Something has been bothering me since last Tuesday's class. I'm not sure whether it was the parade of political blogs we were forced to read, the liberal slants we were encouraged to idolize, or the way Dr. Harrison rhapsodized Ezra Klein's bombastic gushing over Barack Obama that irked me so, but the latter was most unsettling.
It just seemed out of place. After a lengthy discussion of the differences between recounting, reacting, and engaging, we (as a class) determined that the best blogs engage. They treat on a particular subject with incision and depth, incorporating other opinions, examples, references, and resources to stimulate an online discussion of their topic with the internet world.
Harrison cited the second paragraph of Klein's post as a perfect example of engagement. In it he waxes poetic about Obama's skill as an orator. Search the words yourselves. Nowhere in the post does Klein step one foot outside his own opinion. It is well written, and tactically so; despite his own subjective praises he manages to use the first person only once - "I've". This is rhetorically deceiving. It tricks us into thinking we are seeing facts. But even if we were, how would even that be engaging? Does Harrison really believe this to be exemplary of the best blogging practices, or is it just a cheap way to indoctrinate us with pro-Obama hogwash? Am I stimulating an online discussion with all of these question marks?
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I don't think that the idea Dr. Harrison was getting at was to only use facts and sources to engage. The trick was that Klein didn't just say "Obama is a great speaker," he told us why he thought so. We have to have some license to share our opinions on our blogs, or what's the point?
I also can't agree that it is rhetorically deceiving to not refer to yourself while using first person. Since we know that Klein is writing the post, it's a given that what he's writing is his opinion.
The bottom line, I think, is that "Obama is a great speaker" is the bottom line of Klein's post. Sum up his post and all you have is a load of subjective aggrandizement. Yes, he uses spicy and illustrious language, but the "discussion" he supposedly generates here stops after that one sentence. We get it.
I agree that Klein's post was an opinion, and that all bloggers reserve (and deserve) license to share. Perhaps I misunderstood the bloggerly definition of engagement, but I expected a "great example" of such practice to include at least a quotation from a speech, a reaction to someone else's thoughts on the subject, or maybe a question or conflict that BOTH REACTS to the current discussion AND GENERATES another. Surely Klein has generated one, but the writing engages the reader and nothing else.
It's okay to apotheosize someone you believe in, but pro-Obama messianic rantings are perhaps a questionable choice as an example when they are so, well...questionable.
Opinions do engage because they are rarely identical.
"Evidence,” as Christine suggests, can be a lot of things, not just facts and stats and "hard evidence," but also (as in Klein’s case) reflections on the deepset processes of response and reaction that political discourse generates (though I’ll need to think about saying this better in class next time round, and for that reason I appreciate your post, Todd).
Engaging isn't necessarily always about citing facts and statistics and stripping your writing of any emotion, opinion, or assertion of value. A good engaging response to something might in some cases, as Klein's post demonstrates, involve psychologizing the process of responding to an Obama speech. When we're talking about the effect of a certain brand of political rhetoric built around inspirationalism in the first place, it's going to be awfully difficult to speak about that speechifying in meaningful ways that don't engage feelings, emotions, psychology, inspiration, and the aesthetics of rhetoric.
Rather than say, "I love BHO, he's the greatest cause when he speaks I feel all tingly and want to change the world. He's so much better looking than HRC and I like the sound of his voice and he makes me want to be involved in ways I haven't before," Klein attempts to capture the way in which Obama's speeches effect his audiences (at least that segment of his audiences who are roused to support by the speeches and ideas).
And you're actually on to something, I think, when you note Klein's use of "we." That's a pretty rhetorically clever way of reaching out and attempting to universalize his own impressions of Obama's effectiveness. And independent of how persuasive you found it, it's doing something that can work in any number of political, ideological or rhetorical situations. (Emerson does this ALL the time, by the way ... he'll take passages from his journal where he talks at length about me and I and my and mine and he'll change it all to first person plural and in the process transforms private reflections on the self into sage proclamations about the American spirit and his generation's place in the world.)
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