Missed Opportunities?

As a follow-up to the analyses and critiques Faith, Chad, and others have posted, I think I was let down when Crowley missed opportunities to connect her hyper-detailed examples (the analysis of LeHaye's ouevre, the post-1970's apocalyptist seige of the executive office, the 9/11 conspiracy theories, etc.) to some of her original points (respect, justice, locating possibilities for rhetorical invention, interrupting densely articulated ideologies with equal-yet-opposite emotional attachments, etc.) Of course, such a charge could be leveled against any manuscript (too many examples and too little analysis or synthesis, or "she didn't write it the way I wanted her to"), and this could just be my way of complaining that onesidedness undercuts Crowley's original intentions. Still, when Crowley admitted to revising the anger of her earlier drafts (on Jeff Rice's blog), I was thinking, I'm ok with the anger--I just wish you'd operationalized your thesis as a way of exploring the anger that seems inextricable from civic discourse. As it is, we're left to intuitively (inductively?) connect some of her apocalyptist criticism back to how "we" might find space and leverage in a civic discourse with "them."

For example, Crowley's summary of the arc of characterization across the nine season run of The X-Filesonly leads her to note: "I recount all of this by way of pointing out that during the 1990s a popular television show was so, in part, because its writers touted belief, rather than skepticism, as a superior means of making sense of the world" (171). It would seem that the show was also about continuous and mutually respectful (inevitably romantic) discourse between a scientific community and a quasi-religious mythology involving aliens and, above all, a desire to believe (and characters had inner conflicts as well, Scully the skeptical voice of science was also once Scully the Catholic, if I remember right). Perhaps a better example is the thirteen pages Crowley dedicates to detailing the case for a near X-Files-calibre conspiracy regarding 9/11. I got into pgs. 175-188 the way I got into reading the 9/11 commission's official report, but not for the reasons I think Crowley set out to convey. When she wrapped up this overview--this wild digression I kept waiting for her to "unpack" or reconnect--I was let down to read that the upshot was:

"This plea for full disclosure feels to me like another expression of the liberal hope that if all relevant facts are available, understanding will take place (and justice will be done?). Barring the virtual impossibility of such an investigation being undertaken in the near term, I wonder what full disclosure could accomplish, given that it would necessarily expose either massive incompetence or a profound disregard for duty--not to mention the more repellant possibilities--on the part of both elected and appointed officials" (188).

To be fair, there are other sections of Crowley's text that do connect the apocalypist example to the rhetoric she's promoting. And I liked these sections a great deal. For example, in "Nested Beliefs" (pgs. 142-147), Crowley efficiently moves from suggesting that the deductive model of knowledge espoused by most Christians has God "stand[ing] in the place occupied by the individual subject in liberal thought, and He enters consciousness through the heart rather than by means of sensory experience" to her appropriation of Kintz's "repetition of the same" (and media analysis made famous by Baudrillard, who passed away last week) that leads to emotional attachment to "absolute values," which, in turn, leads to ambiguities being the biggest threat to fundamentalist Christian's "ideology of clarity" (147). This whole section had a clarity--if not, perhaps, a charity--that stemmed from an example that didn't become a screed and a follow-up that expanded her previous argument in a new direction.

Anyhow, I'm hoping these examples highlight what I did and did not like about Crowley's rhetorical strategies in the second half of Toward a Civic Discourse. I see others' points about an increasingly onesided argument, but I guess my frustration (at times) stemmed from missed integration and "teaching moment" opportunities.


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