Tense Times: Rhetoric, Syntax, and Politics in US Crisis Culture

By Lee M. Pierce

How the syntax used in US political discourse creates the very crises it describes

American public culture is obsessed with crisis. Political polarization, economic collapse, moral decline—the worst seems always yet to come and already here. Tense Times argues that the ways we discuss these crises, especially through verb tenses, not only contribute to our perception and description of such crises but create them.

Past. Present. Future. These are the three principal verb tenses—the category of syntax that allows us to discuss time—that account for much of what is written about our crisis culture. Lee M. Pierce invites readers to expand their syntactic inventory beyond tense to include aspect (duration) and mood (attitude). Doing so opens new possibilities for understanding crisis discourse, as Pierce demonstrates with close readings of three syntaxes: the historical present, the past imperfective, and the retroactive subjunctive. Each mode produces a different experience of crisis and can help us understand our current political reality.

The book investigates a dozen widely circulated discourses from the past decade of US political culture, from Beyoncé’s controversial hit single “Formation” to the presidential campaign slogans of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, from the dueling rallies of Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart at the National Mall to the Ground Zero Mosque controversy and the 2007–2008 bailout. Taking a comparative approach that integrates theories of syntax from rhetorical, literary, affect, and cultural studies as well as linguistics, computer science, and Black studies, Tense Times suggests that the public’s conjuring of crisis is not inherently problematic. Rather, it is the openness of that crisis to contingency—the possibility that things could have been otherwise—that ought to concern anyone interested in language, politics, American culture, current events, or the direction this country is headed.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Aug 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9780817394639

Book preview

TENSE TIMES

RHETORIC, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE

SERIES EDITOR

John Louis Lucaites

EDITORIAL BOARD

Jeffrey A. Bennett

Carole Blair

Joshua Gunn

Robert Hariman

Debra Hawhee

Claire Sisco King

Steven Mailloux

Raymie E. McKerrow

Toby Miller

Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Austin Sarat

Janet Staiger

Barbie Zelizer

TENSE TIMES

RHETORIC, SYNTAX, AND POLITICS IN US CRISIS CULTURE

LEE M. PIERCE

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Janson Text LT

Cover design: Sandy Turner Jr.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2167-3 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-8173-6087-0 (paper)

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9463-9

For Deb and Barb, for teaching me how to read.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART I

THE SYNTAX OF THE IS AND WAS

1. CRISIS ORDINARINESS IN THE HISTORICAL PRESENT

2. HOVERING AROUND HISTORY AT THE RESTORING HONOR RALLY

3. GOING WITH THE FLOW AT THE RALLY TO RESTORE SANITY

PART II

THE SYNTAX OF THE HAD BEEN

4. TRAUMA’S IMPERFECTIVE ASPECT

5. A MOSQUE THAT WON’T SCAR

6. BEYONCÉ’S FORMATION, OR THE STORM BEGINS AGAIN

PART III

THE SYNTAX OF THE IF, THEN

7. SAVE THE SUBJUNCTIVE!

8. BAILING OUT THE STATUS QUO

9. A MISSED OPPORTUNITY AT THE JFK RETROSPECTIVE

10. NO COUNTERFACTUALS FOR DEAD BLACK MEN

CONCLUSION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Introduction

There’s only freedom in structure, my man. There’s no freedom in freedom.

—Branford Marsalis

The Hill We Climb, delivered by youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman at the 2021 Biden-Harris inauguration, became a flashpoint for American political culture.¹ Arriving just two weeks after Donald Trump incited an insurrection at the US Capitol, The Hill We Climb offered a message of unity and reconciliation praised by amateur and professional critics across the internet and political affiliations.² Reviewers for the New York Times described it as foster[ing] a sense of collective purpose and a remade connection in America.³ The words inspiring and powerful appeared in Fox News reports and the American Conservative called it a fresh perspective on what it means to be an American that’s both rousing and hard to disagree with.⁴ Even those who dissed and dismissed what they regarded as pure banality still appreciated its laudable optimism.⁵

Gorman’s delivery aside, reviews of the poem all draw on the same textual evidence to argue the poem’s greatness: accessible vocabulary; monosyllabic end rhymes, such as shade/wade and beast/peace; allusions to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and the Bible; repetition; and nature, light, and journey metaphors.⁶ These simple and familiar strategies are the stuff of a reassuring message of hope, a message that glosses the tiny moments of stroppy syntax suggesting a more provocative sense of the post-Trump American national imaginary. Tiny moments such as the verb missing from the fourth stanza, which begins We the successors.

The stanza quickly became one of the most quotable passages from The Hill We Climb:

             We the successors of a country and a time / where a skinny Black girl

descended from slaves

             and raised by

a single mother

             can dream of becoming president

only to find herself / reciting for one.

In the pages of the New York Times, white writers note the passage’s endearing self-reference to a skinny Black girl. Elsewhere, writers of color note the embedded criticism of the white supremacist institution that is the presidency (regardless of occupant) as well as an expression of Black and Afrodiasporic empowerment.⁷ Perhaps that is why the line never appears in the Far Right’s censuring of the poem as a banal attack on conservatives.⁸ But it is what went barely noticed, the stanza’s missing verb, that interests me.

We the successors lacks one constant present in every other stanza of the poem: a verb that guides the development of subsequent lines, or clauses. Dropping the verb violates the basic requirement of syntax, the domain of grammar responsible for making sentence order from word chaos. At its most basic, syntax demands a verb.⁹ From the verb, the rest of the sentence follows. Whether we are the successors or were the successors, for instance, determines the form of the words to follow. Yet, even without the verb, the line proceeds. Is it simply an error? Or is there a purpose to the deviant syntax? Is this a matter of incorrect grammar? Or, in the words of the poet Gertrude Stein, is this a grammar that supposes invention?¹⁰

If the fundamental rule of standard (white) English grammar is that an utterance needs a verb to make sense, then We the successors is nonsense.¹¹ Maggie McDonagh makes this point in her critique of The Hill We Climb in the Spectator, titled Amanda Gorman Was Let Down by a Terrible Poem.¹² Of the poem overall, McDonagh writes, I couldn’t make sense of it. I mean, I got bits of it, I got the sentiment, I got the stream of consciousness, the emotion, I got the sub-Martin Luther King flow. But trying to make the whole thing cohere, structurally and grammatically—and in terms of sense—was another matter.¹³ McDonagh struggles especially with interpreting the We the successors line. This is a weird sentence, writes McDonagh. You get the gist, of course. But where does the ‘We’ that begins the line go in search of a verb? If the sentence began with ‘a skinny black girl . . . can dream of becoming president, only to find herself’ it could sort of work. But following on from the ‘We, the successors’ it doesn’t. Sorry.¹⁴ According to the rules of grammar, what McDonagh calls a weird sentence isn’t a sentence at all and, therefore, McDonagh cannot make the words cohere.

McDonagh rightly received backlash for her grammar policing, which, like all policing, is steeped in white hegemony. Calling the critique staggeringly patronizing in its picking apart of Gorman’s structure, historian Manisha Sinha’s editorial for CNN prompted a McDonagh roast on Twitter.¹⁵ Not only is McDonagh patronizing and racist, the tweets assert, the poetry critic also doesn’t understand how poems work. ‘The grammar wasn’t perfect according to me, and I didn’t understand every word and what it was doing.’¹⁶ Tweets attacking McDonagh also vehemently defended The Hill We Climb, calling it perfection and inspiring.

While rightly calling out McDonagh’s thinly veiled racism, Sinha and other commentators unintentionally shared McDonagh’s failure to understand every word and what it was doing. They astutely noted the anti-Blackness of McDonagh’s grammar policing but because they still perceived the dropped verb as a grammatical issue, could not explain the significance of the line. The poem’s defenders offered generic praise as a substitute for meaningful engagement.

The interpretation of We the successors that escaped both fans and nonfans of the poem is this: that the line searches for its verb is the point of the sentence. It is an interpretation that I will unpack over the course of this introductory chapter to illustrate the overarching thesis of the book: a rhetorical approach to the syntax of public discourse, to the arrangement of words, particularly verb forms, at the level of the sentence, yields more provocative American national imaginaries than typically emerge from familiar tools such as argument, theme, imagery, or scheme. Exploring syntax in a dozen hot spots of US political culture, from the 2010 controversy over the Ground Zero Mosque to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, I argue that a rhetorical approach to syntax requires a reading strategy that thinks of grammar differently than reviewers of The Hill We Climb, approaching it not as a list of rules to be obeyed or disobeyed but as a site of rhetorical invention.¹⁷ In this project, the name of that site is syntax and, despite the hostility against syntax in the field of rhetorical studies, I maintain that engaging the term anew is essential for carving out alternative visions of US political culture.¹⁸

PLAYING WITH SYNTAX

Over the past few decades, rhetorical scholarship has shown little interest in syntax.¹⁹ That disinterest stands in stark contrast to the history of the field, which used to be more attentive to syntax as a rhetorical resource.²⁰ The turning point seems to coincide with the work of Michael Leff who, in the 1980s, brought the theory of iconicity from linguistics into rhetorical criticism to argue that syntax is how a speaker’s words merge with the audience’s material experience.²¹ For example, Leff observed how Demosthenes’s uninterrupted succession of short, repetitive clauses beats on the consciousness of the hearers as though they were actual blows, and the speaker ‘achieves the same result as the assailant.’²² The equation of textual features with material reality helped breathe a little more life into the soon-to-be outdated practice of close textual analysis that dominated the field in the mid-twentieth century.

But Leff’s approach had two fatal flaws. One, he was studying the oratory of white landowning straight men from the nineteenth century at a time when the field was turning toward the speeches of women and (barely) people of color.²³ Even if his objects of study weren’t woefully out of touch, Leff was also making claims about the universality of their syntactic resonances when those resonances would have been restricted to other white landowning straight men.²⁴ Two, Leff was still analyzing single speeches at a moment when public discourse was fragmenting, as Michael McGee explained to Leff in their 1990 showdown in the Western Journal of Communication.²⁵ Once the icon lost to the fragment, syntax’s brief moment of significance also ended. Syntax is now kept on a short leash, viewed suspiciously as an accomplice to the linguistic turn that reduced everything to structure.²⁶ As Mari Lee Mifsud argues many decades later, syntax names everything about language that oppresses difference.²⁷ But there are good reasons for rhetorical studies to reconsider its relationship to syntax, this supposed oppressor of difference, not necessarily because of Leff’s approach to syntax, but because of Donald Trump.

Trump’s rhetorical style was a frequent topic in coverage of the 2016 US presidential campaign, from his penchant for hyperbole to his vocabulary, which ranked at around a fifth-grade reading level.²⁸ But those are familiar areas of criticism for any potential commander in chief.²⁹ The extensive focus on Trump’s syntax, however, was unprecedented. The mainstream press’s refrain both before and after the election was that his syntax, spelling and punctuation are—in conventional terms—a catastrophe.³⁰ But it’s hard to resist laughing at Trumpian syntax, observed linguist and public intellectual John McWhorter.³¹ Other critics described an onslaught of tortured syntax that apparently made not only meaningful interpretation but even basic transcription nearly impossible.³² Trump’s syntactical sins included anacoluthon—sentences whose grammar collapses—and reflexive repetition; paralipsis, a device that enables him to publicly say things that he can later disavow; inability to master hypotaxis, the embedding of clauses within clauses; and as much clausal manspreading as he could manage with such a limited vocabulary.³³ Ostensibly, the purpose of using so many big words to account for so many small ones was to help the American public see the terrifying fascist agenda emerging among the shaggy-dog digressions, frequent narcissistic asides, false starts, odd qualifiers, and free associative ramblings.³⁴ But the opposite effect seemed to take hold.

Somewhere around the primaries, playing with Trump’s syntax became more of an intellectual pastime than a meaningful critique. Trump’s #word-salad, as it came to trend on social media, was less about political literacy than an invitation for clever puns and witty wordplay.³⁵ The more of a mockery Trump’s syntax became, the more it captivated the savvy literati typically disdained by the Right. Crowd-sourced analogies of the Trump haiku, Trump-themed poetry contests, and sentence-diagramming competitions were just a few of the ways that people enjoyed Trump’s speech even as they ridiculed it.³⁶ Even talk show host Jimmy Kimmel learned to construct syntax trees to try make sense of Trump’s infamously cockeyed rally speeches.³⁷ Writers for resolutely anti-Trump publications even came to praise Trump’s style of speaking, noting an accidental brilliance and special vocabulary and syntax and psychological substrate.³⁸ Meanwhile, there was Hillary Clinton, whose orderly syntax and coherent sentence construction produced simple, direct and competent speech.³⁹ But no one was hosting Clinton Scrabble games or delivering Clinton sonnets at the local open mic night.

The language cultures that grew up around the two candidates show how bad grammar can make good politics. Trump’s convoluted syntax performed the kind of unmaking and remaking of identity craved by contemporary political subjects, even if those subjects are appalled by the attendant semantic content. As scholar Lawrence Venuti argues, texts characterized by fragmented syntax . . . mimic the identity-shattering experience of being-towards-death by destabilizing the signifying process, abandoning any linearity of meaning, and unbalancing the reader’s search for intelligibility.⁴⁰ Trump’s public discourse reached literary status not because of its eloquence but because it stumbled upon those features of the literary that prioritize impact over beauty.

The syntactic acrobatics surrounding Trump’s political agenda (his own and that of his critics) transformed the revolting into the enticing. It is the kind of transformation that literary critic William Gass called the essence of creative activity, regardless of whether order is created out of chaos or chaos out of order. If you take really bowel-turning material from the point of view of its pragmatic importance in the world, Gass writes, and surround it like kitty litter with stuff that is there purely for play, then you can get an electric line between the two poles clothes would turn white simply hanging on.⁴¹ Whereas Clinton’s grammatically correct syntax merged with her moderate, well-informed policies, Trump’s syntax was purely for play, as Gass puts it. It was the kitty litter that surrounded his bowel-turning material platform and offered attendees at Trump haiku contests and poetry nights the pleasure of playing in syntax. If, as Mifsud argues, liberated from syntax, the exceptional voice speaks its sense, then Trump was the voice whose nonsense was made exceptional by liberating syntax.⁴² By contrast, Clinton’s grammatically correct sensibilities made her campaign neither liberated nor exceptional but serviceable, a word also used by branding experts to describe the campaign’s slogan, Stronger Together.⁴³ Fortunately, these are not the only choices. As the dropped verb in The Hill We Climb suggests, the pleasure of syntactic play can be linked to an exceptional voice.

A salve for America’s Trump-inflicted wounds, The Hill We Climb is about as opposite a Trump rally speech as a text can be.⁴⁴ However, there is one important point of connection, and that point is syntax or, more accurately, the [disengagement of] words from familiar syntax.⁴⁵ Sharing this strategy, both discourses transform their pragmatic material through play. But those transformations conjure very different conceptions of the national imaginary. Trump’s banality of evil conjures a mean-spirited public whose members relate to one another through cruelty under the guise of ironic detachment.⁴⁶ The benign banality and disruptive missing verb of The Hill We Climb articulates the answer to the question McDonagh thought was rhetorical: Where does the ‘we’ that begins the line go in search of a verb?

IN SEARCH OF THE PEOPLE

Patronizing and elitist as it was, McDonagh’s snarky personification of the line’s quest stumbles onto an important distinction. It is not that the line simply lacks or does not have a verb. After all, poetry regularly takes shape without verbs. But the verb in We the successors isn’t just gone; in a poetic version of phantom limb syndrome, it is missing. The verb is not merely absent but rather remains as a half presence—an omission that leaves a trace inviting other ways of meaning.⁴⁷

Where McDonagh is mistaken is in the interpretation of that omission. That the line searches for its verb is the point of the sentence. The line is not an argument about who we the successors are. (Although, given the poem’s occasion and the separation of successors from descendants, of which Gorman is one, the successors are probably something like well-meaning American subjects who perpetuate white supremacy.) Nor is the line an argument about what we the successors do. We is in search of its verb because we lacks the action, the labor that a verb does in a sentence.

Without its verb, We the successors cannot do its work or situate itself in time. By extension, neither can the successors that are the subject of the line. In English grammar, verbs create temporality in three ways: tense, aspect, and mood, which the field of linguistics abbreviates as TAM.⁴⁸ Verb tense situates an utterance relative to the past or present. Verb aspect expresses a speaker’s experience of that situating. If an event in the past feels over and done with, then use the past tense with a perfect aspect. But if that event does not feel over for the speaker, then the imperfect aspect is needed. Finally, verbs also determine a sentence’s mood and, by extension, the mood of its source. Adding to the verb a modal auxiliary such as could or must changes the speaker’s volition, their commitment to the truth value of the utterance. Other adjustments can transform a statement from the imperative mood, "We are the successors! to the subjunctive statement If we were the successors." Without this singular combination of tense, aspect, and/or mood, a sentence is without place or purpose.

The rhetorical force of the verb is illustrated in a very different statement. We the People, the preamble to the US Constitution, reads, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America (my emphasis). Literary legal theorist Craig Lawson argues that the preamble’s function is is quite straightforward."⁴⁹ He attributes the clarity and vitality of the passage to the abundance of active, present tense verbs: establish, insure, provide, promote, secure, ordain, and establish.⁵⁰ The verbs, Lawson explains, extend the reading experience so that we must hold the subject, ‘We the People of the United States,’ in suspension until the end of the purposive element to discover the verb and learn what the subject is doing for these purposes.⁵¹

In Lawson’s view, We the People is a given entity—a simple conceptualization of what might be called Americans. The function of the preamble is to hold the attention of such people, as the framers explain the function (verb and subject) of the document. Until we learn the verb and object (the ordaining and establishing of a Constitution), Lawson summarizes, we have neither a completed thought nor a completed sentence.⁵² Lawson reads the preamble as a utilitarian statement, one whose audience is given in advance and who reads for the purpose of acquiring information. However, he neglects the constitutive function of this holding in suspense. As the reader encounters each new verb, a People is retroactively called forth or brought into being by virtue of having participated in each action vicariously through reading.⁵³ The verbs, in