Manhood, Lorain Style is a narrative essay in which the author discusses issues of masculinity and gender identity in the working-class environment of his hometown Lorain, Ohio. Written mostly as a story, the essay recounts a fistfight that the author provoked and participated in when he was sixteen years old in order to prove he wasn’t “gay” based on the standards of what he considers Rust Belt masculinity.

A creative essay exploring efforts towards racial integration in an Iowa mining town and in an Iowa college town a hundred years later.

In 1909, photographer and social

In America, critics and proponents of military policy use popular musical forms. The "folk revival" of the 1950s and early '60s drew on antagonism to the Cold War and responded to fears of nuclear holocaust. Examples include Pete Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," Barry McQuire's "Eve of Destruction," and Bob Dylan's "Talkin' World War Three Blues." The Vietnam era wedded rock music to anti-war sentiments but with occasional expressions of popular patriotic support, as in the "Ballad of the Green Berets" by Sgt. Barry Sadler and Robin Moore.

1 This riddle's shelf-life would appear to have run out on November 1, 2004. But in fact, it is a perennial -or more accurately, a quadrennial. When I first heard it in 1980, the three men in a boat were Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and John Anderson.

1 Global governance and human rights have rarely been considered in relation to each another. Here I explore their connections with special attention to the rhetoric of international justice. The result is an argument that combining these two sets of perspectives can give us a better understanding of global politics. 2 I begin by showing what perspectives of global governance can offer those of us who have taken traditional approaches to human rights. Then I turn things around to discuss what perspectives of human rights can add to previous treatments of global governance. To illustrate how they can complement each other, I analyze the problematical "Pinochet precedent." And to project politics where global governance and human rights learn from each other, I conclude by relating global governance to two competing perspectives on international justice.

That's what the movies do. . . . They give us lines to say, they assign us parts:

Democracy premises that every citizen counts, and should count the same. So nothing stresses democracy more than war. Its effects are about as unequal as they come. Through war, some people become rich, famous, or powerful; some are untouched; some lose everything. During war, there is a gap, perhaps a chasm, between the principles and the realities of democracy. Into the breach marches the theorist. Is this gap proof of hypocrisy? Can the gap be explained away? Is the regime worth fighting for? What theorist could resist such questions? 2

I haven't had much luck on my own. . . . Maybe television can help me find the love of my life.

Spectacle is one thing money really can buy.-Terrence Rafferty (1995, p. 84) 1 Summer is the season for spectacle.In America, at least, it is a time for captivating the distracted attention of citizens through the outré, the outsized, and the outrageous.From hype for hurricanes to blockbusters from Hollywood, summer spectacles resist yet also reinforce the centrifugal spirals of privatizing pursuits.Vacations from work, school, government, even first-run television have traditionally taken people away from supposedly responsible preoccupations with public topics of business, education, politics, perhaps religion.Summer in America is for families, we say, but it entertains them with vistas and stories far larger than everyday life.2 On the political calendar, the season of spectacle stretches from Memorial Day to Labor Day, with fireworks for Independence Day between.Thanksgiving gets pageants and dinners, New Year's Day parades and football bowls, Christmas nativity scenes and services, Halloween the trick-or-treat trail of costumed kids.Even at this level, spectacle is nothing like an exclusive prerogative of summer.Still the elective affinity is hard to miss.Summer gets Shakespeare in the park and movies after dark.It means fairs at the state capital, concert tours across the country, and adventures at Six Flags Over Somewhere.It indulges in the pastoral epic of baseball and the sunshine roar of stockcars.Even best-sellers on the beach reach for hyper-realities to draw us beyond mundane endeavors.3 Spectacle is the form and setting targeted by the essays for this summer issue of Poroi.Writing in Wisconsin, Michelle Brophy-Baermannexamines love on the sensational screens of reality television.Contributing from Virginia, Joseph H. Lane Jr. explores uses of Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War for panoramic defenses of imperial action by America, especially in

Empathy is a relatively new term in English. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was first attested in 1904. This is worth pondering.

1 Not long ago I made a keynote speech at a conference in Louisville, Kentucky about sustainability (Throgmorton, 2004a). In brief, I argued that there is a reciprocal relationship between city making and story telling. To make the Louisville region more sustainable, the people of that city would have to make narrative and physical space for diverse storytellers. Their shared urban narratives would need to be locally grounded and include black Louisvillians. From this point of view, the city's new Muhammad Ali Center could act as a powerful trope in persuasive stories about making Louisville a more sustainable place.

The crowd is buzzing, and not just because everyone's getting drunk. In the lobby of the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, about 300 investor relations professionals are gorging themselves on wine, beer and hors d'oeuvres while anxiously wait to be allowed into the IMAX dome theatre for privately arranged screening of one of the most talked about movies of the year: Everest.

There are many ways of putting Jesus at risk and making us feel his suffering. 1 -

Life is like a box of chocolates . . .

Louisiana's political renaissance began in the year 1877 when the government of the state was restored to the hands of the white people -

Bring them on! 1 1 So said a pugnacious president, forty-third in the lengthening history of the United States. Literally this was George W. Bush talking just the other day about retrograde Iraqis, who are not acquiescing in American rule but assassinating American soldiers instead. Mythically this might sound like Dirty Harry from Clint Eastwood movies, growling at a punk to "Make my day!" But because the President comes from Texas, self-consciously mimics horse operas more than other movies, and sometimes appears to treat foreign affairs as a streamlined imperialism of cowboys over Indians, the press and the populace tend to view his administration as a resurrection of the western matinee. This is not exactly wrong, but we can do better.

1 In the ashen smoke of airliners crashing, glass shattering, and steel evaporating, visions of internationalism and safety become difficult to see. Bright images of progress and globalism yield to clouds of terror and trouble. Radical Muslims have declared war on America: this "fact," the pictures of Muslims cheering Osama Bin Laden, and the celebratory gestures of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein crowded out images of mourning Arabs. Photographs of Yassir Arafat giving blood to help the New York City victims got little play. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Samuel Huntington's oft-challenged claim of an inevitable Clash of Civilizations (1996) between a Muslim East and a Christian West swung back into fashion. 2 In pronouncing this rupture between East and West, media commentators often name the Iranian Revolution as the first fullblown demonstration of Islamist radicalism. Revolutionary discourse from the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s and from activist Sayyid Qutb in Egypt predated the Iran Revolution. Yet events in Iran involved a prophetic discourse that discounted Arab leaders as infidels and indicted Western society as corrupt. When Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda echoed these charges, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian Revolution, and the seizure of American hostages emerged as the first figures of Islamic unrest recognized by most Americans. Together these form much of the background that popular media cite for the Attack on America. 3 The rhetorical fount of Islamist ideology in Iran was the Ayatollah Khomeini. Through Friday sermons and occasional writings, he discredited the U.S.-imposed monarchy of the Shah as illegitimate. Widely read in revolutionary Iran, his treatise on Islamic Government ( Velayat-e Faqih) has become the foundation for the post-revolutionary society. Rose portrays Khomeini as the one figure responsible for "the restructuring of the personal and social consciousness of Muslims into an

1 The first shot fired in the intellectual property wars -the first one I heard, at least -happened during a skirmish between Island Records and Negativland, the sound-collage collective.In 1991, the corporate goliath took aim at the group's record -titled, simply, U2 -and blew it off the face of the earth.As a nerdy, motley crew of San Francisco Bay Area artists, weirdoes, and computer programmers, Negativland wasn't even a blip on the pop-culture radar, leaving it an unlikely target for a major lawsuit.So what would prompt one of the "Big Seven" record companies (now four, controlling 80% of global record sales) to use its full legal and economic might against, essentially, the world's tiniest band?As you may have guessed from Negativland's album title, it made the mistake of sampling the music of U2: the crown jewel in Island Records' multi-platinum crown.Poroi, 2, 2, November, 2003England, and WHO GIVES A SHIT? Just a lot of wasted names that don't mean DIDDLEY SHIT!" To add insult to injury, Negativland also mixed in a speech by U2's lead singer, Bono, which made the self-important Nobel Peace Prize nominee sound pious and ridiculous. 14 The record was released with little fanfare on SST Records, a small independent punk-rock label.But within four days of its release, Island Records and U2's song publisher, Warner-Chappel, came knocking to serve legal papers. 2Recognizing that it was a small fish compared to this oceanic multinational corporation, Negativland sent out a press release that stated, "Preferring retreat to total annihilation, Negativland and SST had no choice but to comply completely with these demands." 3 Even though Negativland had a strong fair-use argument, primarily based on parody, it didn't have the resources to fight a prolonged court battle.Instead it agreed to a very unfavorable settlement, a decision that haunts it to this day.Negativeland seems never really to have recovered.

In line with the old Quaker adage, “My enemy’s enemy is my friend,” our response reflected an uneasy alliance of disparate elements that, on other occasions, would have been at odds. In his current piece, not surprisingly, Simons exploits some of the internal disagreements that had to be papered over to face the common foe of rhetorical globalization. Here I break cover and write exclusively under my own name. 3 For didactic purposes, though, let me begin by highlighting one defining tension in our original response to Simons. Perhaps this is represented best by comparing Michael Leff to Alan Gross. Both defend rhetorical protectionism, but on radically different ― even mutually opposed ― grounds. 4 Leff draws on criteria of legitimate lineage: Rhetoric is whatever can be shown to have descended from the classical tradition of public address. As might be expected of a family whose members have bred freely over many centuries, there are many mongrels along the way. Leff holds that it is possible nevertheless, on relatively strict genealogical grounds, to say that certain ideas or

NCA-affiliated rhetoric, as they see it, is under threat from within and without the field of communication studies. 3 That my review should have been singled out for their expression of disciplinary angst stems apparently from my enthusiasm for rhetoric's increasing globalization and for my failure to appreciate how that intellectual movement further undermines NCA-rhetoric's already weakened position relative to its real and imagined rivals. But much that I had to say in the review essay in support of a globalized conception of rhetoric and of an expanded role for civically oriented rhetoricians goes unaddressed by my colleagues. Of central concern to them are issues of

The aftermath of events on September 11, 2001 shows the importance of film, television, and other electronic media in constructing our political realities. Soon the Bush administration was working with Hollywood screenwriters to help anticipate possible targets and scenarios for further terrorist atrocities. Yet the main Hollywood contributions had come earlier, even before September 11, through popular films. These let American audiences experience acts of political terrorism in vicarious, virtual, symbolical, and other modes. 1 Now, in response to the dramatic escalation of terrorist attacks on U.S. institutions, Americans can call on cinematic prefigurations of terrorist strategies, the movements and states that use them, the regimes that support them, and the politics that reply to them.

In the aftermath of the attack on September 11, 2001 British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, "Never forget how we felt watching the planes fly into those twin towers." There is nothing extraordinary about his statement until you think about what he did not say. He did not say the people of New York City watched. He did not say the people of New York and New Jersey watched. He did not say Americans watched. He was speaking to and for the world, and he said that we watched and felt. The change

1 Relationships between popular culture and dominant systems of power can emerge more clearly in crisis than in routine times. Powerful economic and political forces attempted to use 9/11 as a rationale to discipline popular culture. Here I examine how this happened and how it spurred a form of at least provisional cultural resistance. I look at two instances of attempted repression of popular culture that occurred post-911 and at how the success of each was limited by popular cultural reactions against it.

The memories of a great tragedy linger here. And for all who knew loss here, life is not the same. The 184 whose lives were taken in this place -veterans and recruits, soldiers and civilians, husbands and wives, parents and children -left behind family and friends whose loss cannot be weighed. The murder of innocents cannot be explained, only endured. And though they died in tragedy, they did not die in vain. . . Their loss has moved a nation to action in a cause to defend other innocent lives across the world.