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

If we are to believe Cicero’s reports in his Brutus, sentimental discourses were a staple of Roman legal and legislative proceedings. For example, he praised Servius Sulpicius Galba as an orator “who inflames the court, ” thus accomplishing “far more than the one who merely instructs it. ” When charged with massacring Lusitanians, “with tears in his eyes [Galba] commended to [the Roman people’s] protection his own children as well as the young son of Gaius Gallus. The presence of this orphan and his childish weeping excited great compassion ” (xxii, 89-90), and of course Galba was acquitted. Even casual readers of the Iliad discover speeches full of invective (Achilles ’ rage), patriotic encomium (Hector’s battle cry), and sententious disquisitions on the nature of life, love, death, and sociality (Achilles ’ vision of Patroclus). These can unify a people around sentiments of duty, patriotism, fidelity, and amity (books 1, 12, and

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

national, even international, affection.Celebrated as an athlete, a humanitarian, and a leader, he was chosen to carry the inaugurating flame for the 1996 Olympics.The movie Ali earned both money and Oscar nominations in 2001.In 2000, the Kentucky legislature honored Ali as the "greatest athlete of all time." 1 His home city of Louisville named Ali as its most illustrious "native son." 2 All these honors and hundreds of others demonstrate the adoration of Ali and suggest his impact.Locally in Louisville and Kentucky, nationally in the United States, and globally, Ali has become one of the world's most famous figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 32 In the Fall of 2005, the Muhammad Ali Center is to grace downtown Louisville as the foremost in a series of new attractions.The Center describes its focus as promoting peace and social responsibility.Its website proclaims that, "Headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, the city where Muhammad Ali's story began, the Muhammad Ali Center will serve as a place to celebrate the deeply rooted values and worldwide influence of Ali." 4 For Louisville, the Ali Center is to be a nexus of history, politics, culture, and social ideas.

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.

If ethos is the word for our previous issue of Poroi (3, 2, December, 2004), pathos is the word for this one. Pathos appeals to passions; it stirs sentiments; it mobilizes emotions. All the essays in this sixth issue analyze public forms and personal capacities of pathos. Together they argue powerfully for greater attention to political aesthetics, particularly in coming to terms with public arguments. These reach from cultures to technologies and from campaigns to sciences.

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.

Thucydides offered a political language that is not necessarily available in our lexicons of politics.Often his history is characterized as a realist or strictly empirical description of the Peloponnesian War.Yet it also provides a tragic account of the wages of hubris.This essay advances that reading, contending that Thucydides enhanced his telling of the tragedy by attending to moods of the Athenian polis.Political moods are the changeable temper of a polity: a vital factor to be harnessed or counteracted by political leaders.The collective moods of citizens in the Athenian assembly loom large in Thucydides' tale of the war.Moods, notably hubris and demoralization, also grip Athenian leaders of the war effort.

1 It is time for a little tutorial on ethos.A word tour, this is not, for the neighboring terms get too little attention.But even in broad outline, few words can have more telling careers than ethos, and it is under the aegis of ethos that this issue of Poroi comes together.2 Ethos was the word in ancient Greek for character.This classical kind of character is rhetorical and public rather than psychological and internal, as was character for the Victorians.Classical ethos is the standing of the speaker for the audience.Not just any old audience is at issue, but specifically a classical public, where the members take full parts in collaborating to manage the commonwealth.The classical public is oratorical, not dialogical; still the members take turns in speaking and acting at center stage.In the ancient sense, therefore, ethos is who somebody is in speech in action in public -as told by an audience experienced in many of the same politics. 1The specific identities of classical characters stay alive for their publics in stories that judge the virtues and vices while suggesting how people should act toward each other: the province of what we call ethics. 2 3 This explains how Aristotle could recognize ethos as a legitimate mode of persuasion comparable to logos as logic and pathos as mobilization of emotions. 3The ancient emphasis on virtue in character might well have made ethos as important as either logos or pathos in classical persuasion.To know from sustained interaction the character who advances some claim can be to know an enormous amount about what to make of it.4 Yet classical publics are too small and intimate for modern polities.The invention of civil society gradually turns participation away from government.It also truncates oratorical voices into electoral votes.Especially it shrinks classical ethos to modern credentials or, at most, credibility.Alasdair MacIntyre has lamented how the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries put all diverse, plural virtues into a singular template of virtue. 4That led

She's a hero, you see.She's not like us.-Rupert Giles, "The Gift"1 On questions of foreign policy (and sometimes domestic policy as well) the Bush administration since 9/11 has conveyed to the American public -and often brandished to the broader international community -one central underlying message: moral certainty.In the face of the shattering uncertainty produced by the tragic, graphic, and profound attacks on American soil, the need for clarity, for black and white distinctions, grew paramount.In addition to the shock, fear, and sadness elicited by watching the events of 9/11, almost all Americans, along with large numbers of people throughout the world, truly felt a specific sort of moral clarity: that the tragedies of 9/11 were wrong.

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

Life is like a box of chocolates . . .

In June 2003, the Supreme Court declared high-tech censorship constitutional.2 Congress passed the Children's Internet Protection Act, or CIPA, in 1999.The law requires all publicly funded libraries to electronically regulate the access of patrons to the World Wide Web.The "filtering software" is far from perfect.It partly fails in its primary aim: shielding underage eyes from pornography.Worse, the software censors massive quantities of legitimate information from children and adults alike.3 The Supreme Court's 6-3 vote in United States v.American Library Association obscures an ominous detail.Only four justices bothered to acknowledge that censoring public access to cyberspace is a First Amendment issue.Four justices outright denied it.They called the legislation a mere matter of purse strings, declaring that Congress can dictate rules to institutions that take federal funds.The Court's ninth justice, Kennedy, made vague noises of sympathy for "constitutionally protected Internet material" but voted to uphold the law.As Kennedy loitered on the fence, the First Amendment slipped through its pickets.4 There are five things wrong with the US v. ALA decision.The purse-strings argument is almost as faulty as the filtering technology; and the Court misconceives censorship, federalism, and what libraries are for.As a scholar of law and politics, but especially as a former librarian, I criticize from experience.Perhaps these credentials add weight to the arguments to come.The wonder of the Web, though, is that I don't have to have such credentials to be heard.

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

Most of my lifetime has been spent wrestling with evaluation of wars.World War I hung over my high-school years like the ghost of Hamlet.The Spanish Civil War occasioned my first partisanship.World War II claimed me as a minor actor.The interminable and perplexing Cold War, with its ghastly flare-up in Vietnam, made me an anti-war activist.Confronted now with George W.

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 strategy of terror is a spectacularly failed one. 1 -Caleb Carr 1 Terror, like panic, might be almost impossible to sustain.It strikes and spikes with virtual simultaneity; it decays nearly as fast.It consumes personal and historical moments that might last beyond minutes and hours to days and weeks, but it rages too hot and ranges too far to leave fuel for durable burns.This, unfortunately, is the good news.The bad news is that terror all too readily recurs; and when it doesn't, it echoes -in some settings, seemingly without end.

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.

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age, When sometimes lofty towers I see down-razed, And brass eternal slave to mortal rage . . . .Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away.This thought is as a death, and cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.-William Shakespeare, "Sonnet 64"1 The tragedy of September 11, 2001 elicited a tremendous emotional response from Americans.It produced an outpouring of grief, outrage, bewilderment, and renewed patriotic fervor.It also brought out feelings of compassion and camaraderie among New Yorkers, in particular, as people from all walks of life pulled together in a collective effort to help the city recover.For most people, the legacy of 9/11 is likely to remain emotional.Yet Shakespeare's sonnet show how emotional responses to ruin can inspire ruminations about devastation.Ruin teaches the poet to reflect on visions of collapsed towers.Shakespeare finds in vistas of fallen towers a sense of sadness but also a moment of recognition, an intellectual discovery.So may we.2 This discovery arises from allegorical dimensions of the rubble.Indeed the surpluses of meaning in the felled structures make them apt sites for scrutiny, as the remains point to realities beyond our literal worlds.An abundance of signifying potential in the buildings' ruins speak of more than architectural decay.In the ruins, the poet encounters allusions to the brevity of time and the fleeting quality of human life.Especially the rubble induces the poet to think differently about love.It provides a painful reminder that human bonds are ephemeral.As history runs its course, they, too, are fragmented by "Time's fell hand."3 Do similarly stirring or instructive insights for Americans come from the devastation of the Twin Towers?Do our images and memories of the ruined World Trade Center --the heap of rubble, debris, destroyed infrastructure, burning fires, noxious smoke, smothering ash --contain allegorical dimensions that might encourage Americans not only to react