{"id":65,"date":"2018-03-03T22:36:06","date_gmt":"2018-03-04T03:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/?p=65"},"modified":"2018-03-03T22:36:06","modified_gmt":"2018-03-04T03:36:06","slug":"week-8-readings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/2018\/03\/03\/week-8-readings\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 8 Readings"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the first essay Politics of Resentment, Jeremy Engels explores how the the concept of a democratic public has been defined and redefined through history and why. The subtitle of the essay is \u201cReimagining the People: From Duas Civitates to E Pluribus Unum to E Unibus Duo\u201d which helps to describe the general trend of the definition of the public. In the introduction of the book, Engels worked through a historic understanding of the duas civitates which describes a power struggle between the poor and the rich, the mass and the elite, that has been demonstrated throughout history, but more specifically in the context of Rome and Greece. The clash between these two classes and the struggle for the poor to maintain power in the face of the rich produced the emotion of resentment. There are two conflicting understandings of resentment: one that understands it to be the force behind instrumental action to <\/span>ensure equality between the rich and the poor in a democratic society<\/span><\/a> and one that sees democracy itself as a threat and a \u201cviolent imposition of the popular will\u201d (41).<\/span><\/p>\n

Sanchez-Escalonilla writes this article to explore how panic as a public emotion has been expressed in film post-9\/11. He writes that filmmaker Steven Spielberg is \u201cone of the most sensitized Hollywood directors to the social fault lines caused by 9\/11\u201d and proceeds to demonstrate how Spielberg\u2019s various films reflect this. Spielberg\u2019s films respond to a five main points: tension between security and civil liberties, xenophobia, self-destructive widespread panic, preventive war (Bush Doctrine), and the cost of the \u201cspiral of violence-vengeance\u201d (12). Sanchez-Escalonilla describes the film <\/span>Minority Report<\/span><\/i><\/a> where there is devised a system of screening that can determine those guilty of \u201cpre-crime,\u201d that they will eventually commit a crime if not apprehended. The film confronted the theme of surveillance and the presumption of innocence before proven guilty. Further, he describes how Spielberg and others\u2019 films worked to deconstruct the various strands of fear that have pervaded the mainstream media. <\/span><\/p>\n

Engle describes how the work of mourning has influenced our understandings of the 9\/11 attacks and how it was employed by the government and mainstream media to \u201cmake sense of what happened\u201d (63). Mourning and grief was paired with other modes of iconography such as souvenirs, Norman Rockwell, and t-shirts to provide a unifying justification for the war on terror. By being able to purchase World Trade Center memorabilia <\/span>such as these<\/span><\/a>, there is a personal identification with the events that transpired on 9\/11, despite the fact that the vast majority of people witnessed it from thousands of miles away. Engle writes that, \u201csympathy becomes a means of participation\u201d (77). This means of mass secondary participation allowed many Americans to reconfigure their identity as US citizens as it was shaped by the context of 9\/11. <\/span><\/p>\n

I think that Engels\u2019s Essay I gives us an architecture through which to place a lot of our other readings into. Just glancing back through our syllabus, I am immediately just lead to believe that everything can be fit into the politics of resentment. For example, the article we read for last week, \u201cTrumpism is a Politics of Loss and Revenge.\u201d The author of the article, John Marshall, argues that Trumpism is \u201c best understood as a reaction to the erosion of white privilege, supremacy, and <\/span>centrality<\/span><\/i> in American life.\u201d <\/span>This article in The Atlantic<\/span><\/a> describes how Donald Trump won the presidency precisely <\/span>because<\/span><\/i> he was white, an active factor in the presidential race. The introduction of <\/span>Resentment<\/span><\/i> makes it clear that Engels is not pointing fingers at conservative Americans and that both liberals and conservatives are \u201chardworking people just trying to get by as best as they can in a difficult economy\u201d (22). Through our socialization in the politics of resentment, we have been taught not to direct our resentment at the other half of the <\/span>duas civitate<\/span><\/i>, but <\/span>rather at each other<\/span><\/a>, leaving those at the top untouched. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the first essay Politics of Resentment, Jeremy Engels explores how the the concept of a democratic public has been<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3638,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3638"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}