Virginia Anderson, Indiana University-Southeast
Abstract of a Paper Presented at the 1999 Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society
The Clinton debacle has provided rhetoricians and others interested in persuasive language with much raw data for analysis. Particularly intriguing have been the vehemence of the conservative assault on Clinton and the question of the gravity of his transgressions: what level of depravity they rise (or sink) to. Recently, in The New Republic, University of Chicago professor Jonathan Lear postulated a psychoanalytic explanation both for the intensity of the inquisition and for the certainty of the moral condemnations; in this interpretation, Clinton represents the "primal father" whose claim to access to "all the women!' (26) must be quashed by the establishment of rules of access that constitute the foundation of civilization. Such abrogation can be achieved only if the sons "kill" the presumptuous individual whose disdain for the rules unifying the group they see as a claim to the powers and rights of a god. I propose, however, that it is equally productive to view Clinton as a Burkeian scapegoat in that he matches perfectly the paradigm offered, for example, in The Rhetoric of Religion. As such, he enacts Burke's "logologicarl" principles through his cultural and rhetorical roles.
If Burke is correct, conservatives' desire to cast Clinton out at all costs should reflect some "flaw" inherent -in-even paradoxically central to-their own idea of order and perfection, a "disorder" implicit in their construction of godliness. Indeed, I find this "flaw" in what social conservative Daniel Bell, writing a quarter century ago, called "the cultural contradictions of capitalism." I argue that Clinton "perfectly" represents the ineradicable tension between production and consumption that Bell locates at the heart of American conservatism. I suggest that those who see in the American people's acceptance of Clinton despite his transgression a tacit acceptance of their complicity in his Wings also provide Burkeians with a topic for investigation: arguably, the American people have tamed the inevitable scapegoating impulse by reassigning the flaw in themselves that Clinton mirrors to the culture itself, altering the agency/scene ratio and thereby providing themselves with a redemption that does not require a violence to persons. I suggest that the deferral of action enabled by this rhetorical move can ultimately be a tactic of redemption and salvation equal in potency to the act of sacrificial scapegoating itself.
Return to the 1999 KB Conference Program
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