Sarah Palin, Gameplaying, and the Three-Legged Fool

In the interest of irony (even the abridged Ong was a long read :D ), I've decided to make my comments on this week's readings fairly brief. Of course, this is not to say that there ain't a lot to say about them, but rather to provide some interesting talking points for Tuesday.

First, I've always been intrigued by Ong's Orality and Literacy, and in fact I've found bits of it quite useful in explaining sentence structure to Engl 102 and GenEd 302 groups--for students who often write the way they speak (which occurs often, regardless of whether they come from a culture of orality/secondary orality), the "additive vs. subordinative", the "aggregative vs. analytical", and the "copious" sections make for quick, easy, and helpful reading (I sometimes summarize) when discussing things like redundancy, flow, and clauses (37-41).  Often, my favorite examples of redundant, aggregative or formulaic speech/writing come from Sarah Palin--consider her response to David Letterman's description of her as having a "slutty flight attendant" look:

"Pretty pathetic, good old David Letterman, that old David Letterman, what a commentary there ... very sad not to recognize what this trip was all about [...] Just doing some good things here for some good people in New York... such a distortion." [my italics]

 Notice the repetition and use of adjectives; granted, this is from speech, not writing, but in the press release for her resignation (which used to be on Alaska's official website), written by Palin herself, the same features keep popping up.

Next, Ong's comments about "the dozens" (Ong's description always makes me chuckle a bit--so academic!) and his description of oral culture as being close to the "human lifeworld" brought to mind another game that parallels the agonistic features of "the dozens" while maintaining that connection to the world around us (42-44). Back in Olympia, people on the street play a game where two or more participants compete to demonstrate their awareness of their surroundings. When one participant sees someone strange, ugly, stupid, etc., they will say to their companion, "Your team." The point of the game is to associate the odd-acting person with their companion, and is obviously highly judgemental and often quite crude. However, the game serves another purpose, one well suited to life on the street: by pointing out unusual people to their companions, participants remind each other to be mindful of their surroundings and to maintain a keen awareness of the people around them. While I am now a graduate student in one of the safest suburbs in all of Washington, I still teach my friends the game and continue it because, aside from amusement, it teaches a valuable lesson.

Finally, what stuck most in my mind about Barbara's piece is her description of the three (+1) trends in composition (W337). While Barbara describes herself as having "one foot" in two different "camps," I left the passage feeling like a fool stumbling through a three-legged race; I've got one leg in acculturation, one in hybrid discourse (the dominant one, of course), and one in multimedia composition, and I feel as if it won't be long before I trip. While I dislike the acculturation perspective (reminds me too much of the Borg from Star Trek--"You will be assimilated. Your cultural and biological distinctiveness will be added to our own."), I have to respect that students will need to be able to produce traditional academic discourse upon demand simply for their own survival. So now I've got to figure out how to run with this extra leg without letting it trip me up.