Holocaust Hyperbole as a Warning Sign

Making hyperbolic and apocalyptic comparisons that evoke the Holocaust, having a tendency to escalate disagreements by using extreme and irreconcilable terms, way out of proportion to the immediate situation, these are some of the rhetorical similarities between mad shooters and political extremists that have nothing to do with gun laws. The Holocaust is the definitive extreme case in any debate, worse than global nuclear war because it has actually happened, the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki aside. The Holocaust has rhetorical power because it readily spreads into any number of Old Testament comparisons. So it becomes easy to slide from Scripture to genocide for some people. This then is a first sign that someone is imbalanced--when they start speaking in such end of the world language to describe a much more ordinary confrontation. If a problem with a professor, leads a student to suggest genocide, then he is seriously off the beam. If a politician evokes medieval pogroms to cast herself as the victim of unfair rhetoric, than she, too, has clearly lost all sense of proportion. And it is these slips , these moments when the mask of normalcy slips, when the hugely disproportionate metaphors stream out, that you worry about what is going in the speaker's mind. The link between Palin and the shooter is now coming out after the fact--in the tendency to make eerie and unfitting comparisons between their own personal troubles and the historical murder of the Jewish people. In her denial of any connection to the shooter, she shows just how her reasoning and rhetoric share a common tendency.

Changing clothes/Changing Tones/Mocking Gender

"You change your mind like a girl changes clothes." What always gets me about this line is that female singer is using a misogynist line to mock her male lover. It is as if she wants to sound like a tough old guy--like Clint Eastwood, but in order to insult her boyfriend, she has to denigrate women. Indeed by putting women down she legitimates herself as capable of insulting a man for being "feminine."

Even better, in the video Katy Perry is wearing a white wedding dress as she first sings the line, signaling that she does not want to change her dress, she wants to continue as the bride. The groom on the other hand is too girly to marry. The bride is "man enough" to make a commitment, the groom not.

This tough girl talk is also the aural strategy in many conservative political commercials, where the voice over is a (white) woman passing along skeptical remarks about Barack Obama. Because the voice sounds female, it gets away with remarks that might otherwise sound like a harraning white guy. This seeming contradiction defines the rhetoric fascination for Sarah Palin, and all those other soccer mom spokeswomen for the right-wing, -- she speaks more like an old white guy than any old white guy, even as she sounds female. Feminine is definitely not how the woman speaking wants to sound, because in this rhetorical context femininity becomes a negative attribute that the conservative, tough-guy female voice accuses the male liberal of having become--soft, indecisive, moody and eager to spend money, a string of attributes that are meant to mock his claim to masculinity.

Just wait, conservative political women are going to sound more and more like Katy Perry--minus the whipped cream spraying.