{"id":11017,"date":"2008-03-06T17:10:53","date_gmt":"2008-03-06T22:10:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/03\/06\/11017.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:12","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:12","slug":"shes-my-country-i-think-ill-ke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/03\/06\/shes-my-country-i-think-ill-ke\/","title":{"rendered":"She’s my country, I think I’ll keep her"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Travis Daub over at the Foreign Policy Passport notes that John McCain loves Lady Liberty<\/a>. He makes a terrific point about the candidate\u2019s rhetorical reference to our nation in the feminine:
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First, using \"her\" shows McCain as a traditionalist. He talks about great causes the way a founding father might have spoken. And second, McCain establishes himself as a paternal figure: a man who has the power to protect, honor and provide for a woman—when that woman just happens to be the USA. It's a subtle way to imply that a woman would not be able to do the same job as president as a man. Certainly, it would sound strange for Hillary Clinton to refer to America as \"her.\" In this way, McCain can covertly raise the gender issue without ever sounding overtly sexist.<\/blockquote>
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I often claim that we should teach rhetoric at the high school level. This is one example of a case where it\u2019s fairly difficult to explain what\u2019s going on to people who don\u2019t know anything at all about rhetoric. After all, why shouldn\u2019t<\/i> Senator McCain refer to America as she<\/i>. It really is<\/i> the traditional way. And it is. And if it comes off as sexist in some indirect way, surely that\u2019s just the inevitable baggage of the tradition, and besides, isn\u2019t a big deal anyway.
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There\u2019s nothing necessarily nefarious about his choice. After all, he is the Conservative candidate (at least he is the more Conservative candidate), and if his language indicates Conservatism, he will be indicating Conservatism in a variety of other ways as well, including the name of his Party. It\u2019s not dishonest. It\u2019s not a dog whistle.
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But it does have connotations that aren\u2019t necessarily obvious to the hearer, and that contribute to the vague impressions that are, after all, what most of us take away from political speeches. The more people who know something about rhetoric and how it works, the more people who understand that there are deliberate choices to connote those things, the less vague those impressions will be.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, looks a lot like a certain Senator from New York.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11017"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18294,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11017\/revisions\/18294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}