The second chapter of The Rhetoric of the Two Year Old will have to deal with two primary non-tantrum forms of argumentation: tautology and repetition. First, tautology. The two year old appears to understand the form of the enthymeme, because if you ask for a good reason to support a particular claim, the two year old will provide a reason. That the reason is the same as the claim does not seem to bother them. For example, from this morning, when dropping babygirl off at daycare:
babygirl: I want to go downstairs.
topspun: Why do you want to go downstairs?
babygirl: Because I want to.
topspun: You’re the Master of Tautology. I’m going to call you Princess Tautology.
babygirl: No! I’m not Princess Tautology!
topspun: Why are you not Princess Tautology?
babygirl: Because I’m not.
topspun: So, you’re not Princess Tautology?
babygirl: No, I am.
See, she had to throw a little contradiction in there just to mess with me, which is, I suppose, a perfectly legitimate tactic when somebody is calling you “Princess Tautology.” The second strategy is more brute force: sheer repetition of an entire claim or a keyword from the claim. The tenacity of this repetition is really the key to the argument. I think that once you hit maybe seven years old, you can’t deploy this sort of repetition strategy without significant cognitive costs, but at two, it is not only possible, but effective.
For a great illustration of both these strategies at work, see our friends’ video, here.
So it’s been a big month over at the Seven Red household, as may have been noticed by our two and a half readers based on virtual non-activity on this blog. So here’s the news from Seven Red Land:
1) topspun finally, finally, finally defended his dang dissertation. Now, most people say “Huh? I thought you already did that!” Well, no. I hadn’t. It was a long and painful slog, not helped by a variety of factors that I don’t feel much like going into like, ever again. Life got in the way. Other things. My own insistence on doing it right the way I wanted to. But that’s done now, and I’m not really in the mood to apologize for it taking so long, to myself or others. In the end, it came out better than if I had kept to the route (and the chapters) that I had in the Spring of 2007, and I can live with it. During this whole long and – wait, did I say “painful?” – process, the worst days were the last day of each month. I’d go to bed on the last day of each month saying “There’s another month that I told myself I would be finished by, and here we are.” That’s the gut check time: lights out and alone in the dark with that burden. But on the last day of last month, I had submitted what I was going to submit. And on the last day of this month I can go to sleep without that hanging question hovering there in the dark. I’m going to sleep like a baby. Well, maybe not like a baby, but you feel me.In any case, it’s now time to take up the projects that have had to go on the back burner while this thing was eating away at my soul. I also have a new motivation to guide me: vendetta. I’ll leave that a mystery for now.
2) Bigger and more importantly, Seven Red – as so many facebook messages have indicated – is expecting another baby in April. babygirldos or babyboy, we’ll know (for the most part) on Tuesday, when we get the big twenty week sonogram. Let the gendering begin! We are, of course, thrilled and scared and wondering how we’re going to manage it all, but mostly thrilled (and scared). More on Tuesday.
3) Despite the near collapse of on of the nation’s Giant Financial Institutions, she (who works for said Giant Financial Institution) has thus far managed to keep her job, and also successfully completed her First Graduate Class (thanks for the tuition, Employer Institution!). As our friends who we had over for Thanksgiving said, full time job in an industry in crisis, a two and a half year old at home, four months pregnant, and still manages to ace her first class in ten (or so…) years! Not effing bad. If I don’t say it enough: you rock, baby!
So, all-in-all a good month. Seven Red is all smiles. Oh, and there’s also that little thing called Barack Fucking Hussein Obama getting elected President of these United States. After an awful October, and an awful eight years, it is a sweet November.
Here’s this, written on Day 1,000 of this fucking war:
In the heady days of January 1991, we used to cut out of our senior year of high school early and go smoke joints at R.L.’s apartment. We’d often have beer as well. From about 2 pm to 6 pm, a large group of us would chill there, maybe with CNN or MTV or cartoons on the television in the background. It was the line in the sand day, or thereabouts, and CNN was on. The war had not yet started, but we were waiting for it, full of bravado. We were sure that if the war started, it would lead to a general Mideast conflagration, and we would all be called to service. We were all 17 years old, and in good health, if often high.
I left R.L.’s at about 6, heading home to dinner. I walked back to my apartment with Sulli and Steve. We were pretty lit by this time, and the electricity in the air said it all: the war is imminent. Steve started belting out the lines as we walked down the Queens street: All we are say-ing/ Is give war a chance! I remember laughing. When I got home I found my mother standing in front of the television, her hand over her mouth. “What’s going…” but she shushed me, and I looked at the television. The eerie green light, the tracers going up over the minarets, the stentorian intonations of some spokesman or other. War. I went into the bedroom I shared with my brother, my heart filled with joy…
*****
Why doncha come on back to the War. – Leonard Cohen
September 10, 2001. I have dinner with an old friend at an Italian restaurant in the East Village. Then we go to DBA, a bar. Jay-Z’s “Hova” comes on the bar’s sound system: H to the Izzo, V to the Izzay, what else can I say, dude, I gets bizzay. We talk about how great it is. I’m drunk at this point, and I have to get back to Brooklyn. I have to be up early tomorrow to do campaign work in Lower Manhattan before I head to work at my building near the Ferry terminal. I take a cab back over the Manhattan Bridge, with a final glance at the lights flickering in the Manhattan skyline just as we hit the center of the Bridge. Goddamn is it beautiful.
*****
One…we are the people
Two…a little bit louder
Three…we’re gonna stop this fucking war, now
One…
March, 2003. The first Saturday of the War. I am at a conference in New York, but I stay at my brother’s place in Brooklyn rather than in the conference hotel. I don’t live here anymore. On Friday I got food poisoning. My brother, his wife, and my wife went to a French restaurant in Fort Green, but I stayed at his place, sick as a dog, watching the lead-up to the War on television. On Saturday I go to Midtown to see a friend’s panel, but the war is on television there, too, real now, green-lit tracers over the minarets, Shock and Awe booming through the hotel lobby. I leave after the panel, and wander into the anti-war march that is just beginning. The crowds are tremendous. I walk downtown with the march, but on the sidewalk. Hard for me to be a joiner that way, I guess. Earnestness irritates me, but I’m with them. When I get down to 10th street I encounter the drummers – a group of Latinos and Latinas leading the chant: One…we are the people, Two…a little bit louder, Three…we’re gonna stop this fucking war, now. Everyone on the march and on the sidewalks is cheering. On a third floor balcony above the march, a woman comes out with a little boy and a conch shell. She starts blowing it in beat with the drum. Everyone’s eyes seem to move from the drummers to the balcony and back. The drummers acknowledge her, and the little boy dances. There he is dancing on the first Saturday of the War.
*****
And we looked at each other and gazed on the green meadow over which the cool evening was running just then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was. –Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Other Dancing Song”
One Thousand Days. I should have waited another one, and led with One Thousand One Arabian Nights. Too clever by far. And no history or stories will save me, like Scheherazade. It is the one thousandth day of the War. I often wondered when I was a child how people could live normally on the home front when a war was going on. How do they face it everyday, I wondered, knowing what must be happening, knowing that everything is at stake? How do they go out to dinner, play sports, make love, gesture to each other on the street? It bothered me. I’d think of the swing clubs during World War II – everyone dressed up and dancing. A sip from a bottle of beer, or a Tom Collins. How? It is the one thousandth day of the war. No stories will save me. In March, if all goes well, my first child will be born. Perhaps on the first Saturday of the fourth year of the War. I want her to dance to something else. I want some other occasion for her joy and even for her heartbreaks, something other than what Langston Hughes once called “the same old stupid game, of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.” I want for her some other dancing song. But it is the one thousandth day of the war and no stories will save me.
*****
Now back to the present, today, election day, 2008. And another one on the way. Another child, another dancing song. For the first one, now our dear babygirl (life is dearer than all that wisdom ever was), and for this second one, whoever he or she will be, and whatever he or she will dance to: VOTE. Vote some other dancing song. Vote OBAMA.
Note to Story-Teller Lady at the Lincoln Square Applefest Story Time: The old lady who swallowed a fly? She dies. She swallows a bunch of animals in a cascading attempt to capture a fly, and then swallows an entire horse, and dies. She does not “pop,” only to be re-inflated by a bunch of kids blowing breath into her (the spatial logic of which is itself hard to swallow). She dies. I quote: “There was an old lady who swallowed a horse. She’s dead, of course.” That’s how it goes.
In the last month, we’ve noticed a marked increase in babygirl‘s capacity to dispute our assertions (and, quite frankly, commands). Up until recently, her disputations mostly took the form of a squealing hell-tantrum. Noticing diminishing returns on this strategy, she’s actually started deploying some rhetorical forms. Someday, someone’s going to get really clever and do the rhetorical analysis of the two-year old, probably to prove some Chomskyite point or other. Yes, I know Melanie Klein already did it, but I mean somebody else. So I’ll get ‘em started:
1. The “I’m just…” Strategy: Used when she wants to continue an act she’s just been forbidden from continuing, babygirl‘s “I’m just” strategy involves repeating the very thing she was told not to do, but prefacing it with “I’m just…” Presumably, this strategy is designed to minimize the forbidden action, thereby making it more acceptable.
Example
topspun: babygirl, stop bending that cabinet back right now!
babygirl: No, I’m just bending the cabinet back.
2. The Emphatic Need Approach: It’s shocking that one of the standard responses of Western culture is already well embedded at two years six months. When told that action A is off the table, or that action B is the current plan, your interlocutor tells you that he or she really needs to do action A. This has really become babygirl’s go-to move: I need… It is usually stated emphatically at this stage (more experienced users know that the more casually the need is stated, the more it will seem like a real need to the interlocutor), and seems to be paired with both an urgency marker (“right now”) and a drawn out “OK” that turns the whole statement of need into a question.
Example
topspun: babygirl, get your shoes on. It’s time for school.
babygirl: No, but I NEEEED to go on the computer right now, o-kaaaay?
3. I Already Said That: Not so much a disputation as a direct challenge and slicing cut, babygirl uses the “I already said that” to essentially demonstrate her fundamental argumentative superiority. Later on in life, she will use the more common expression, “Fucked if I’d talk to anyone as dumb as you.”
Example
topspun: See the stop sign?
babygirl: No, dop dine.
topspun: Stop sign.
babygirl: Dop dine.
topspun: Stop sign.
babygirl: Dop dine.
topspun: Sssssstop ssssssign.
babygirl: Dop dine.
topspun: Stop sign. It’s an “S.” Ssssssstop sssssssign.
babygirl: I already said stop sign.
…and she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers. – Leonard Cohen, Suzanne
Once when I was taking the train from NYC to Albany, the conductor announced the next stop like this: “In five minutes we will arrive in beautiful Rensselaer, the Pearl of Upstate New York.” Those not in the know stretched their necks to check the windows, hoping for a view of this magical place. Everybody else burst out laughing, knowing full well that Rensselaer had seen better days, and that if this was the Pearl of Upstate New York, one would do well to steer clear of the less valuable jewels.
Yesterday we took a trip to Walmart to pick up some stuff. she and I are strict non-Walmarters, but it is true what they say: in a place like this (rural Upstate about 40 miles west of Albany), you aren’t exactly flush with options. So off we went to Evil Walmart, and truly, without many regrets. Being arugula-eating urban elites, the only time we ever step foot into a Walmart is when we come here. It’s like pre-enlightened anthropology. It is perhaps indicative of the economy up here that we were greeted at the doorway of Walmart by a uniformed corrections officer recruiting for the prison industry. I insisted to she that I had to take a picture of this, since it encapsulates the post-Fordist economy so perfectly for so many rural and formerly industrial areas: giant Walmart, with the only growth industry in the area being the warehousing of “dangerous” sorts from the urban areas, many hundreds of miles off. The population of this area tends to be, moreover, much lighter in complexion than those they house, and so the whole nasty bag of it just drains you of optimism.
I did have a very nice talk with the woman who was staffing the booth. She asked me, as an initial gambit, whether I was interested in a good job. I let her down gently: I work in the other institutional space designed for the less recalcitrant population. It’s a parallel setting, to be sure. We then discussed turnover and conditions, the corrections officer union, my friend who did a stretch in Greene and Wyoming (both NYS medium facilities), and other such matters. It was all very pleasant. She declined to be photographed, and was a little concerned that I would portray the DOC in a negative light, which I hope I’m not really doing. I told her I didn’t blame her for not wanting some mildly bemused citified jerk to take her picture, and we chatted some more, and I commented on the strange double-meaning of a “secure future.” But this was really the selling point of the whole thing. When she was actually recruiting, as I overheard, she always asked “Do you feel like to could provide more for your family? Are you looking for great medical and dental?”
Then we went back to the farm, where the vistas are somewhat more pleasant:
Needless to say, babygirl loves it here, and we’re glad that she gets to see this part of life as well as the frenetic motion of Chicago:
Recent Comments