I delivered this speech at the invitation of then-Graduate School Dean Teresa Sullivan, with whom I had the pleasure of working at UT when I directed the writing center. The occasion was the 119th anniversary of the founding of UT and the reopening of the observation deck of the UT Tower. I was a bit nervous, hence the delivery reminders.
Thank you Dr. Sullivan.
Colleagues, students, fellow citizens:
I want to begin by thanking the undergraduate students in my two courses this semester for holding rough draft workshops of this speech with me yesterday. They are not sure whether or not they, as undergraduate students, are part of the intended audience for this event, and, frankly, I am not sure either.
Indeed, those of us gathered here today -- faculty, administration, staff, students, and members of the wider community, some of you perhaps with individual memories of the Tower, some pleasant, some very painful -- we constitute a richly complex audience, assembled at a unique moment in time. Trained first as a journalist in college, I know better than to use the word “unique” carelessly. But this is a unique rhetorical situation -- the largest public institution of higher education in the country is reclaiming a high-profile space from an increasingly violent culture. This is a uniquely public moment in the history of this institution, and such occasions require appropriate rhetoric.
So I would like to begin by asking you today,
(read in the voice of a commercial radio advertiser):
“HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO LOOK BETTER NAKED?”
Excuse me. I’ve made the mistake of listening to talk radio again. You can call KVET and ask them: that is how one of the ads begins on the talk show with the highest Arbitron ratings in our fair city. At some level, who is going to answer no to that question? And the radio show, of course, will tell you what products you can buy to make it happen, though past results are no guarantee of future performance.
What startled me about that horrible question on the radio -- what carved it into my individual memory -- is that it suggests so unabashedly the difference between a demographic and a public. People regarded only as consumers constitute a demographic. But people regarded as citizens who can make judgments about issues of common concern constitute publics. As John Dewey remarked as early as 1927, “the public is bewildered” (116, 123). It can’t -- we can’t -- recognize ourselves as publics, as private people who come together through discourse to make judgments about our common concerns and to articulate our public interests. I won’t dwell on the problems of voter turnout and declining civic participation, assuming that these are not news to you, but I do want to dwell briefly on our means and modes of public communication. They are central to the course I teach on the UT Tower and Public Memory.
Producers of national television shows have asked me nearly a dozen times in the last few years to reduce to sound bites what happens in the Tower course. These producers are not asking about a scientific discovery, a nationwide opinion poll, or a new tool for business or industry. They are asking about an undergraduate rhetoric course. And, more times than not, after talking to me about what the students in the Tower course do and what they have accomplished, producers scratch their heads and say, as an MSNBC producer said to me last week, "How can we get something so complicated into one segment?" The process of human deliberation and judgment is, it has become clear, too complex for what is allowed onto commercial television and, alas, even radio.
Consistently, I have not been willing to turn the course into a sound bite. Frankly, as media requests proliferate, I am less and less likely even to try to do so. The problem, I tell myself, is not in my set. The problem is that our means and modes of public communication -- commercial television, commercial radio, the Internet, and increasingly even commercial print journalism -- are not fit for public discourse. Commercial television and radio, despite their email addresses and focus groups, are too interested in entertainment and ratings and profit margins to provide a place for publics to form by patiently allowing individuals to discover and discourse together about issues of common concern. At the end of this century, commercial media understand their audiences only as demographics, as “people who want to look better naked.” Given the current state of the commercial media, the future of our democracy depends on public education.
Students in the class I teach called The UT Tower and Public Memory distinguish themselves by, among many other things, refusing to be merely a passive demographic audience. Rather, they take me at my word that the classroom can be a protopublic space. Many of them move beyond what we learn and practice in class and enter the fray that is public discourse, beginning to construct for themselves a sense of public agency and, with their peers, a shared past and a sustainable future. Faced with only remnants of a public vocabulary and few venues for public discourse, the students in the Tower course -- and other students across this campus -- set the discursive stage for the reopening of the observation deck -- as well as for other, more important changes at The University of Texas at Austin. Today I’d like to suggest that the rest of us follow their lead: We can talk together in public about difficult issues, and we can deliberate together our shared -- if uncertain -- future.
Though I can’t deliver sound bites, I can divide what we do in the Tower course into two questions -- how has the Tower been remembered? and how should the Tower be remembered?
First, how has the Tower been remembered? To answer that question, we use rhetoric’s unmatched power for reading and interpreting discursive artifacts. We have studied and made collective judgments about over thirty years of print and broadcast journalism about the Tower; we have read the only book-length memoir that refers to the shootings, Frances Gabour Lamport’s The Impossible Tree; outside of class, students have watched and made judgments about the various films and television programs that allude to the Tower shootings; and we have studied how the Tower has been remembered and used within this institution, though that has been the most difficult part of student research. Being careful to respect the unimaginable pain caused by the events of August 1, 1966, we have invited to class a few people who were wounded to talk about their memories of the day. The comments of one person, who said being wounded that day was the best thing that ever happened to her because it made her appreciate the fragility of life, sparked a semester-long discourse in class and beyond about anger and how it is transformed over time. Several students’ parents were students here before the observation deck was closed, and they remember the Tower as a great place to go on dates and to watch the sun set . . . or rise. The Tower is remembered variously by various individuals, but one legacy of the university’s long silence about the Tower is that cultural products -- movies, web pages, T-shirts, popular songs -- nearly wrote the public memory of the Tower for us.
What has perpetuated the memories of August 1, 1966? The vast majority of cultural texts that allude to the shootings emphasize not the victims but rather the shooter, Charles Whitman. Besides the 1975 made-for-TV movie Deadly Tower, starring Kurt Russell, which airs regularly on TNT, references to Charles Whitman occur in films from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, where a drill sergeant says Whitman “showed what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do”; to Richard Linklater’s Slacker, in which an anarchist philosophy professor says the Tower shootings were Austin’s “finest hour”; to Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, wherein Whitman serves as one of the celebrity “American Maniacs”; and, most recently, The Delicate Art of the Rifle, a North Carolina-made independent film which renames Charles Whitman “Walt Whitman” and concludes that “a Whitman’s got to do what a Whitman’s got to do.” Film references to Charles Whitman consistently have a smirky ethos: the juxtaposition of Whitman’s horrific deeds with the college photo of him distributed by news services around the globe in 1966 -- smiling former Eagle Scout and Marine sharpshooter, the proverbial all-American boy -- sells coolness, detachment, the threat of furious and random violence, revenge.
T-shirts with that same photo of Whitman’s smiling, crew-cut visage and a picture of the Tower over the legend, “Be True to Your School” were for sale in many college towns. Another t-shirt, sold by a company called Burning Church Enterprises and advertised on the Web, features Whitman surrounded by images of his weapons. This memory of the Tower shootings as commodified in the image of Whitman’s smiling face and the icon of the Tower is also articulated through Whitman’s place in the Mass Murderer Trading Cards canon; and his handwriting is being formatted for sale as a font for word processors through “Killer Fonts,” another site on the Web. Nature abhors a vacuum, and into the official silence following the shootings and suicides, these and other cultural texts have rushed. Unfortunately, they ignore the pain of his many, many victims and the consequences of an increasingly violent culture.
Given the paucity of eloquence about the Tower in the past generation, the question of how the Tower should and will be remembered is the focus of most of our deliberations and writing in the Tower course. The cultural texts that have endeavored to commodify the image of Charles Whitman suggest the dire need for informed and ethical use of rhetoric and the need for public judgment.
From the first day we meet as a group, most students in the Tower course begin to figure out that if public history is to be written, citizen critics are the ones to do the writing. I invented the Tower course as a way to get undergraduate students from all majors and all areas of the state and beyond excited about talking and writing with each other. Students at The Largest Public University In The Country do not get much of a chance to talk to each other. They certainly are not encouraged by the structure of the university to interact with people who are different from them -- people with whom they would find infinite and enduring commonalities. Since I see interacting with and being able to reason with people different from you as a necessary foundation of participatory democracy, I try to teach those practices as part of my beloved subject matter: rhetoric. Rhetoric provides, among many other things, a place for the coming together of difference.
As many rhetoric courses do, the Tower course widens to embrace public issues of the moment. Last semester, our class discussions of the school shootings in Littleton, Colorado, prompted students to deliberate whether the UT Tower shootings might not have been one of the first bulletins about our increasingly violent culture. If we had studied more about the shootings rather than repressing the questions or settling for easy answers, might we have begun to figure out how to prevent such violence?
I was in this wonderful auditorium a few weeks ago for a memorial service to my colleague, Jim Kinneavy, a rhetorician who passed away on August 10. Jim was a passionate and steadfast advocate for undergraduate education during his nearly thirty years at The University of Texas at Austin. I spent part of the morning of August 1 at Jim's hospital bedside, with his daughter Kathy and my friend and colleague Jorie Woods. We talked about Jim's unfinished book, a K-12 pedagogy for enabling people of different religions to discourse together about ethics, and made plans to visit again two days hence. However, a phone call after I got home from attending the dedication of the Tower Memorial Garden indicated that Jim had taken a turn for the worse, and -- except for visiting him a few times in the Intensive Care Unit at Seton, when he could no longer talk -- that morning's conversation with Jim Kinneavy was my last.
As I drove down I-35 that evening to see the darkened Tower, what it symbolized for me at that moment was Jim's illness and the loss of another of rhetoric’s twentieth-century pioneers. That's what I will think of henceforth when I think of August 1, 1999: the darkened Tower and my grief at the loss of a colleague. Among the distinctions we study in the Tower course are those among individual, institutional, cultural, and public memory. My connecting the darkened Tower with Jim's decline is individual memory, and, through this kind of discourse, it is largely unshareable.
Yet rhetoric is our best hope for a language of public memory, of collective remembering. Rhetoric and public discourse allow for memory without commodification, judgment rather than mere demographic preference. At an institution that too often unwittingly trains its students to be spectators, rhetoric presents students a means of gaining public agency to be the leaders of their communities as well as their corporations.
Opening the observation deck of the UT Tower, in itself, changes very little. It is, as President Faulkner said on August 1 of this year, symbolic action. Our university and state and nation beg for real action, for students who are public leaders rather than spectators, who work toward the public interest rather than just private gain.
I am not an expert on the Tower, and I am certainly not an expert on Charles Whitman. While I have learned a great deal about those topics during four sections of teaching the Tower course, what has excited me most -- at times overcoming the angst I feel every time I teach the course -- are the public discourses the students have produced. With what they learned in the Tower course from me and from each other about memory, one of the canons of rhetoric, students also have consistently written about public and private memories of their own families and their own home towns, as well as about their own processes of memorialization and memory. I am honored to read and learn about the rich histories of my students, their families, and their communities. I am first and foremost a teacher of rhetoric. I believe that learning how to reason together about difficult topics will improve our collective polity and shared lives.
That is truly in the public interest.
