Dis-Honoring the Dead: Negotiating Decorum in the Shadow of Sandy Hook

Abstract

Mourning the indiscriminate murders of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, many eulogizers began calling publicly for gun control reforms that would help prevent similar tragedies in the future. One particularly savage set of responses to these efforts accused eulogizers of a gross breach of decorum that dishonored the dead and ought, therefore, to be dismissed. Drawing from a Burkean perspective that recognizes the relationships among rhetoric, decorum, and ideology, I contend that these attacks are based upon and advocate for a particular sense of decorum (one at odds with the one embodied in the rhetorical tradition) that reduces the circumference of human tragedy to the individual and permits only conformity with the status quo.

Keywords:

• Burke
• Decorum
• Eulogy
• Genre
• Ideology
• Piety
• Propriety

Acknowledgements

The author is especially grateful to Sharon Downey and two anonymous reviewers for their extensive, constructive feedback on various drafts of this manuscript. Additionally, the author thanks Amy Deardoff for her enthusiastic support and careful reading of the final version of this article.

Notes

This shift seems to have occurred for multiple reasons. In addition to the growing authority of the church, many important texts were lost during the multiple sacks of Rome and the Western empire's total disintegration in 476 AD/CE. For scholastics of the age, the canon of invention (as it pertained to questions of truth and evidence) belonged more properly to theology than to rhetoric.

This impulse toward identification, codification, and systematization of tropes, figures, and dictamen achieved its apex in the 1800s and can be glimpsed in elocution handbooks, which provide detailed illustration and musical scales to instruct the student in the exact kinds of articulation, inflection, and bodily gesture most appropriate for any given rhetorical end (Knowles & Sargeant, 1844).

Although Burke is clearly indebted to Marx, he chose to employ orientation, frame, and terministic screen likely to avoid the connotative overhead attached to ideology and quite possibly to smuggle these critical ideas into an increasingly paranoid and repressive political climate.

I am not innovative in this regard: Black (1970) suggests this sort of work in calling the critic to study “stylistic tokens” in a text to arrive at the second persona of a text (p. 112). A similar approach is embodied in the “symptomatic reading” to which Althusser (2009) and Jameson (1981) refer.

These ideological commitments might be expressed in a number of ways—Burke does not provide any precise suggestions here. I gravitate toward the language of intensities, valences, and bonds. We might be coached to adopt a worldview structured by an intense emphasis on the significance of some symbol. That emphasis may be strongly affirmative or negative. And that symbol may be situated alongside or in opposition to other symbols.

Lanza reportedly reloaded his guns frequently, often after firing only a few rounds, and consequently did not actually gain much benefit from the large capacity clips he carried.

Because my interest is in the rhetorical force of a recurring argument which circulated in a variety of mediums at multiple levels in popular culture, my goal in selecting these texts was simply to assemble a range of rhetorical fragments which well exhibit this argument and can substantiate the claim that the argument circulated widely.

As it happens, the Newtown families initiated contact with the president, asking to meet to discuss the issue of gun control (April 18, 2013).

In Hegemony or Survival, Chomsky (2003) situates the 9/11 attacks on the United States as an understandable response to perennial American attacks (diplomatic, clandestine proxy military, and economic) on the Middle East. By expanding the circumference of the situation, both chronologically and geopolitically, Chomsky's telling of the story of 9/11 changes the meaning of the attacks—from unprovoked aggression to bloody retribution. On the contrary, the Bush administration's position—that Islamist radicals had suddenly attacked the United States because of a hatred of America and American freedom (absent any recognition of how such a hatred might have been generated)—construes the events of September 11 as a singular act of pure evil. The difference is one of circumference.

Rand (1964) views altruism and social obligations as detrimental to human greatness and she advocates, instead, for what might be called enlightened narcissism, wherein each individual is released from all restraints to relentlessly pursue her or his greatness.

Defining mass shooting as “when four or more people are shot in an event, or related series of events, likely without a cooling off period,” there were 363 mass shootings in 2013, 336 mass shootings in 2014, and 298 in 2015 before this essay went to press (Mass Shooting Tracker, 2015).

Attempts to tabulate the carnage differ because definitions vary. Everytown for Gun Safety (2015) counts each instance when a gun is discharged on a school campus, which includes accidental discharges, or attempted assaults that result in no injuries or deaths. On the basis of this definition, they record 153 school shootings since Sandy Hook. Of these 153 discharges, 95 attacks have resulted in injury or death.

While I applaud efforts to do better in our ways of talking about and treating mental illness, it seems that mental illness plays a role in only about 5% of the gun-related killings that occurred in the United States between 2001 and 2010 (Metzl & MacLeish, 2015, p. 241). If mental illness gets too much attention in reporting on gun violence, hegemonic masculinity—which articulates manhood with violence, control, and anger—is chronically underappreciated. As Katz and Jhally (1999) have remarked, the media typically frames these massacres as “kids killing kids,” when we should more honestly say it is “boys killing kids.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher M. Duerringer

Christopher M. Duerringer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, Long Beach.