It has been a while and most of us are embracing the dog-days-o'-summer in full form. I just wanted to throw out a quick post-to-ponder to keep the rhetoric blood circulating in my nearly atrophied brain.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting the gorgeous Boulder, CO while attending RSA Institute 2011 (yes, the very one that will be bequeathed to us at KU in two short years). The plethora of workshops and seminars were enough to make any nerdy rhetorician salivate with delight. And salivate we did. Specifically I sunk my teeth into a "Rhetoric and Ethnography" workshop that was every bit as delicious as a New York Strip would be to a vegan with a Laquanian lack of animal protein. Yet in the process of developing an argument for rhetoric and ethnography one passage stood with particular aplomb:

"It is not that rhetoric culture could in itself provide the skills to rebuild a house after a flood, assemble arms against another attack, or eradicate the mosquitoes which have brought the disease, but it can move oneself and others to a common understanding and a common policy, which may then lead to house building, arms assembling, or mosquito eradication."

To borrow from Bon Iver's Holocene - "And at once I knew I was not magnificent." There is much to be done. A study of rhetoric for change, the study of discourses for justice, reaches toward that which I desire. It is there, within rhetoric culture, that I primarily find a sense of magnificent significance.

Thus, I realized in a revelatory way that this is why I study rhetoric. So this summer, as we venture into various projects of rhetorical vice, let us strive for magnificence as we proverbially build houses, assemble arms, and above all else eradicate mosquitoes!