Mike Huckabee, Cicero and the Undereducated Media

In case you weren’t watching, reading or listening - or, more admirably, just didn’t care about the day-to-day manufactured kerfuffles in this two-year gestation period for Presidential nominees - Republican Mike Huckabee caused waves with an attack ad that he made, decided not to distribute and screened to the press corp anyway.

Here’s a quick recap:

(CBS/AP) Mike Huckabee said Monday he wouldn’t run a TV ad he’d prepared blistering Republican rival Mitt Romney as dishonest. Then he showed it to a room packed with reporters and cameramen.

Huckabee, who has sharply intensified his criticism of the former Massachusetts governor in recent days, tried to reclaim the high road in the midst of a news conference three days before Iowa’s presidential caucuses. He told reporters the event had been called to announce the hard-hitting new ad but he had changed his mind about running it on TV.

So, he made the ad and then showed the ad to show that he wouldn’t show the ad. Enemies cried foul, supporters pointed to his choice of the high-but-not-THAT-high road and pundits raised eyebrows. And, for 48 hours, it dominated political discussion from the networks to the blogosphere [though in the political dead zone that is the days leading up to the New Year, that's not remarkable].

But this is an education blog, not a political blog, so the cost/benefit analysis of Huckabee’s strategic move is of no interest to me here. I want to talk about paralipsis.

Every news-consuming American citizen should know about paralipsis by way of this story. Unfortunately, the undereducated media didn’t tell you. You either knew paralipsis before Huckabee’s press conference or you didn’t - and that didn’t change in the two days after.

Paralipsis is, in short, making a point by saying you won’t make the point. We use it all the time when we say, “Not to mention…” We say that we aren’t going to mention it but we mention it anyway. That’s paralipsis.

And paralipsis is exactly what Huckabee did with his Romney attack ad - it’s as low-hanging a rhetorical fruit as one might find. The media, however, didn’t use the word once in all the millions of words printed in the week after Huckabee’s press conference. Google News and Google Blogs, both fine trackers of what’s said electronically, return 0 results for “paralipsis” pertaining to Mike Huckabee in the last 30 days. The only real result that even addresses the rhetorical device is “What our lawyers won’t let us say” by the Christian Science Monitor’s Ruth Walker.

One can’t seem to invoke the classics or their literary/rhetorical devices without enduring charge upon charge of snobbery. Or, if one is lucky, one will be treated to the banal babbling of the progressive crusader who decries the worship of the Dead White Men. They’re right, though - most of those classical figures are indeed dead.

I learned of paralipsis at 15 while we read Cicero’s Cataline Orations in Latin 3. Catiline, having been charged with a conspiracy to undermine the Roman Republic, was famously taken to task by Cicero in the Orations. He besmirched Catiline, rightly and truthfully, when he said:

“I pass by, Catiline, what even your friends say, that you are an adulterer.”

Mike Huckabee, meet Cicero. Politicos, meet the high school education you somehow managed to avoid.

The point? That such a small, seminal and common rhetorical construct was introduced in a 10th grade New York State Regents course at an unremarkable rural public school. I didn’t pore over books in the penthouse of the Ivory Tower; it was more like reading the graffiti on a bathroom wall. There was nothing remotely unique about that education, yet we still managed to hit a topic like paralipsis that has shown itself about 5 times a day since.

There are two possible explanations - and likely a combination of both - that lead to the absence of this knowledge in news articles:

1. The media is, as a whole, undereducated. They themselves don’t know these things;

2. The media thinks that you’re too dumb and disinterested to appreciate them.

I asked a few news-reading college graduates if they knew the term for that “not to mention” device. None did. When I told them it was called paralipsis, their collective reaction was, “There’s a word for that? Huh.” Trivia, possibly, but they found it interesting.

This is just a drop in the bucket of problems with the media - and there are probably bigger fish to fry. It is, however, a fair indictment not just of the media’s lack of knowledge, but also of how they think of us: a disinterested bunch satisfied by a quick glimpse at a current event that includes not a bit of useful knowledge.

When President Bush so famously stated that he didn’t read newspapers, it likely didn’t occur to most people how little he was missing.

UPDATE at 1.09.08, 3.30pm:

Mike Edwards, a professor of English, noticed too. On Vitia.org he writes:

Mr. Huckabee, it would seem, knows his pseudo-Cicero, although I’m not quite as inclined as the New York Times is to call his recent performance in telling reporters that he would not air his negative ad about Mr. Romney (and then showing them the ad he wouldn’t air) “remarkable,” unless it’s in his savvy deployment of paralipsis / occultatio / praeteritio by proxy.

A word of warning to anyone in the media: the discussion about the most fitting term for Huckabee’s action just might make your head explode.

Prof. Edwards also has two adorable cats, one of which is appropriately named after a rhetorical device [I assume it's because of the colors].