The rhetoric of September 10 and September 11

Colleges have reconvened for the fall semester. As always, it is an exciting time for higher education. The stakes are exceptionally high as demographic challenges and ideological battles collide to make collegiate instruction daunting. We are rapidly approaching an epideictic and deliberative collision of competing rhetorical worlds on September 10 and September 11. The two dates contain highly significant historical events, and the highly charged rhetoric surrounding them is distinct but not unrelated.

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On September 10, colleges and universities will observe the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Kirk was assassinated on a Utah college campus while debating members of the campus community. Kirk was embroiled in an escalating ideological debate about how higher education changes the American mindset and presses political arguments that are at least debatable. His assassination was a high mark of incivility. The alleged shooter said that he could no longer reason with Kirk’s public arguments. Almost all campuses struggled with how to respond. There is an evident implicit and often explicit bias against Kirk’s Christian and political viewpoints at most campuses. Universities are loathe to mourn his death, but they know that assassination is grossly uncivil. Colleges and universities will struggle to meet this date and the epideictic rhetoric it requires. Universities are likely to quietly urge as small a response as possible to an obvious hateful crime against the very nature of free inquiry they claim to champion. Kirk embodies an awkward reality too often true on college campuses: conservative viewpoints are not welcome to the point of radical political exclusion and violence.

The next day, on September 11, the campuses will face another epideictic problem. It will be the 25th anniversary of one of the most significant political crimes of this century, often referred to as a number: 9/11. It is also a confusing educational marker because most students were born after September 11, 2001, and they must rely upon professors and teachers to relay ‘what happened.’ The memory of 9/11 is complicated. Acknowledging its radical religious premises alongside political ideology has no comfortable avenue of discussion. The awkward reality is that a sect of Islamic ideology nurtured by Osama Bin Laden as an outcast from Saudi Arabia hijacked four domestic airliners and deliberately crashed two into both towers of the World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth that was overwhelmed by heroic passengers like Todd Beamer before crashing into a rural area of Pennsylvania. We can barely recount the agency and purpose of the act 25 years later because the government of Iran, in the form of radical Shia supremacism, chants every day in their state-run mosques at Tehran, “Death to America!” That rhetorical world has not fallen away, and our own political sphere entertains the absurd notion that America deserved those 3,000 deaths and more. September 11 produced a war on terror rhetorically constructed to deflect the underlying religious motives of the 9/11 attacks and yielded massive military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. To avoid a 20th anniversary in Afghanistan, our troops were abruptly withdrawn in August of 2021, and now women live in unspeakable subjugation to an archaic, outrageous sectarian branch of Islam practiced by the Taliban. The second prong of the war is held to be a disgraceful failure despite the overwhelming reality recounted by Obama National Security Advisor Samantha Power that Saddam Hussein used weapons of mass destruction to kill thousands of Muslims in Iraq. Our academic renderings now require that we “admit” — falsely — that Saddam ‘never’ had WMD.

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The collegiate interpretation of both of these dates, September 10 and September 11, is hopelessly absurd. It is nearly impossible for campuses to articulate a reasonable response to either event. Both events are already shrouded in ideological mystique that almost no one can actually defend: ‘Kirk and America both got what they deserved on September 10 and September 11.’ We know those ideas are not only ‘out there,’ but are also politically viable. Until we can stand at the epideictic pulpits of our nation and admit that neither Kirk nor America deserved these brutalizations, we will struggle to create moral educational coherence. The time for bravery like that shown by Charlie Kirk and Todd Beamer is now.

Dr. Ben Voth is professor of rhetoric and director of debate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of several academic books regarding political communication, presidential rhetoric, and genocide.

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