Photo from The Boston Globe & Associated Press
Argumentation as the Rhetoric of Agency: Bridging the Historical Gap
By Robert Balla
This May marks the 42nd anniversary of the 1970 May 4th tragedy at Kent State University. It was on that Spring day that Ohio National Guard troops under orders from Governor James A. Rhodes opened fire on Vietnam War protesters and onlookers on the campus of Kent State University. The results were: four college students murdered, nine others suffered permanent injuries ranging from a bullet through the wrist to life-long paralysis, and zero arrests or courts martial. As a teacher of first-year composition at the University of Akron (whose James A. Rhodes Arena, The JAR, is named after the former governor) which is only 13 miles away from Kent State, and as an alumnus of Kent State University, and as proud American who believes that our greatest freedom is our freedom to peaceably assemble to question and challenge our government, I am often stunned by my students’ lack of knowledge of recent, local, historical events like the massacre at Kent State. Some of them have heard of the shootings in a vague sense. Many have not. Even though the events at Kent State took place barely forty years ago, probably 20 years before most of my students were born, we find ourselves in a similar time in political and social history, and, unfortunately, the tragedy and alarm of May 4th has slipped from our cultural memory.
Recent world wide events like the Arab Spring, revolutions in Libya, and an ongoing war in Afghanistan may seem a world away to college students, but here, at home, in downtowns and on college campuses, we see the Occupy Movement as an all too clear reminder that we do not live in a perfect world or a perfect nation. However, many of my students fail to see the connections between social forces like Occupy, the Arab Spring, and themselves. They lack a sense of agency, the ability and power to affect their world, to enact real and meaningful change. As citizens in a democracy, possibly the greatest democracy ever conceived, it is our duty to exercise our agency. However, citizens cannot exercise their agency if they are not aware that they have it or if they don’t know how. It is here that American universities and colleges fail in their primary mission to create and educate CITIZENS, not future employees, who are equipped with the knowledge and means to be socially and civically active members of our democracy.
It is to this end that in my classes I, in effort to portray the rhetoric of argumentation as the rhetoric of agency and change, seek to link current social, economic, and political forces and movements to their historical analogues. If current students see their current situations as analogous to historical ones, and then understand that written and spoken rhetoric has the power to alter the world, they will then adopt a more value leaden and meaningful relationship with democracy, citizenship, argumentation, and writing in general. I endeavor to empower students as individuals with clear, strong voices. They need to know that they are more than just products of the education system; that in fact education serves to empower them to become autonomous and responsible. To this end I have used the play May 4th Voices, scripted by David Hassler, as the historical touchstone for my students to which I link the current wars in the Middle East and domestic social justice campaigns such as the Occupy Movement.
David Hassler, director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, has created an engaging theatrical retelling of the stories and personal narratives collected by Kent State’s Oral History Project which provides access to oral history accounts pertaining to the May 4th shootings and their aftermath. The sources that Hassler uses from the Oral History Project are actual first-person narratives collected from people who were on campus or otherwise directly affected by the events: faculty, staff, students, Kent citizens, National Guardsmen, police, and others. While the play’s narrative is admittedly edited and rearranged, it retains the feeling and authenticity of real first-hand accounts needed to make the play powerful. It is this authenticity that has prompted me to adopt the DVD recording of the debut performance accompanied by the script for my argumentation classes an attempt to get my students to finally experience the power, emotion, and agency that can only come from finely crafted personal narrative. It is in these first-hand source accounts that the self and the text become one, and it is from this union that the power of the narrative stems. It is in the written self, the self of experience, of pain, and of joy that we find a personal connection, we find ourselves, and we begin to understand who we are and how we live in the world.
The play is organized into nine scenes which follow the events and aftermath of the shooting. The first scene establishes the main voices in the play. The central narrator is Maj Ragain who was a Professor of Chemistry at KSU and who witnessed the shootings in person. Ragain’s lines are taken verbatim from his own poetry, journals, and audio recordings of interviews conducted in the 1970s. The other main voices in the play belong to various KSU students, several guardsmen, townspeople (adult, a high school student, and a nine year-old girl), a Vietnam Veteran, and other faculty members. While these characters are never identified by name in the play (the names used below are simply the names of the actors reading the parts), their narratives clearly establish their roles.
The subsequent scenes follow the actual events as told by the various voices. The narratives begin on Friday, May 1st with the increasing outrage over the expansion of the war into Cambodia and the growing unrest in Kent. We hear from average students, protesters, and the unprepared and incredibly young guardsmen. The tensions build to the night of May 3rd when the scene of the riot in Kent is narrated by several guardsmen who abuse the protesters. One recounts an encounter where “A fella down from me put a bayonet to a man’s nose and said, ‘I know your face, but you don’t know mine. If I ever see you again, this is gonna go in your head.’ I think the man urinated himself right there on the spot.” The brutality of a guardsman and the victim’s helplessness are shown when a soldier closes Scene 3 with, “He had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. He was up against the wall with his hands up, and one of our guys ran his bayonet through his hand, pinned his hand right against the building.”
When my class gets to this point in the text/video my class is often stunned by the brutality of it. They may gasp, or they may sit in silence, but they may not internalize the experience. This is where I pause the historical and begin the current. I bring up on the over head multi-media projector recent videos of Occupy demonstrations on Wall Street where unarmed students at Berkley are assaulted by riot gear clad police and the now infamous footage of UC Davis students being pepper sprayed for sitting on a sidewalk. While none of the student protesters have been killed, the similarities are striking, and my students do see this.
The actual shooting took only 13 seconds, and the scenes four and five of May 4th Voices, which chronicle the actual shooting, are appropriately short. They depict the terror and uncertainty in the minds of those participating and observing. It is here that some of the guardsmen express their confusion. One remarks, “God, someone else is shooting. Did I miss an order? I’m gonna do this… I assumed that when others were firing, they were firing for a reason,” while students walking across the commons are aghast at the “tremendous amounts of blood.”
The remaining scenes deal with the immediate and short term effects and repercussions of that bloody day. Hassler gives us snippets of violent FBI interrogations and devastated families. We hear from protestors running for their lives and from frightened students desperately looking for friends and loved ones. The residents of Kent abandon their homes and university students flee to theirs in Cleveland and Akron. The animosity and hatred of the following weeks and month are summed up when the state prosecutor trying the guardsmen says to the Grand Jury, “They should’ve shot all the troublemakers.” I conclude this section of my lesson with a final internet video. This one is three minutes powerfully silent footage of UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi as she walks past hundreds of seated, silent students in a parking lot after the pepper spray incident. Watching this, my students are just as quiet.
The personal narrative, when presented in combined oral and visual form, is an incredibly powerful vehicle for social change. This is what Hassler’s script does incredibly well. The narratives are well adapted to the stage, and Hassler interweaves them in a unique and effective way. The play is staged without scenery or props, and there are only limited sound effects from off stage. This allows for the first-hand personal narratives to be the center of the production. The interplay between the voices is most effective in scene 5 when the bullets begin to fly. We hear alternately from guardsmen, students, and protestors who simply step forward to deliver their lines directly to the audience:
John: I didn’t have my glasses on. I couldn’t see through my gas mask.
Alex: I saw people hitting the dirt, so I hit the dirt thinking, “Okay, okay.”
Brandon: The men in front of me were aiming their rifles.
Tessa: The bullets whizzed past my ears.
John: God, someone else is shooting. Did I miss an order?
The immediacy of Hassler’s presentation allows the audience to focus, listen, and understand the complexity of the situation. Combining the DVD of the play with the written script affords my students ample opportunity to internalize the narratives. The unique staging and creative use of narrative casts these almost forgotten events into a new light. Bridging the gap to the present with the viral videos of recent Occupy events establishes the connections between the historical events, my modern students, and relevant social issues that will drive critical inquiry, foster a sense of agency, and empower a new classroom full of citizens. If my students can see this in the writing of others, and if they understand the power of words, and if I can equip them with the requisite tools, then they too can become agents of change.
