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The emphasis on the role of the small donor in
large fund-raising campaigns to aid rescue workers and other victims of
the September 11th attacks fosters the impression of a culture in which
the individual's social and economic contributions are not structured primarily
by class differentiation. This emphasis is even taken to children
with the "Dollars to Afghanistan" program from the Whitehouse that similarly
appeals to young Americans' collective rather than class identities.
Similarly, the State Department sponsored "Rewards
for Justice" site uses many of the tropes of the disaster relief donation
site by valuing the contributions of the individual to the project of national
surveillance. Groups of potential patriotic informants are oriented
along the right margin in ways that emphasize American social and spatial
mobility, such as "commuter" or "frequent traveler." Unlike other
web pages from the State Department, students clearly saw themselves as
part of the target audience.
As this essay has argued, making students conscious
of rhetorical appeals to class identities encourages greater participation
in public discourse. After September 11th, official rhetoric that
presupposes our middle class identities may also ultimately limit the effectiveness
of the presentation of the American argument for world prosecution of terrorism
abroad. The naive presentation our own society as uniformly "middle
class" and the societies of the Islamic world as inevitably divided between
rich and poor could make our rhetoric significantly less effective.
The other essays on nation, race,
and gender similarly argue for a careful consideration
of the ideological ramifications of political speeches, public websites,
and printed pamphlets.
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