Also Ran

For this post I thought I'd take a look at something different. It comes from a blog called Fanatical Apathy run by comedian Adam Felber. Specifically, I'm looking at his Concession Speech post which can be found at www.felbers.net/mt/archives/2004_11.html . Analyzing a speech that was never actually given by a fictional candidate is a somewhat difficult prospect. When the fact that Felber tends to write in a satirical manner doesn't necessarily make it easier. I think the best way to do this is to relate it to the reading by showing how this speech fits Bitzer's criteria for a rhetorical situation. I would think that the very existence of this speech as an entity originated online and continually presented as it was originally puts it into the context of the history of rhetoric that was briefly descibed in the purple text.
Bitzer's three constituents of the rhetorical situation are exigence, audience, and constraints. The exigence present here would seem to be the re-election of President Bush. If that is the case, then the burden for rheotric is not satisfied because that is not something which can be reasonably expected to be changed. Bitzer points out that the exigences can be many, and the one that matters here is the the failure of the democratic party as opposed to the victory of the President. That is the situation that Felber is addressing and the one that can be changed in the future. The property of audience is also present. It can be hard to gauge whether audience is capable of the degree of action Bitzer requires based on only the speaker's words. Considering that this is a blog that attarcts people already inclined to hear what Felber has to say, giving the speech audience is something of a no-brainer. For further eveidence I would point out that the speech did in fact spur some action on the part of his audience. Many of the initial readers, including myself, e-mailed the speech to others who don't regularly frequent the site. Not a life altering act, but an act nonetheless. The constraints present are the outcome of the election itself and the statistics to make up the "inartistic proofs," and the satirical style that Felber writes with as the "artistic proof." This property would seem key to allowing a piece such as this to be understood ina rhetorical way,and Bitzer does allow for the fictive to become rhetorical in the proper circumstance as a rhetorical response.