Bill Hicks and the Rhetoric of Diet and Exercise

I know. My blog title makes it sound like I’m going to address diet and exercise from the perspective of Bill Hicks’ rhetoric. I’m not. It’s just a title for last week’s presentations.

Jilllian did a great job with relaying the rhetoric of Bill Hicks. (Personally, I had never heard of him.) Jillian said that Hicks considered himself “a lone voice of reason in a consumer driven wilderness.” Hicks said that it’s the “responsibility of the intellectual to expose lies.” I thought rhetoric from this perspective went along with many of the things we have read this semester. That rhetoric is a means to understanding and communicating truth. The idea that it is the responsibility of the rhetorician, as the intellectual and as the one who possess language (the means and container of interaction and knowledge), to become that “mediator of change” that I think Bitzer talked about. Hicks seemed to hold these same ideas. That it was his responsibility to expose the lies of politics, commercialism, etc.

Annie’s presentation was also very interesting. It’s amazing the great lengths in advertising people will go to to sell their product—in this case, their scam. As Alden mentioned in her blog, the best way to healthy living is healthy eating and healthy exercise. These fad diets grip culture with their “fast and easy” gimmicks that are highly unhealthy means to try to achieve a certain body type. I thought Annie’s presentation really exposed the lies of these scams.