This essay reexamines George W. Bush’s post-9/11 rhetoric of escalation for the way it articulated a war of totality with a nationalist sentiment of giddy victimage. My analysis pivots around a speech Mr. Bush delivered in the fall of 2005 at Norfolk Naval Base. Steeped in figures of amplification, the speech is a dramatic exemplar of Mr. Bush’s habit of articulating totality with pleasure. His performance conjoined the “whatever-it-takes” commitment of the nation’s socioeconomic and human resources with a dark strain of civic pathos. I thus argue that the challenge for critics of public discourse is figuring out how to disentangle the threads of sorrow and giddiness that produce rhetorics of escalation and wars of totality. This in turn requires grappling with the sensation of ecstatic victimage that dwells in the bosom of national trauma.
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