Okay, I take it all back. I love the New Republic, with its witty reviews of unusual books and popular television shows and its sanguine attitude about the economy and the potential for Democrats to retake not only Congress but the nation. In the last issue (August 5 & 12, 2002 – cover = “The Emerging Democratic Majority”), Jeffrey Rosen writes a very cogent and convincing piece about the relationship between the failure of CBS’s “First Monday” and ABC’s “The Court” television shows and the collapse of our ability to understand the Supreme Court and American litigation and justice. Fascinating. But more interestingly for me was his comment about Aristotle’s enthymemes, which are kind of strange codes that live in our heads defining our daily moments.
Rosen explains that Richard Sherwin, the writer of When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line Between Law and Popular Culture, defines enthymemes as “the common constructs we carry around in our heads … the recurrent scripts and simplified worlds, the familiar stories and scenarios, the popular character types and plot lines … that serve as the building blocks of reality making.” This could also explain a complex of cultural phenomena, including national mythologies, racial stereotypes, and the division of genders into two (un)equal parts. I believe that Aristotle was a slave-owner.