Mark Danner, a professor of journalism and politics at UC Berkeley and Bard College, in his article, “Words in a Time of War”, argues the importance of rhetorical principles in the context of war and chaos. Danner conceptualized the idea that “power has made reality its bitch” (5), illustrating the triumph of creating your own reality through eloquence. In hindsight, these claims were practically supported by Danner’s interpretation of the Afghanistan War, in response to the events on 9/11. These incidents that led to the American invasion was set forth by a single oddity in the spectrum of rhetorical expertise, and that is “the television set, which reproduced and conveyed that astonishing picture, creating both a recruiting poster for jihad and an image of humiliation to ‘dirty the face of imperial power’” (9). In this instance, the American “unipolar moment” has brought the imperial attitude to cause violence and destruction over Afghanistan and Islamic states, in consolidation from a single viable rhetorical platform (10-13). Conclusively, Danner realizes the adversity of using rhetoric to create power, and consequently to ratify anyone’s reality of the circumstance; however, he acknowledges the fact that we can also inherently use rhetoric to challenge these malevolent ideas and advocate our own conceptualization against it.
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