ABSTRACT
This bit of cultural reportage blends political and social critique to form a bitter joke of the sort circulated so often on the Internet. Relatively few places, it would seem (Canada, Greenland, Central America, Australia, New Zealand, and assorted small islands) are exempt from this equal-opportunity offender. The anonymous rhetor here operates as an ideological critic, one who specifies (or in this case, clearly implies) the political standard (Chapter 2) by which the critic believes rhetorical acts and artifacts should be judged. Like feminism (Chapter 13), other forms of ideological criticism serve as lenses through which critics focus not only on the rhetorical strategies of a particular artifact, but on its social and political goals. Thus, they focus on the ends as well as the means of rhetoric, and subject those ends to judgment. In this sense, ideological critics merely make explicit what other rhetorical critics do more implicitly, often without being aware they are doing it. In this chapter, we will briefly discuss three types of ideological critique: deconstructionist, Marxist, and postcolonial criticism.
