There is a surprising opening move in an old article by Kenneth Burke where he criticized the book reviews people were writing about a new English translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf. No, the reviewers weren't praising the book, they were slamming it, Burke said. But it was how they were doing it that was the problem. They were dropping a few true but easy criticisms and leaving readers no smarter at the end than they were at the start. He called this vandalism--essentially high-class graffiti--and said that it "[contributes] more to our gratification than to our enlightenment."

For Burke, it's lazy just to tag even this vile book with a few critical slogans and move on. Sure, the book is racist, for example, but spraying that word in large letters across the front of it doesn't help us figure out how that racism worked so thoroughly as to lead to millions of deaths. There is a mechanism, a vile philosophy, a set of practical political tools, a psychological foundation of human desires and weaknesses all at work here, a body of slogans and imagery, etc., and the accurate word racism does not illuminate this complexity. The writer pats himself on the back; the ready applauds; but the brain shuts down.

The chance for understanding requires specificity. When we read a blog post or an editorial or a tweet, the phrases may turn essentially to graffiti--simple phrases repeated in frustration or outrage or self-assurance rather than the specificity of the subject starting to unfold. It's a question we should be in the habit of asking ourselves: when so-and-so announcer or columnist or blogger gets on a soapbox about this or that topic, are we smarter at the end or have we mainly been tagged with graffiti?

And here is the Burke paragraph.