Don't Think of an Elephant

http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Think-Elephant-Debate-The-Progressives/dp/1931498717

I finished the subject George Lakoff book (pamphlet?) titled. The book is a NYT bestseller, with a foreword by Howard Dean, and raved about by the left as "This is how to start winning elections again". The book can be summarized by "There are two kinds of people, those that make ridiculous oversimplifications in classification, and those who don't". Well, joking, but only a little.

George claims that there are two models of families: "The Strict Father Model" ... life is hard (competitive), kids are born (“bad”), children need discipline, and adults need self discipline. Hard work, the nuclear family is the core, fathers are important, individuals have to do a lot, they ought to have power, right living etc should be rewarded, there is a God, he has an agenda, if you don’t follow his agenda (rules) there are consequences. (this is was formerly known as "the real world") 

The other model is “The nurturing parent model” … we are all born good, the world needs some work but there is no reason it really needs to be hard / competitive, if we just care and love each other, are “responsible” (which apparently mostly means paying a lot of taxes) things will be fine. No real need for discipline, fathers aren’t that important -- certainly not as any kind of a “head of the family”, there may be a God, but if there is he has no rules other than love and group-hug.

There is really only one other big picture claim in the book, and that is that the only way that people can think about things is by “framing”. Simple words "activate a frame", and then at least most of us are “stuck in the frame”. Republicans have been successful lately because they “control the media”, and they are really good at this framing. George is going to clue in the liberals, and once he does, the poor “strict father” conservatives are toast! He uses the term “progressives” often.

One of his favorite Republican frames is “tax relief” – evil because it makes it sound like a good thing (“relief”), and also diabolical because it is a “strategic agenda” because it enables a whole raft of other Republican strategies including the dismantling of ALL social programs and destruction of the known universe, since there will be no money for ANY of the good stuff. He may not have looked at the Bush budget which includes 1.6 TRILLION in social security, medicare, and sundry other social programs out of a 2.6 trillion budget, but looking at this kind of boring stuff likely isn’t what the “nurture types” focus on. Oh, yes, only the “progressives” (I can’t help myself from using that, it must be what he means by framing!) look at facts and discuss programs "honestly". 

That may seem kind of odd on the surface, since the “strict fathers” believe in rules and the world being competitive, one could jump to the false conclusion that they might do odd things like look at both sides, facts, and maybe even read the other sides pamphlets, but that would have to be wrong, so I must be “out of frame”!

Other nasty frames include “Partial Birth Abortion”, “War on Terror”, “Defense of Marriage”, “No Child Left Behind”. I’m not sure where George has been, but he must have missed “Woman’s right to choose / control their bodies”, “Lockbox”, "Risky Privatization Scheme”, “It’s about the CHILDREN!”, and even failed to think of “Progressive” as a frame. It could be that since he only listens to NPR, his horizons are limited. 

This isn’t in fact a joke, a lot of his “breakthrough in thought” here arises because some conservative that he knew mentioned James Dobson, and George had never heard of him because he wasn’t on Public radio and that is all George listens to. The revelation that Dobson existed and millions of people listened to him led George on this path of discovery … although one wonders if his understanding of “conservative thought” might be missing a couple thousand years of writing, it is important to start somewhere.

One of the other sad things for liberals is that conservatives have “a huge head start”, since they deviously fund “think tanks” like the Heritage foundation, and have been spending “billions” on their ideas and control of the media, while the penniless liberals are at a HUGE disadvantage (George Soros is one of the guys that recommends the book). The depths of their poverty are so great that one is almost driven to send them a donation!

George is a professor at Berkley, I’m wondering if there are any other liberals on the faculty there or at potentially one or two other US institutions of higher education that he could contact to figure out what the liberal answer to the “think tank” is? Last I checked, UW Madison, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, UofMN, … and maybe a few hundred other institutions were spots where potentially an intellectual liberal could hang out? 

I was forced to break out in laughter that a guy that IS actually an intelligent guy (I’ve read his book “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things”, and he knows what he is doing on classification and language), could be so blind as to not understand that the biggest reason that conservatives have been forced to fund “think tanks” is because the many billions being spent on public universities over the past over 50 years have funded just the kind of idea generation on the left that he abhors on the right.

This is getting too long for a blog entry, so I’ll just desist. There are many further revelations in this book of the operation of the liberal mind, but the biggest thought that I’m left with is that they will clutch onto literally any straw rather than face the fact that they may have a lot of BAD IDEAS in a post-communist, globalized world, and their ideas are certainly not the ONLY ideas -- although they REALLY want to stamp out any ideas except their own! 

They know all about framing -- you have to be pretty good at it to name a rigid ideology of totalitarian state control as "liberal" or "progressive"!