Some notes on Lakoff's framing

[ngant17]

Some notes on Lakoff's framing, from Florida.

As I recently stated on a forum in the Dem. Underground, there are now 2 influential linguists-cum-political activists on the US left: George Lakoff of UCLA/Berkely (more or less the DNC's official advisor) and Noam Chomsky (the well-known anarcho-syndicalist and writer who is a professor of linguistics at MIT in Cambridge, MA).

In that context, Jeffery Feldman in his notes on Lakoff's framing, he writes that a linguist is a strategic thinker primarily concerned with words.

Comment from the Jan. DFA meetup in Orlando: "Just as many of us folks that live in the "reality-based" community, you've fallen into the trap that the vast majority of Americans, when presented with the facts about something, will "see the light" and vote with us."

My responses:

1. Granted my problem as a WASP is perhaps one of intelligence and the inability to condescend to lower levels of my fellow WASPs, to speak in the language of their lower "thought-frequencies". I coin the word, "lower thought-frequency", to describe the thinking of a vast group of white people in the US who can not think critically or independently for themselves. They need guidance or political leaders to develop their thinking process. They flock to the Republicans, apparently, because nature abhors the vacuum in their minds. The Rethugs supply them with the air to fill their heads and make it complete. That's the Bush approach and that's how I am understanding Lakoff's "framing".

Therefore, my impression is that Lakoff's framing is about this ability to condescend to the groups of WASPs with the 'lower thought-frequencies'. To supply the "head" with some "air". I wouldn't want to use ignorant or stupid to describe their thinking, for example, a dog has less processing-power in its brain but it isn't really stupid on a biological level, it is quite intelligent, it has natural instincts and qualities which are superior to humans who have a bigger brain. So I think we need not call someone a 'stupid Republican' even though it almost seems self-evident at times. However, when I first heard of Lakoff's "framing", I immediately thought of Pavlov's dogs. Manipulation. Indoctrination. Something out of Orwell's book, "1984".

2. Again, as I stated in the first DFA meetup post, there was a super-intelligent African-American lady (I regret not speaking to her after the meet-up, I left in a hurry, unfortunately), what she said was of paramount importance, that black people can not be addressed from the perspective of Lakoff's framing, they have several centuries of collective oppression and racism that has already 'framed' their thought-processes sufficiently to make them immune from the condescending process this is implied in "framing".

I believe most African-Americans can inherently understand the class-struggle, even if they have not read 4 or 5 volumes of Das Kapital or even Marx's Communist Manifesto, the latter of which does a marvelous job of "framing" the class-struggle for the masses.

In this respect, African-Americans have a superior instinct and qualities even if they do not necessarily have any bigger brains than the average WASP.

A case in point. Dem. Senator Barck Obama's recent Chicago victory. An African-American, he won in the biggest landslide in Illinois history. 70% of the vote, squashing the ultra-right black commentator, a darling of the Republican elite, Mr. Alan Keyes, a man who was rushed in from Maryland in a frantic bid to challenge Obama's campaign. That was the best they could offer.

Obama won the white vote, even in Repug suburbs like DuPage County.

He had substantial support from the Latino communities, labor, peace groups, basically every progressive group in Chicago.

Obama had denounced the Iraq war in stronger words than Dean. I would guess that everything he said in the campaign had little to do with framing. Obama in fact had very little support from the local Dem machine in Chicago. It was grass-roots, real democracy at work. The way it's supposed to work in theory.

Did framing work here? I would like someone to explain how it worked in Chicago with Obama, if that's true. MORAL: Framing is not needed when there is a clear momentum of support. The Republican strategies in places like Chicago melt as quickly as a snowball in hell.

3. To conclude, I would think that framing is not the only variable at work in the elections. In one aspect, computers are controlling the vote-machines, and the software is the soul of the computer. Whoever controls the 'soul' controls the rest of the body. I suspect that Chicago was one of the few places where the Repugs could not control the votes, it's pretty much a Democratic machine that controls the election board, the Repugs couldn't cheat there and it must have been a contributing factor in why they lost bigtime.

Until we can be sure the voting process is relatively accurate and honest, I won't be convinced that framing is effective as it is in theory. Framing is a kind of manipulation of people's minds, the minds of WASPs, I should say, just as computers are being used to manipulate the counting of votes. I can play with the framing concept for my intellectual amusement, but I don't care the be manipulated like I'm a passive consumer watching an endless stream of commercials on TV.

The results of Chicago and Sen. Obama's victory tends to suggest that real progress can be made not just by "framing" ourselves, but by applying ourselves, as WASPS, poor and rich alike, to work within the African-American and Latino communities to defeat the Rethugs permanently.

From a linguistic standpoint, shouldn't the victory by Sen. Barack Obama tell us that we need to be rapping with our "frames"? Or perhaps "framing" with our rapping? And since I live in Florida, where you are hearing Spanish more and more, should I start "framing" in colloquial Spanish, with Mexican immigrants, Puerto Ricans, Cuban-Americans and within the Haitian Creole language? That's another universe or two that needs to be exploited. Why should we limit "framing" to the English language in Florida? Let's don't let the Rethugs get the jump on us next time. I won't be happy until they've been stomped and flattened like a cockroach.