[Peace-discuss] Framing Obama

[C. G. Estabrook]

In the absence of an accurate analysis, the best will in the world can do the right thing only by accident. If I give first aid for drowning to someone suffering from burns, I probably won't be much help.  The goal of the brief news summaries that I've offered the AWARE meeting for the past half-dozen years has been to understand how and why the massive killing that we Americans have perpetrated has come about, in order to counter it.  Some effort toward that goal has seemed necessary because we all of us hear about the world through the filter of a huge industry devoted purposely to misrepresenting crucial political matters.

For the past two years or so one important question has been the real position of Barack Obama. Was he in fact an anti-war candidate?  The answer is now obvious, as he calls for an expanded military, more US and NATO troops for Afghanistan, and attacks on Pakistan, but it hasn't always been so.  Many good-hearted peace people, hoping against hope (to paraphrase the apostle), believed that he might become ‘the father of peace for many nations’ ... but he adopted only the motif.

Properly descrying the nature of the Obama campaign -- and more broadly the policy of the Democrats -- has been a crucial question for the peace movement. Getting it wrong meant co-option and ineffectiveness.  That would of course be neither new nor an accident.  In at least eight US presidential elections in the last hundred years, a current or pending war was an issue; in practically every case, beginning with Wilson in 1916, the electorate has not voted for war but got it anyway, owing to the misrepresentations (to put no finer point on it) of the "peace candidate."  

Fool me once, shame on you: fool me regularly every four years, and we need a more accurate analysis.  So the factual nature of the Obama campaign would seem to be a paramount concern in AWARE's consideration of the news. But Mort's primary objection to how it's been done seems not to have been to the accuracy of what I've said about Obama -- under the present meeting arrangement, there's time for such objections -- but to its "framing." 

Mort said when asked that he meant "framing" in George Lakoff's sense, and I offered a rather summary judgment of Lakoff's work ("Lakoff is an ass") that perhaps deserves elaboration.  

Lakoff is on the faculty at Berkeley and the founder of a purportedly progressive think-tank, the Rockridge Institute.  He began his career in linguistics as a student of Chomsky but became a severe critic.  (Chomsky's view is that Lakoff has "virtually no comprehension of the work he is discussing.")  

Lakoff makes great claims for metaphor as the nature of human thought.  (Of course, as the poet says, a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a metaphor?) In regard to politics, he argues that the differences in opinion between liberals and conservatives (those seem the only choices available) depend on different metaphors about the relationship to the state -- a strict-father model versus a nurturant-parent model. (His scheme seems to me a brutally reductionist form of what the late Christopher Lasch did much better a generation ago. I knew Kit Lasch; Kit Lasch was a friend of mine: Lakoff is no Kit Lasch.) 

Central to Lakoff's prescription for what he says is a liberal politics is proper "framing," a notion introduced into social science discussions from anthropology by Erving Goffman a generation ago. But Lakoff typically vulgarizes it. A critic, the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, says Lakoff has reduced framing to "faith in the power of euphemism":  he says that Lakoff's view is just "cognitive relativism, in which mathematics, science, and philosophy are beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality".  

Lakoff has simply given a blustering academic veneer to the one undoubted cultural contribution (so to speak) of the American 20th century: the advertising business.  (See the current TV production "Mad Men.") As the late Australian social scientist Alex Carey wrote, "The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." 

Success in politics, says Lakoff, is a matter of how politicians and policies are framed, in the sense of what metaphorical context they're placed in, rather than an attempt "to characterize the nature of reality." To borrow a phrase, he advises us to put lipstick on a pig.  

Mort can't mean this, but by quoting Lakoff in his demand for a different framing of the news, he appears to want to mobilize the power of euphemism on Obama's behalf;  I prefer to try to present an accurate analysis -- naturally with the additions and corrections provided by the other members of AWARE.  

Regards, CGE

PS--On the practical matter of how to conduct the news segment at AWARE meetings, I'm delighted with the idea of its consisting of a fifteen-minute period devoted to a general discussion of the significance of the week's news -- to which all contribute as the spirit moves them.   

PPS--I'm out of town & won't be at Sunday's meeting. I'll be interested in hearing how the new format goes.