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You are framed ! According to George Lakoff in Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, we all are. "Framing is normal. Every sentence we say is framed in some way." So, is there a problem? George thinks there is: currently (only temporary, he hopes), conser-vative frames, mind frames that is, are (unfortunately, he considers) more effective than progressive. If you didn’t read George yourself, you could be uneducated on the subject (I was): it is not the content in a frame which is critical but the frame itself. Listen to George: "To be accepted, the truth must fit people’s frames. If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off." And we are to trust him, he is a cognitive scientist and linguist, he knows what he is evidencing: he believes that I am (and you are, for that matter) an average American idiot who is in need of mind frames supplied by the political thinkers of the progressive movement. So, why did I read the book? |
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Bill did it to me. I enjoyed reading Bill O’Reilly’s Culture Warrior, and there he elaborates George’s "elephant" secular progressivism on quite a few pages. It couldn’t be that ugly, I thought, Bill is exaggerating it ("We are watchdogs, not lapdogs", Bill says for The Factor on the Fox Newschannel). So I bought the "elephant" book to find out how I am framed and how George would like me to be framed. Here it is, according to George:
There are two main frames comprising everything, from your morning bathroom visit to star wars: "strict father", propagated by those demonic conservatives (and rather well, by the way), and "nurturant parent", propagandized (not enough) by these angelic progressives. George describes the frames in detail (thank you, George), and it occurred to me that title "nurturant person" would be more appropriate (so that George may include his beloved homosexuals). George knows, he is a cognitive scientist (the fact repeatedly asserted in the "elephant" book), that you are at least partially nurturant, he just wants to help you with nurturant framing which will liberate you from so many facts in life - they will bounce off. You may wander what a reward is waiting for you beyond the nurturant horizon until George tells you: "If you work hard; play by the rules; and serve your family, community, and nation, then the nation should provide a decent standard of living, as well as freedom, security, and opportunity... It is the job of government to promote and, if possible, provide ...greater fulfillment in life..." Here we go: nurturant socialism. George’s nurturant parent is after the distribution of goods, not their production. Suddenly you realize that "reach-poor" diploid in the "elephant" book rivals the "strict-nurturant". George acknowledges the extraordinary wealth accumulated by the American nation, he is a cognitive scientist, and he has ideas how to distribute it - he is a smart progressive, not like some other progressives who don’t know how to frame. Well, George, did you ask yourself, you are a cognitive scientist, who will produce the goods and why, the goods to be nurturably distributed? Remember Soviet Union?
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