Framed

Simplistic

You don't even have to watch the video; just scanning the title of the link on the CNN homepage tells you everything you need to know about this content-free story.

'08 Vote Could Be Patriotism vs. Hope

Thank you, CNN, for framing the myriad issues of policy and personality encompassed in the Obaama/McCain race into one simplistic sound bite.

No one who has watched the mainstream media's coverage of recent American elections will be surprised to see that CNN has adopted the GOP's characterization of the candidates.  If McCain is the candidate of "patriotism," then Obama is . . . not.  Republicans have made much hay by impugning the patriotism of Democratic politicians from Mike Dukakis (who was insufficiently protective of the American flag) to Bill Clinton (who was labeled a draft dodger) to John Kerry (who "looked French") to Barack Obama (who doesn't wear flag pins enough).

What of hope?  Hope is a paler, less distinct emotion than patriotism.  Patriotism encompasses hope far more easily than hope encompasses patriotism.  It will be easier, within this framing, for McCain to  persuade voters that he's  the candidate of both "hope" and "patriotism" than it will be for Obama to do the same.

Still, I don't think this type of analysis is due to manipulation by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.  I think it's simply intellectual laziness by the media, a fear of challenging their audience to think harder than they would about the dilemma presented by choosing between "tastes great" and "less filling."  The CNN clip openly mocks Lyndon Johnson's presentation of complex, multi-faceted policy proposals: ugh, how boring.   Who wants to analyze policy proposals when what the American people really want is a simple A-vs.-B?  All the GOP has done is to capitalize on the media's pursuit of ratings by  framing the most profound and complex of choices into three-word headlines. 

Definition

Apropos of my last post about the word "liberal," BlondeSense has a great quote up today:

“....if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties.. if that is what they mean by a “liberal” then I am proud to be a liberal. “

~ John F. Kennedy

The Liberal Lifestyle as a Conservative Frame

Geoffrey Nunberg, as quoted by Eric Alterman, puts his finger on something that's bothered me for a long time:

"Just look, for example, at the way liberals are referred to in the media, even in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times," says Nunberg. "Wherever you look, the liberal label is almost exclusively reserved for middle-class whites. Phrases like 'working-class liberals,' 'Hispanic liberals' and 'black liberals' are virtually nonexistent, though 'conservative' is frequently used to describe members of all those groups. When the media are referring to members of the working class or minority groups who vote left-of-center, they invariably describe them as Democrats, with the implication that their political choices are shaped by economic self-interest or traditional party loyalty rather than by any deep commitment to liberal ideals. It's as if you can't count as a liberal unless you can afford the lifestyle. Liberalism is treated less as a political credo than as the outward expression of a particular social identity, like a predilection for granite countertops and bottled water."

I've written before about my hope that the word "liberal" can be reclaimed someday.  I had blamed Reagan for making the word so toxic that even the most stalwart candidates of the left had to run from the label if they had any hope of being elected.   But Numberg has a more sophisticated--and better--analysis.  By framing "liberals" not as an ideological group but as a subculture with somewhat rarified tastes in consumer goods, conservatives very cleverly drove a wedge down the middle of the progressive movement.  Defining the word in those terms separates the more numerous middle-class progressives from their better-heeled political brethren.

It was the old divide and conquer strategy, and it worked.  As another piece about Numberg's theories points out,  the subtitle of Numberg's new book, Talking Right, is "How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, Left-wing Freak Show."  That neat bit of phraseology, taken from the classic anti-Howard Dean ad by The Club for Growth, shows how conservatives administered a near-fatal wound to liberalism by associating it with frou-frou consumer tastes and decoupling it from, for example, a belief that every American ought to have health care.

It's easy to sneer at lattes and nose rings, but a lot harder to laugh off the notion of a living wage.

Mutilation

Here we are again at the question of whether there really are universal human rights or whether there are only culturally-normative rights:

Should African women be allowed to engage in the practice sometimes called female circumcision? Are critics of this practice, who call it female genital mutilation, justified in trying to outlaw it, or are they guilty of ignorance and cultural imperialism?

Those questions will be debated Saturday morning in Washington at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting. Representatives of international groups opposed to this procedure will be debating anthropologists with somewhat different views, including African anthropologists who have undergone the procedure themselves.

And once again, as with the issue of this go-round involves the question of whether doing horrible things to women--but not to men--is really OK just because a particular culture has been doing it for a long time.

I would be a little bit tempted to go along with the  cultural relativists  on issues like this if they didn't seem to so frequently involve disadvantaging women.  But given men's sorry track record on the treatment of the generally smaller and weaker sex, and the lack of cognate restrictions on men in the societies that cover, burn, restrict and beat women with impunity, there's no other valid way to see cutting off a woman's clitoris for anything but a barbaric act of a misogynistic and backwards culture.

In this case, the cultural relativists have already scored something of a coup vis-a-vis the New York Times, which refers to the practice of cutting off a screaming girl's clitoris with a shard of broken glass or a dull knife as "circumcision," rather than "mutilation."  In framing the issue thus, the Times suggests an equivalence between the common Western practice of slicing off the male foreskin with the what is in effect a clitorectomy.  "Castration" would be a more appropriate comparison. 

Homeland

Have I ever told you how much I despise the term "homeland"?

Before 9/11, if I encountered the word at all, it was generally in the context of the apartheid South African regime, which used it to designate the barren resource-poor zones within which the white ruling class dreamed of corralling all the blacks.

In 1951, the Bantu Authorities Act established a basis for ethnic government in African reserves, known as "homelands.'' These homelands were independent states to which each African was assigned by the government according to the record of origin (which was frequently inaccurate). All political rights, including voting, held by an African were restricted to the designated homeland. The idea was that they would be citizens of the homeland, losing their citizenship in South Africa and any right of involvement with the South African Parliament which held complete hegemony over the homelands. From 1976 to 1981, four of these homelands were created, denationalizing nine million South Africans. The homeland administrations refused the nominal independence, maintaining pressure for political rights within the country as a whole. Nevertheless, Africans living in the homelands needed passports to enter South Africa: aliens in their own country.

Like Linda Lewis, I also associate the term with Nazi propaganda:

[T]he word "homeland" conjures a kind of antediluvian primitive nationalism (tribalism) based on blood and soil, not a people united by their devotion to political ideals like liberty and free speech.

Indeed, there is something very reminiscent of Hitler's Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer! slogan about the word. It feels like a remnant of 1930's propaganda.  "Home" conjures up warm associations of belonging and of nurturing; "land" suggests something primal, something owned.  Put together, the resulting compound suggests a place that is ours in the deepest possible sense.  The word "homeland" is much more vivid than "United States," a name comprised of an abstract adjective and a politicolegal construct.  Thus an attack on "the homeland" is much more like a rape or the murder of a family member than an attack on the "United States" would be. 

And so I get agitated when I see things like this PowerPoint slide:

This slide is part of a DHS workshop presented to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in September.  The (capitalized!) word "homeland" in the first two bullet points could be replaced with "United Sates" or "U.S." without causing any grammatical difficulties.  But then the slide would lack emotional oomph--and more importantly, would potentially subject the government or the people to criticism.

Let me explain.  The "United Sates" can make mistakes.  It can fail to protect its people and it can adopt foreign policies that make terrorism more likely.  But the "Homeland" can't make a mistake.  It can't fail, and it can't be misguided.  Nothing is ever its fault.  Hence the term becomes a sheild behind which politicians hide.

It's probably politically impossible to abolish the Department of Homeland Security now.  At the very least, though, it could be--and should be--renamed.  Replace "Homeland" with "Interior," "Domestic," or "National" and the agency would lose some of its Orwellian creepiness.

48 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.  That's the news today.  The state has officially set January 8 as primary day, earlier than the January 27 date of 2004.

Framing Blackwater

Erik Prince, the CEO of Blackwater, hates it when his soldiers-for-hire are called mercenaries.  But the dictionaries I've consulted consistently define a mercenary as a professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army.  So certainly from the perspective of the Iraqis, Blackwater employees are mercenaries.

Still, Prince is sensitive about the term, poor guy, and has been known to break down sobbing whenever any of his gun-toting Iraqi-killing boys are designated by such an awful word.  He much prefers to frame them as "contractors," a benign word that calls to mind the guys who come and put a new roof on your house or build you a new garage.  Prince is so insistent on avoiding the M-word that, according to Naomi Klein (in The Shock Doctrine), he has directed lobbyists on Blackwater's behalf to ensure that any use of the term by politicians or the media is squelched.

Now it seems that the United Nations is more courageous and honest than U.S. politicians on this point:

Private security companies operate without supervision or accountability in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and represent a new form of mercenary activity, a United Nations report said on Tuesday.

*  *  *

"They are new modalities of mercenarism," it said, likening them to the notion of "irregular combatants".

I think Prince's aversion to the honest and descriptive term "mercenary" has more to do with Blackwater's domestic operations than its foreign ones.  Blackwater soldiers were dispatched to CONUS (in soldier-of-fortune-speak, the continental United States) to patrol the streets of New Orleans after Katrina.  Some reports (again, cf. Klein) say that Blackwater was there ahead of FEMA, putting its boots on the ground before it even had a contract so that it would be in a superior bargaining position vis-a-vis competitors when the time came.  I imagine that the notion that the federal government is sending a mercenary army into New Orleans would not go down very well with anyone, so the facts have to be reframed to make mercenaries look like a cross between Officer Friendly and Ralphie the Roofer.

As Richard Beeman notes:

[O]ur Constitution is neither a self-actuating nor a self-correcting document. It requires the constant attention and devotion of all citizens. There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: "A republic, if you can keep it."

In her most recent book (The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot), Naomi Wolf wonders what would happen if there was a natural disaster, a terrorist attack or civil unrest on American soil and the President sent in the National Guard "backed" by Blackwater mercenaries. 

My answer would be: at that point, we will have ceased to keep Mr. Franklin's republic.  In 1789, the framers of the constitution had just fought a war against an enemy that employed Hessian mercenaries to fight on its side.  They would no doubt be horrified by the idea that such mercenaries would later be deployed to "keep order" in America.  I would be too--and that's why the question of how Blackwater is framed is so vital to Erik Prince and the future of the American experiement.

Anthropomorphization

Anthropomorphization as a defense to incompetence, recklessness and multiple safety violations:

"I will never come back to that evil mountain."

That from the tragicomically inept Bob Murray of Murray Energy, the company that owns the Crandal Canyon mine.

Note how Murray has framed the mine cave-in.  First he insisted that it was caused by an earthquake, i.e., a natural disaster.  Now he suggests it was caused by an "evil mountain," i.e., a supernatural force.

Sorry, Bob.  There's no evidence of an earthquake.  What's more, mountains aren't evil; people are.  If there is any justice in the world, you will never come back to Crandal Canyon because you'll be in prison.

Framing Capitulation

David Sirota has the scoop.  Apparently the Demo cave-in on Iraq was a big freakin' victory.  Who knew?

Distributed

I had a conversation last night with a friend about blogging, an enterprise she views with some skepticism.  She views the proliferation of blogs as a bubble that will burst when people tumble to the fact that they're spending hundreds of hours and dollars creating free media content.

I disagreed.  I told her that most of the bloggers I know put in the time and money typing away because they are passionate about what they're writing about, be it gardening, sex, shoes or politics.  Those of us in that last category are not only passionate, but we hope through our efforts to change the culture and its governance as well.  With respect to those of us on the liberal end of things, Matt Stoller explains our motivations quite well:

Basically, we're a group of people who feel very betrayed by the leadership of our country, our media, and our party.  We care about ideas because bad ideas implemented tend to kill lots of innocent people, and we don't like that.  We are liberal because we believe in liberal ideas, and by and large, we've been proven correct.  The Iraq war was a terrible idea.  Bush has been a horrible President.  Running on Iraq in 2006 was a good idea.  Stopping Social Security privatization was possible and necessary.  A 50 state strategy made sense because a wave election was foreseeable.  Don't trust the telecom companies with the internet.  Let's figure out this global warming thing.

Having read Crashing the Gate recently, I was struck by its descriptions of how conservatives have plowed millions of dollars into think tanks that churn out position papers, nurture political candidates, and provide talking heads for the MSM.  As the book points out, there is nothing like that in scope on the left.  The liberal blogosphere, however, is in effect a distributed think tank that accomplishes the same goals in a radically different ways.  As Stoller puts it:

We like to hash things out.  And hashing things out tends to create a sense of community and natural discipline, since you kind of figure out where the obvious areas of agreement are and move in that direction.

To this, I would add that hashing things out focuses our vision, hones our ideas, and details the strategies and tactics that are most likely to make our vision and ideas a reality.  This is what the big think tanks of the right do for conservatives; the distributed think tank of the liberal blogosphere can and should do the same thing for progressives.