I used to be a radio talk show junkie. I was the worst kind – listener and caller. None of my liberal friends understood why I engaged right-wing hosts by phoning-in since the debates on conservative talk radio are obviously set up to be essentially un-winnable. Most of the time a Limbaugh fan or Soucheray listener in Minneapolis would call in after me and make a mockery out of any point I had been trying to make. I was referred to as “Marcia, the Liberal Lunatic from Minnesota” or “Katie from Liberal Lakes” (a pejorative reference to a place within the mythical town of “Garage Logic.”) I finally reasoned that an insult from an insulter is actually a compliment, so I remained relatively unscathed by the labels and continued my Quixotic efforts to stab at conservative windbags – I mean windmills.
Occasionally, a listener would call in after me and say that Marcia or Katie or whoever I had been that day “actually had a good point.” Sometimes that would start a series of calls that slowly caused the direction of the discussion to shift. A supportive call that produced such an effect was the proverbial carrot that fueled my radio call-in addiction. There was only one problem when that happened; I could never figure out exactly what I had said to produce a positive reaction in a conservative listener. If only I could figure this out, I could repeat my rare success and up my radio batting average.
After 9/11, I stopped calling in. Being called “unpatriotic” by a listener of the Barbara Carlson show was a fight I couldn’t bear to take on. You can’t explain in a sound bite how real patriotism that is informed is different than blind patriotism that just makes one feel better, so I gave up. Besides, being on hold for even 30 seconds listening to Limbaugh’s “femi-nazi” references and pseudo intellectual mocking speech of the “elite” left, made me increasingly nauseous. Adding to my disillusionment was intellectual exhaustion. I was tired of trying to find statistics I could quote that would back up my arguments. I was tired of trying to figure out what logic system caused Christian conservatives to be against prenatal abortions but to support what I consider the post-birth abortions of war. I was worn-out trying to explain my views on the extraordinary privilege that comes with exponential wealth or why I trusted the science of global climate change.
The final piece that allowed me to let go of my talk-show addiction was a sort of re-location therapy; we moved to California. The scheduling of programs is different here, and there seems to be fewer call-in shows. I had to find new programs at new times, and I did. I found progressive radio programs such as Amy Goodman (Democracy Now), Lila Garrett (Connect the Dots), and Sonali Kolhatkar (Uprising) on Pacifica Radio, (kpfk.org). I was ecstatic to find the excellent programming of Larry Mantle and Patt Morrison on our local NPR station (kpcc.org). My need for rational discourse was satisfied. The call of call-in radio was fading from my psyche. I was content to be just a good listener (for the first time in my life). My addictive behavior was waning, that is, until last week.
That’s when I heard an interview on KPCC with George Lakoff, professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Lakoff was summarizing his most recent book The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. I was intrigued with the title and the interview.
Lakoff hooked me immediately with the mention of metaphors. Why wouldn’t I be hooked? On most nights I go to bed with my favorite line from Shakespeare echoing in my brain: “Sleep, sleep, innocent sleep. Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.” - “Knits up the raveled sleeve of care!” Can any words be more stunning? The phrase is brilliant! What could create a clearer image of the sleep as relief from worries of a troubled day?
So when Lakoff explained the image created by the metaphor “tax relief,” I got it. “Relief,” of course, implies cessation from affliction. When the term is used over and over, it creates a framework for the concept of tax as an affliction rather than the concept of dues we pay for the services and infrastructure of our society. When progressives fall into the trap of responding to arguments using the conservative frame of “tax relief,” they actually reinforce the concept of affliction. So I wondered how many concepts had little Marcia from Minnesota been reinforcing on her call-in binges to talk radio. More importantly, what could I (i.e. Marcia) do to change my debating skills?
I wanted to learn more about Lakoff’s theories, so I immediately jumped into my ecological little Toyota and went to my friendly neighborhood library to get the book I had just heard about. However, only Lakeoff’s older book, Moral Politics, was on the shelves. Of course, the word moral in the title pulled me in – a key value of progressives that conservatives have somehow stolen away. I walked out of the library with the book cover facing outward so all of the Newport Beach conservatives would see me in my Obama hat walking down Pacific Coast Highway with “moral” and “politics” in plain sight.
Once home, I attacked the book with the fervor of a kid on the first day of college. Surely here I’d find the answers to my talk show call-in inadequacies. I copied the phrases that spoke of progressive values as those based on the morality of nurturance and empathy, social ties, fair distribution, strength, and lots of other words I love. The “nuturant parent” view of the world and the contrasting conservative “strict father” view made sense to me. The strict father model sees the world as a dangerous place where evil resides. It is a competitive place where there are winners and losers. Each of us has variations of both nuturant parent and strict father views operating in varying degrees in different aspects of our lives. One or the other view can be evoked depending upon the framework in which it is set.
Half way through Moral Politics, I realized that this book, as comprehensive and enlightening as it is, was written in 1996. I needed post-9/ll strategies for countering the conservative arguments in the talk show fray I now considered re-entering. So I hurried down to my locally owned and operated bookstore. Ok, it was actually Barnes and Noble, and I picked up Lakoff’s New York Times bestseller, Don’t Think of an Elephant – Know Your Values and Frame the Debate! The book doesn’t have the word “moral” on the cover, but it is red, white, and blue, which I figured wouldn’t hurt when I walked out of the store wearing, once again, my Obama hat.
Don’t Think of An Elephant… was an easy, 124-page read. The last chapter, “How to Respond to Conservatives,” was particularly pertinent to solving my talk show travails. I was especially drawn to a reprinted letter Dr. Lakoff received after his appearance on Now with Bill Moyers. The writer of the letter to Lakoff related how she single-handedly turned around an AOL political chat room! She reframed “trial layers” as “our last defense against negligent corporations.” She asked, in regard to gay marriage, if the people in the chat room wanted “the federal government to tell them who they could marry.” She required a definition of “liberal” when someone called her a “dirty liberal.” In just a few days, she reported, the whole chat room had become civil. Lakoff continues this chapter emphasizing that we must always be sincere in our arguments and use frames we really believe in based on the values we hold. We should stay away from the set-ups in venues where a conservative host sets the frame. “If the game is fixed, don’t play,” advises Lakoff. “All very helpful,” I thought, but still I needed more. (A new addiction might have been beginning.) So I visited Dr. Lakoff’s site at www.winwithlanguage.com where I bought the DVD, How Democrats and Progressives Can Win… I had it shipped overnight, really, I did. And guess what? It helped.
Just yesterday, I stopped in at the little store nearby our home. A gentleman was talking to the clerk behind the counter. “Governor Schwarzenegger just signed an executive order to balance the state’s budget by cutting state workers’ salaries to minimum wage,” he told the cashier. “I make $24.00 an hour as a state worker. I’m going to be cut to $6.55. I’ll lose my home.” The clerk said nothing. When the man walked out, I said, “That’s terrible.” His reply: “What’s terrible? The government is too top heavy.” I was stunned. I didn’t even understand the logic of his statement. He, a man who was probably earning very little himself, seemed to have no empathy with the customer and could only respond with a metaphorical frame he probably had heard over and over again. I hoped I was shifting to the nurturant parent model when I said, “Government is there to protect people.” He had no answer. I smiled and wished him a good evening.
As I left the store, I thought of a myriad of other ways I might have attempted to change the metaphor ingrained in the clerk’s mind, but I’m just new at this. I’m going to try to learn, though. I will never stop believing in the power of one person. The issues facing the globe right now are too important not to. The time is short. The progressive view is one that needs to have a voice at the platform in Denver. It’s not only conservatives we have to bring around to embracing the nurturant parent view of the world as opposed of the strict father world view; it’s members of the Democratic Party as well. We need to be attentive to the metaphors that both parties and even supposedly fair-minded journalists have accepted and adopted. We need to confront those frames in our discussions in the classroom, in our caucuses, in casual conversations with neighbors or friends. We might even have to call talk radio shows to exercise our new debating skills and muster the courage to actually use our real first names when we do!
Billie Pagliolo is a former teacher of the deaf. sign language interpreter, and present owner of Windmill Works Educational Software and Games at www.windmillworks.com. A collection of audio essays by Ms. Pagliolo, “Live From Milwaukee, It’s Tuesday Night, is also available at www.podiobooks.com
Additional works by George Lakoff include: How Liberals and Conservatives Think; Frame the Debate (2004), Whose Freedom? (2006), and Thinking Points (2006) [with the Rockridge Institute].
Tags: campaign, conservatives, Election, Lakoff, progressive, talk shows, tax relief, Taxes