unpacking the frame frame

Floyd Merit · Joined: 01 Apr 2007 Posts: 30

lgf posts about the left's popular instruction to it's base about political rhetoric.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=25293&only

since i first saw a segment on NOW interviewing lakoff about "don't think of an elephant", something has stuck out like a sore thumb for me.

all this popular instruction of the lefty grassroots in rhetoric, speaking of "frames" as if it were a new and alien concept, wraps itself in one huge frame.

that frame is something like, "the other guys invented this powerful weapon and we are but meek and innocent victims of it's application. if only we could know and apply its secrets and suppress - momentarily, for the greater good - our natural inclination toward straignt-talk and honesty - we could use the frame weapon to defeat the frame weapon and return discourse to simple plain-spoken purity of motive and deed."

this is of course enormously dishonest. "framing" is a popular bumpersticker reformation of postmodernism; the "adjusting of cultural
texts" and all those sorts of things that is taught in all those litcrit classes which conservatives don't take in college.

and liberals know that conservatives don't understand this stuff. for example,i was reading one of the few kos diaries which aknowleged the "gathering of eagles" which centered around the author's bewilderment that the freepers and rolling thunder had managed a "rhetorical shift" in their mission statement, noting that they didn't think such rubes were capable of such a thing.

and this from the "burning flags is patriotic", "we support the stupid, war criminal troops" people who managed to convince the nation that barry goldwater was going to drop a nuke on your sweet innocent daughter as she plays quietly in a meadow if elected, and countless other provacative, intrusive, combative contrivances which often don't even have a kernel of truth at their cores.