8 November 03

Atomic Cafe Revisited

Numenius and I had an abortive trip to the gym tonight-Saturday hours have changed-so we picked up a DVD of the Atomic Cafe to watch on a rainy, rainy night (no lunar eclipse for us!).

What struck me so forcefully, seeing it today, was how close the rhetoric of the 1950s was to today’s administration. Formulation of the evil other. Projection of a pro-American god. Systematic perpetuation of ignorance in the population.

George Lakoff, a member of the Rockridge Foundation, explains how conservatives have been working on language to dominate politics over the course of many years (and with the help of millions of dollars). Lakoff thinks this has the Democrats on the run, and his foundation aims to counteract the conservative think tanks. Good luck. My fear is that the electorate doesn’t want to think. They don’t, for sure, want to know that they aren’t thinking. This will be a tough sell.

Posted by at 08:38 PM in Politics | Link |
  1. We are lucky that, so far, there is no one on par with McCarthy out there, in power, actually enforcing the madness to that extent. If another event like the New York tragedy were to take place again in America, I really wonder would happen, though. That is a truly scary, scary thought, not just because it would be tragic for something like that to happen, but also because Americans are not really prepared for any further large-scale tragedy on their own “side” in this misbegotten “war”. I wonder if the fragile philosophy of America’s bill of rights could survive such an onslaught. And perhaps people sense this vulnerability; everyone can feel the whole world teetering on that awful edge. It would only need one little push more.

    — butuki    8. November 2003, 22:32    Link
  2. Actually, they didn’t have a clip of McCarthy on the film. It was Eisenhower that was the scariest, I think, because he “seemed” so rational.

    I agree, though, that one more large-scale attack on American soil will put the bill of rights in trash. And jeopardize, as you suggest, the rest of the world.


    — Pica    9. November 2003, 06:00    Link
  3. You are probably right about the electorate not wanting to think … and that was Lakoffs point, that conservatives, by hijacking language and the terms in which issues are raised, have relieved them of the task of thinking. The Democrats need to take back their terms and reframe discussion—not so much to make people think, but to offer them an alternative and credible vision. It doesnt help that the Democrats keep fighting each other. This lets conservatives rule by that old, old trick, which goes something like this: divide and conquer.

    But thanks for this post … I have been trying to remember where I read about this issue, and once you mentioned Lakoff, it all came back to me.


    — maria    12. November 2003, 08:24    Link

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