George Lakoff is beginning to get on my nerves. I always get a little nervous when all of my friends are talking about one book, as they have about Lakoff’s little treatise on framing the debate, and his bizarre notion that the choice battle can be won with a little semantic reframing only furthers my concerns. I think Frances Moore Lappe got it right in her essay, Time for Progressives to Grow Up Beyond Lakoff’s Strict Father vs. Nurturant Parent, A Strong Community Manifesto, when she argues that noble though the concept of reframing may be, it is predicated on a system that is dysfunctional and that what we need to do is change the paradigm of what a functional society should be.
At any rate, Lakoff’s latest is a critique of a wonderful piece by Martha Burk, The Democrat’s Woman Problem, which critiques the Lakoff notion that the Dems didn’t win because they said it wrong. Actually, as Burk points out, they didn’t say it. They ignored women and women’s issues and spent their wad going over the brink to make Kerry look more like a man’s man than the monkey-in chief (which shouldn’t have been all that difficult, regardless of whether it was appropriate, but just the same, they blew it).
The most bizarre statement in Lakoff’s piece is, “Many of the feminist organizations have come to the conclusion that the word “choice,” and the concept of choice, is a bad idea.” Huh??? What feminist organizations is he talking about, he doesn’t mention any of them. I’d be willing to wager that I am on far more feminist mailing lists than he is and I’m pretty sure I’d notice if this was an overwhelming topic of discussion.
But Lakoff is right, this isn’t about choice. But what he doesn’t get is that this is about power, power held by two parties run by white men who have absolutely no real interest in empowering women or any other disenfranchised group. After all, this is a country where women do not even have full constitutional rights). Until we re-vision the system and make it representative of all (and Frances Moore Lappe’s vision would be a good starting point), playing word games merely trivializes the issue.
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