Letter from Christy C. Bulkeley
Politics – November 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Dear Martha:
This is mostly so you’ll know you’re not writing to a vacuum. Your commentary debunking the frames/ metaphors/stereotypes involved in George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant and his earlier Moral Politics, the fuller, academic treatment of the topic, prompts this note. His work sent me in a different direction — back to the work from other academic fields documenting the connecting ways many of us relate to the world more naturally than we do to the dominant linear, hierarchal, patriarchal — the both-and approaches rather than the either-or.
Carol Gilligan’s Women’s Reality from the 1980s is one of the first times I encountered the discussion, but it’s in lots of other places and from lots of other fields, too. Few who have explored the possibilities have achieved the attention Lakoff gets; but Deborah Tannen, another linguist, managed it (You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation, 1990) as did Stephen Covey , the white, male, Mormon business guru who’s built a whole industry around The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic, 1989.
The tricks include these: The initial works were by overtly feminist scholars, labels that cost credibility and prominence. People who don’t fit the dominant paradigms (mostly women but not all women, some men but a decided minority) tend to adapt to and, sometimes, adopt fully, the dominant approach. Indeed, in many organizations (including the news organizations for which I worked), adapting is necessary for long-term career survival. Some of the adopting is from folks who disown their own experience and instincts from lack of confidence or reinforcement — he’s the boss, he’s rich/powerful, he must be right and who am I to question. The media have moved even more into the dualisms, the either-or-ness, than were apparent when I worked in newspapers. That reinforces the dualisms, of course, and further undermines the sense that they’re not right or complete.
Journalists today just can’t get anywhere reporting options and consequences of ideas and proposals and go for the opposite extreme as the main reaction story (or “balance” content). The insulting red state/blue state thing is the worst of all examples. This stuff has implications throughout society, most notably these days perhaps, in education theory explaining why some folks learn best being talked at while many of us do better in various other approaches. Most people live most of the time in a multiple-choice world (Covey’s book plays to that reality which, I suspect, is why it’s continued to connect with so many readers). Only on election day and a few other times are we stuck with either-or choices. Our friends who voted for the boy in the White House would be appalled, I suspect, if they read Lakoff and saw how they were being labeled by the experts. Lakoff obviously plays to the either-or choice of election day, as do the conservative brain trusters he cites.
But to be labeled with all of the “progressive” frames is, as you note, almost as unappealing to those of us who didn’t and wouldn’t vote for the boy. Enough. Democracy is supposed to depend on enough discussion to explore the options and consequences, discover the common ground and make the compromises that, over the long haul, work out for the satisfaction of nearly everyone. As you’ve lamented other times, it’s rare these days to find room and place for that discussion and to allow it to evolve into rational decisions about any issues.
You and Ed come as close as anyone to trying. Your respect for the intelligence and willingness of your readers to learn and consider explains the strong appeal your magazine has for some of us far from your mountains (we have our own in North Carolina, of course; but the oldest did their job of falling down so well that they’re only 900+ feet tall and a little hard to spot.)
Christy C. Bulkeley
Sanford, NC