A while back, Chris suggested that I check out George Lakoff’s Moral Politics, and I added it to my to-read list, where it’s sat since, having taken secondary priority to my more economically-oriented dissertation reading. Today, I came across a link to an interview with Lakoff that made me wish I’d checked him out sooner. Basically, he’s a linguistics professor who examines the way conservatives have done a far better job than democrats in rhetorically framing national political debates. An excerpt will give you the flavor, but the whole thing is worth checking out, especially for people interested in rhetoric and politics.
You’ve said that progressives should never use the phrase “war on terror”
George Lakoff on Rhetoric
“There are two reasons for that. Let’s start with “terror.” Terror is a general state, and it’s internal to a person. ”
i thought this was really interesting; i’ve always had this instinctive reaction to the “war on terror” catchphrase that it’s more additive than it casts an opposition — not a war AGAINST terror but war compounded with terror, and where it’s hard to tell the two categories (war, terror) apart.
i quibble with the idea that terror is an internal state, though. except for the people directly targeted in the WTC and the pentagon, and relatives of the victims, for instance, the “terror” of september 11 is almost entirely vectored through the media — the story people tell of 9/11 is almost always framed as a story of watching television, of being “glued to cable t.v.” and of recoiling in horror not only from the human cost of the attacks (as underscored in very specific ways by the entertainment-as-news media) but the change in the way the information was presented — the absence of commercial breaks, the wall-to-wall coverage, the continuous ticker-tape bulletins of potential crises running along the bottom of the screen (“bomb scare at the empire state building”!).
to the extent the media created and perpetuated this all of this fear, and continues in different ways to do so today (over there! it’s saddam! duck!) this form of “terror” is a highly collective experience almost by definition.