New Kids in the Neighborhood – Norman Rockwell
So many pressing problems, so many divisions … do we correct them one issue at a time, or should we try to find a way to see what connects them all? It’s seems that the second tack, finding connections and global solutions, has been rendered all-but impossible. With our defanged and ineffective public education system, it doesn’t seem that escaping this trap is in the offing. As I’ve stated in the past, I believe that there was a movement to destroy broad, liberal-arts based learning that began in earnest after Brown v. Education. Better to destroy this vital foundation of the public square rather than to share it.
Plainly, fighting each carefully chosen battle one at a time isn’t working. This isn’t true only for our problems with education, but also in the challenges that we face regarding race relations, the environment, the widening gaps in our economy that are dragging us once again toward a feudal caste system, as stated so well by the Oxymoronic Philosopher:
But America, as these pieces illustrate, has failed her working class. One can no longer pick herself up by her bootstraps and fight for a better life. We make it impossible for the sons and daughters of blue collar labor to get a college degree. Not to mention the fact that the blue collar labor that once meant a hard working job in a mill or factory that provided the family with benefits and a pension now means a job flipping burgers or stocking shelves at Wallyworld for meager pay and little or no healthcare. But what has led us into these precarious waters? Is it a fault of the system? Maybe…if we look to Marx we find capitalism playing out in just this way: a growing proletariat becoming more dissatisfied by the day eventually overthrows the whole shebang. Is it a fault of the people? Most definitely, for we define the system and the institutions. We created the laws that now allow corporate giants to create the laws. We’ve allowed families to maintain fortunes far beyond necessity…because if you earned it you get to keep it, right? Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “What is the most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class.” In this we have failed and failed miserably. We have allowed a class to emerge and now they act as any reasonable ruler would…they protect their power and hoard all other power available. They band together and grow their fortunes. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll trickle down, but I doubt it.
Yes, I’m throwing a lot up against the digital wall here, but I think that this is all related. Our system is broken at least partly because so many of our citizens have NO idea how it works. They were trained to be corporate drones, not taught to be citizens. When these workers are wooed by the political elite in the course, they are fed small problems that act as foci to narrow the debate, to leave the monied classes to carry on with their gaming of other parts of our society. Steve Gimbel over at Philosopher’s Playground calls this trick caging:
Caging is a way to defeat policy proposals on a set of related issues by designing public discourse in a way that makes sure that those issues never get raised. This is the rhetorical version of an intentional walk in baseball — you don’t deal with the next batter in the order, you decide who you want to pitch to. You take a whole segment of the political discussion and put it in a cage, letting out only that single issue you want in front of the public. As long as the chosen topic has an air of contention and you can spark passionate debate around it (the louder, the better), the single issue will draw all the attention and no one will notice everything you’ve artfully kept off the table.
As I’ve noted before, there are issues and political viewpoints that are completely unwelcome in the current political debate. The Professor has given me a word to describe how this happens. As he continues:
We discussed a couple of examples a few weeks ago (see the link for the difference between caging and framing). On the morally wrong side of the civil rights movement? No problem, just make sure that the only discussion around race and justice that you let out of the cage is affirmative action. That will be enough to use up all the activist oxygen in the room and the rest of the concerns just disappear. Getting your moral butt kicked over questions of gender fairness and women’s rights? Just take all of it and put it in a cage, only letting out abortion. In order to defend abortion, women’s organizations and advocates will devote all their time and effort to that fight and not push forward on other fronts. In fact, within the abortion debate itself, we’ve seen caging. Don’t discuss all of abortion, the only procedure worth talking about is D&C that is done in the last trimester. Reduce the whole reduced matter even further. How low will you go? Seen as bad guys for preferring corporate profits at the expense of God’s green Earth? No biggie — just put all ecological issues in a cage and only let out National Parks and drilling in ANWR. All those green groups will have their focus pulled off of the other nasty things the contributor to your campaign are doing to save a piece of land in nowhere Alaska.
The corporate/theofascist right has been playing this game successfully for quite some time, and as of yet NO ONE seems willing or able to break out of this still strong rusty cage they’ve locked the polity into, enabling the kleptocrats and zealots to run free, plundering everything they can get their hands on. Instead of finding common ground, of working together to bend the bars, saw through the barriers, find a way to bust free in mutually beneficial ways, the plebians at the bottom turn on each other, driven by the divisive and meaningless debates that the upper class tosses at us like red meat before starving dogs.
Fighting little battles one at a time over piecemeal problems isn’t going to get us anywhere. It plays into their hands. It keeps worthless Vichy Dems in office to provide fake fights for us as more and more of our infrastructure, our communities, our children and hopes and dreams get crushed by the relentless aquisition of MORE STUFF at the expense of planning for the distant future.
As the situation becomes desperate, the growing bottom of our society will eventually lash out … the question is how. The Lords and Ladies in the halls of government and the boardrooms of the corporate keeps know this, and their Praetorian guards eagerly discuss ways to deal with the eventual backlash. How this counterstrike comes will determine if this country remains a representative democracy. If the left doesn’t find the will or leaders to build a new progressive populist movement, (a REAL one, not the faux “liberal netroots” being pushed by the Democratic Party’s blogheeling snake oil salesmen), someone to the right will emerge as a reactionary demogogue. This eventuality will only strenthen the right’s hand, leading to further dismantlement of the public square, more oppressive policing, more abuses of power. Make no mistake about it, the next two elections look to be contests between the corporatist right represented by the Bush Administration and the further right-reactionary fringe of the racist, nativist present day know nothings. The feeble center-right also-rans being pushed by the “leaders” of the DC Democratic Party will only help solidify the damage done by the Bush-Cheney cabal, and thus offer little hope.
How we on the left do this, how we break free from the caging of vital issues into fake proxy debates is the hard question? The first step toward answering it is to ask the question in the first place. One of the exciting things about the growth of the blogs was the social experiment in broadening the debates that they represent. That broader debate isn’t happening in the bought-and-paid for world of the connected blogs, but in individualistic, creative outlets like the ones I’ve linked to here. Go forth, find some new connections, don’t just run with the pack after the latest bloody chunk of red meat. Down that way lies continued dissolution.
The way forward is not to be a fucking sheep, as sheep are easily herded. Rove and the think tanks are masters at caging, diverting and herding.
Getting a population to think for themselves is one tough proposition. The first thing is to unbrand people, not getting them to stamp your brand on them (take that orange blog) which is just rebranding the branded. If you rebrand someone then someone else can rebrand them too. The point is to deprogram people, even kids today are already branded many times over by advertising, proselytising etc.
One of my in-laws took a seminar recently that said the average American gets 3000 messages a day and so they put up filters because it’s far too many to deal with. Now the chase is on to figure out what these filters are and how to get your message past said barriers.
“caging”. I think it probably is more to the point than “framing”. If we never ever get into the debate, then framing is meaningless. How do we bust out of the cages is the point. I think some pretty remarkable things have to happen for those cages to spring apart. Maybe busting up the advertising by boycotts or just plain nattering at the advertisers. Maybe creating whole new segments of places to debate, like youtube and crooks and liars and blogging in high and low places and spamming the network with the items we care about. Maybe some of the photoshopping and graphics can push the corners in a bit. We have some highly creative people. They have all kinds of ways of jumping over, into and around that cage giving off our own noise. What say you, creative ones???
I think it’s in refusing to be caged by simplistic debates. Here in WI there is a broad and strong coalition being built to defeat the Hate Amendment this NOV. They’ve gotten off to a great start by refusing to let the far right define the debate, to make it about their version of “values”. They talk about the Constitutional tradition in this state. They talk about the legal damage done to ALL WI, and most importantly, they’ve shifted debate to that fundamental midwestern belief … FAIRNESS. There are business groups, faith communities, GBLT activists, college students … all hammering away at the idea that this terrible Amendment to the state constitution will make the state less free, less economically competitive, and most importantly LESS FAIR.
All it takes is some people willing to go right at them, and the fundies have been on their heels ever since.
Thanks Grandma Jo.
“If we never ever get into the debate, then framing is meaningless.”
BINGO!
The idea is that the two techniques are often employed together. While they both have the same rhetorical effect of streamlining the listener to a position you want him or her to hold, they work differently. Framing, according to Lakoff, is choosing the linguistic basis for a single debate. Is abortion about life or choice? The words you choose makes a huge rhetorical difference. Caging is taking an entire connected group of issues and setting them all aside, allow only one particular member of the set to be the discussed. Ignore everything else about women’s rights and make sure that the only thing talked about is abortion.
The issue let out of the cage is often one that can be easily framed and for this reason, we do often see the cage and frame 1-2 punch.
Wow, pretty weird to be surfing around and seeing yourself quoted.
As a liberal arts teacher myself, I have to agree with you. Another cause that was operative at the same time that plays into this story is the rise of the military-industrial complex. You not only have Brown v. Board of Ed, but also the sudden shift to a technology based economy where the purpose of education is no longer broad learning, but training a technological workforce. These jobs are going to be the good jobs and so, training becomes the key to the middle class. An “educated” person becomes suspect because they are not useful. I am a philosopher and have perspective majors all the time approach me to coach them in talking to their parents anticipating the “how are you going to get a job with a degree in philosophy?” question. You had simultaneous shifts in the composition and the aims of our schools.
It really is an excellent piece, and I spent some time reading your other fine offerings as well. I’m trying to spend less time in the Big Blahhhhg echo chambers and more time bouncing off links in search of fresh perspectives.
Your point about the military-industrial complex is spot on. I was a physics major in college … and was often pursued by recruiters to accept their “help” completing my academic work (up to and including a Navy nuclear engineer calling my parent’s house the day after I got home from sophomore year … spooky).
I added philosophy as a second major that year, to the endless dismay of my father and a couple of the physics professors (though my advisor thought it was cool and made perfect sense). When I graduated, I tried grad school as a physics major, thinking in Reagan’s America that my job prospects would be better (dumb … it’s always been to the worse when I make pragmatic decisions). Needless to say, I’m not monomaniacal enough to be a working scientist.
Anyway, the whole point of that digression is that I wish I’d had the self-confidence to pursue philosophy as a career path, but at the time prospects looked exceedingly dim. Maybe I’ll be one of those 50-something PhD candidates someday …
Thanks again for your excellent blog.
And, sadly, the media continue to assist in these activities.
It’s late and I’m off to bed, so this is a brief comment. Your thoughtful diary deserves a more detailed response, but this is my capacity at this time. One serious effect of severing community and communal ties is atomization and the helplessness that is spawned by isolation. You are exactly on point that the blogs must lead to real communities, not just attacks on common enemies. It especially pains me when incipient communities turn on each other, draw lines in the sand, and drive people away. In order to build our strength, we must honor our common values and respect our differences. Sometimes our differences are real and feelings get hurt. It seems to me that there are few principles that matter more than people. I wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago, so either I’m getting wise or getting soft. But this is vague and your diary, as I said earlier, deserves a better response. I’ll try to gather my thought tomorrow.
oh, no, thank you for the thoughtful response:
well said.