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| Sunday, July 17, 2005 |
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Happy Birthday, Pop 
| | My father was born 97 years ago, today. The picture above was taken in the summer of 1956, when he was ten years younger than I am now. The fish is a striped bass, about five pounds, as I recall. Pop was a devoted fisherman, and tried to make the same of me, though it never took. Now I've got a boy about the same age I was when that picture was taken, and he wants to fish. Pop would have loved teaching him. I will too, I'm sure. But just thinking about it makes me miss the old man, even though he's been gone for twenty-six years. Strange... four more years and he'll be gone as long as I knew him. |
| | By the way, I just scanned several other old photos along with that one, including one of my nine-year-old self and Sparky, who was a birthday gift from Pop. I just posted that photo, along with the story of Sparky, here. Both pictures are part of this set of photos. All were also taken at the Wanigan, our summer home in the South Jersey woods. Here's a set of pictures from when Pop and his brother-in-law Archie Apgar were building the Wanigan in 1949. Here's a page with more links about Pop. And here's a set piece on the great life we lived there. Written the day Mom died, almost two years ago. That feels like yesterday, too. |
SometimesOn
| | Since I move about every year or so, I've lost track of more than a few details along the way. One was renewing searls.com, my primary domain and where much of my family gets much of its email. |
| | Well, searls.com ran out on 7/11, as I found out a few minutes ago, when I was greeted by a NetworkSolutions offer to renew or sell me the domain. |
| | So I renewed it. Should take around 24 hours for the renewal to propogate through the Net. Meanwhile, if you want to reach me by email, the one at the bio link to the left there should work. |
| | The timing isn't the worst. I'll be on the road later today, heading up to the AO Summit. |
| | Looking through the site (at that last link)... I find myself quoted saying something I barely remember saying (though I agree with) here. Also that I'll be on the Open or Closed Web panel (moderated by Marc Canter) at 11am Thursday. (Yes, I knew about that one. You can guess where I stand on the question.) |
| | [Later...] Searls.com seems to be working now, from where I am, anyway. And I have no trouble sending or receiving email from there. YMMV, etc. |
The true secret to blogging: unbuttered parsnips.
| | Hard words break no bones; fine words butter no parsnips. From last night's fortune cookie. |
Frame up
| | The father of framing is a man named George Lakoff, and his spectacular ascent over the last eight months in many ways tells the story of where Democrats have been since the election. A year ago, Lakoff was an obscure linguistics professor at Berkeley, renowned as one of the great, if controversial, minds in cognitive science but largely unknown outside of it. When he, like many liberals, became exasperated over the drift of the Kerry campaign last summer -- ''I went to bed angry every night,'' he told me -- Lakoff decided to bang out a short book about politics and language, based on theories he had already published with academic presses, that could serve as a kind of handbook for Democratic activists. His agent couldn't find a publishing house that wanted it. Lakoff ended up more or less giving it away to Chelsea Green, a tiny liberal publisher in Vermont. |
| | That book, ''Don't Think of an Elephant!'' is now in its eighth printing, having sold nearly 200,000 copies, first through liberal word of mouth and the blogosphere and then through reviews and the lecture circuit. (On the eve of last fall's election, I came across a Democratic volunteer in Ohio who was handing out a boxful of copies to her friends.) Lakoff has emerged as one of the country's most coveted speakers among liberal groups, up there with Howard Dean, who, as it happens, wrote the foreword to ''Don't Think of an Elephant!'' Lakoff has a DVD titled ''How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions From George Lakoff,'' and he recently set up his own consulting company |
| | Great to see George getting the respect he deserves. I've known and written about George for years. (Here's one item from March, 1997.) |
| | Bai, however, doesn't puff George. It's quite even-handed. For example: |
| | An antiframing backlash has emerged, and while it is, on the surface, an argument about Lakoff and his theories, it is clearly also a debate about whether the party lacks only for language or whether it needs a fresher agenda. Lakoff's detractors say that it is he who resembles the traveling elixir salesman, peddling comforting answers at a time when desperate Democrats should be admitting some hard truths about their failure to generate new ideas. ''Every election defeat has a charlatan, some guy who shows up and says, 'Hey, I marketed the lava lamp, and I can market Democratic politics,''' says Kenneth Baer, a former White House speechwriter who wrote an early article attacking Lakoff's ideas in The Washington Monthly. ''At its most basic, it represents the Democratic desire to find a messiah.'' |
| | In a devastating critique in The Atlantic's April issue, Marc Cooper, a contributing editor at The Nation, skillfully ridiculed Lakoff as the new progressive icon. ''Much more than an offering of serious political strategy, 'Don't Think of an Elephant!' is a feel-good, self-help book for a stratum of despairing liberals who just can't believe how their common-sense message has been misunderstood by eternally deceived masses,'' Cooper wrote. In Lakoff's view, he continued, American voters are ''redneck, chain-smoking, baby-slapping Christers desperately in need of some gender-free nurturing and political counseling by organic-gardening enthusiasts from Berkeley.'' |
| | Lakoff has some valid points. In his writing, at least, he explains framing in a way that is more intellectually complex than his critics have admitted. His essential insight into politics -- that voters make their decisions based on larger frames rather than on the sum of a candidate's positions -- is hard to refute. And Lakoff does say in ''Don't Think of an Elephant!'' albeit very briefly, that Democrats need not just new language but also new thought; he told me the party suffers from ''hypocognition,'' or a lack of ideas. What's more, when it comes to the language itself, Lakoff has repeatedly written that the process of reframing American political thought will take years, if not decades, to achieve. He does not suggest in his writing that a few catchy slogans can turn the political order on its head by the next election. |
| | Most of the rest of the essay is about politics, political strategy, personalities and so on. |
| | I suggest that interested readers, regardless of political orientation, read George's thinking, and not filter it through his politics. George may be a hot political personality for the moment (or even a while longer); but for decades he has been the leading thinker and writer in the field of cognitive linguistics. Nobody knows more about metaphor, and why it matters. What George teaches is not only deep stuff, but exceedingly useful as well. Has been for me, anyway. |
Repatriotism
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