Was 9/11 a crime or a war?

At Huffpo, George Lakoff discusses the consequences for the way in which Americans have framed the 9/11 attacks.

Colin Powell recommended calling the attack a crime. But Cheney understood that if it were framed as an act of war, then Bush and Cheney would be given war powers. So war it was, a metaphorical "war" on terror. The American people, intimidated by the vision of the towers falling, accepted the framing. Democrats, seeing the reaction of their constituents, went along with the framing. Except for my congresswoman, Barbara Lee. I ran to my computer to be the first to congratulate her on her no vote. Terror meant everyone should be afraid of terrorists. Throughout the Midwest the predictable happened. A highly memorable event raises one's judgment of the probability that it will happen to them. All over America people started being afraid of terrorists. Bush asked for and got unlimited war powers and the Patriot Act.
I discussed this same issue in this earlier post on the frame of war.

Continue ReadingWas 9/11 a crime or a war?

Scary News from the Christian Coalition

I did not opt out of the Christian Coalition newsletter mailing list that someone unknown signed me up for some months ago. It helps to keep an eye on what the other side is up to. The Aug 5, 2011 issue includes the following scary observation:

"Critics and supporters of the Budget Control Act ... agree that the Tea Party now controls the agenda in Washington D.C. As one who attended Glenn Beck's Tea Party event last August -- along with over a half million other Tea Party supporters -- when looking at the hundreds of thousands of families near the Lincoln Memorial on Washington D.C.'s Mall, I realized that those families represent the large majority of the American people, as anyone with any kind of commonsense would.

Why in particular do I find this scary?
  • Open admission that The Tea Party (not even an official political party) controls the actions of our legislature. This group is a powerful vocal minority, arguably smaller but richer than the 1980's "Moral Majority."
  • Lack of fact checking: The attendance of the Glen Beck event is well established by several independent sources. They range from Beck's hopeful "300,000 to 600,000" and Michelle Bachman's "at least a million" to several actual counts from aerial photos between 60,000 and 87,000.
  • The massive innumeracy that equates "thousands of families" with "large majority of the American people." Please divide several thousand by hundreds of millions and show that this is somehow more than half. 87,000 / 330,000,000 = 0.00026 or somewhat less than a majority, however you massage it.
  • The implication that the openly theocratic ideals of the Tea Party are somehow related to common sense. Even Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" argued against a government supported by the church (as is England's).
  • And in totality, the tone that says that the oddball ideals of this group are somehow mainstream. They seem hopeful about Lenin's maxim that a lie told often enough becomes the truth. And the Christian Coalition is all about The Truth.

Continue ReadingScary News from the Christian Coalition

“Retard” and other disability-insults.

The word "retard" possessed dual meanings for a long time. First used as a term for intellectual disability in 1788, the word took on a pejorative sense in the 1970s. For thirty years the two meanings curiously co-existed. Universities had "Mental Retardation and Developmental Disability" Departments and students who drunkenly called one another 'retards' for lobbing bad beer-pong balls, and the two existed in tandem. But once medical and social service experts finally disavowed the word 'retard', it vanished from official usage with amazing swiftness. The Special Olympics ceased using the 'r-word' in 2004, initiating the trend. In 2006, the (former) American Association of Mental Retardation changed its name to the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. By 2008, Special Olympics turned the abolishment of 'retard' into a full-time effort and launched R-word.org. The site protested the derogatory use of 'retard' (including a protest campaign against the 2008 film Tropic Thunder, which featured a lengthy discussion on 'retard' roles in film). Special Olympics and R-word.org also pushed for their fellow disability-service organizations to drop the term. In 2010, 'retard' was legally banished from the professional lexicon. On October 5 of last year, Obama signed "Rosa's Law", which banned the use of "retard" in all federal health, education, and labor policy. "Intellectual disability" and "developmental disability" became the approved nomenclature. Non-federal organizations followed hastily: in Ohio, Google directs you to the "Department of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities", but the website itself has already been scrubbed of the R-word(even if the url still has the dreaded 'r' in it). It's official: 'retard' has no place in formal usage. Once a medical term for someone with an intellectual disability, it lives now only as an insult. One that means, roughly, unintelligent. Like moron, which began as medical terminology for one with a mental age of 8 to 12. Or imbecile, which meant 'a mental age of 6 to 9'.

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Chinks III

Since writing Chinks II, I’ve felt uneasy about calling the Vietnamese workers in that nail salon ‘racists’. It’s true that they pigeonholed an African-American patron as a lazy welfare recipient who was unwilling to get a job. They seemed to take pleasure in voicing all the hurtful stereotypes that could be applied to a total stranger. I found their behavior cruel, terrifying and ironic.

The barb at the heart of Chinks II was minority on minority hate. Yet I described their hate speech as “tittering... nonsensical verbal massaging.” Even if the taunting was meant to be indecipherable, wasn’t I being a bigot myself by writing about it this way?

I can’t think of more alternatives to the pronoun “them.” That’s probably because I don’t know much about the Vietnamese women who taunted a black woman that day. (Here again, I resort to the roughest of rough sketches: “that black lady”). I don’t know their names. I don’t know where they live, although it’s probably not far from my own neighborhood. They are caricatures precisely because I have so few details with which to draw my group character sketch. And what would my cartoon self-portrait look like?

Qipao1

On the day of Chinks II, I was the most socially normative minority in the room. Being light-skinned, speaking with an American accent, growing up in a solidly middle-class household and earning a professional degree all help me to appear more “white” and inviolable. Who knows? It could have been my blessed-in-every-way-second-generation-Chinese-American presence that precipitated the verbal attack that I describe so vehemently. It’s not that I think I am the center of every story; though this story - all the Chinks stories - are about me and my perception of race. Chinks II simply exemplifies the pervasive, insidious, contagious nature of bigotry. This is a barb that hasn’t stopped pricking.

Continue ReadingChinks III