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Metaphors We Frame By - GNR for Bluesday, December 13th [1]
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Date: 2022-12-13
Over the course of the years since I became politically aware, I’ve searched religiously for ways to explain the open perfidy of the conservative movement, as it has morphed from the dignity and humanity of Eisenhower to the vast criminal conspiracies and explicit promotion of hatred under the former guy.
When George Lakoff and Mark Johnson released Metaphors We Live By*, back in 1980, they made the case that our pervasive use of metaphor is the way we make sense of complicated subjects. The premise is that we use what we know from our direct physical and social experience to interpret the abstract and complex. Economic policy is often explained using war or healthcare as a vehicle (“the war against inflation,” or “the economy is sick”).
We do this all the time when discussing republican malfeasance.
Republicans are like plaque in our country’s arterial system. They are inhibiting finding solutions to serious problems by clogging up the works and doing their best to stop all forward motion. Progressives are national anti-oxidants, working hard to to breakthrough the build up.
Republicans are clogs in the country’s plumbing system. Democrats are the Roto-Rooter™ workers charged with the task of cleaning up the mess.
Trickle-down and supply-side are just voodoo economics, sticking pins in Uncle Sam to cripple the Middle Class.
Republicans are the tether balls of political sport. They exist solely to be swatted into a brief orbital circuit, always arriving back where they began, never progressing into the field.
Elephants are supposed to have incredible memories. Republicans can’t even remember their oaths of office. They need a new and more appropriate mascot — I think Covid-19 is available.
Metaphors we frame by are what drive many of our punchlines.
Republican office holders are what happens when you give power to the village idiot.
How wide is the intellectual gap between MAGA nation and a bag of hammers? The hammers are Rhodes scholars to the MAGA nursery school dropouts.
Republican are so into doubling down, that when they shoot themselves in the foot, they end up blowing off their entire leg (and now they’ve started using Russian artillery to do the shooting).
When arrogance feasts on stupidity and bigotry, it shits out republicans.
The astute reader (that’s all of you, of course) will wonder why republicans aren’t desperately seeking to use the same linguistic tactic to improve their political standing. The short answer is they want to. But, they've boxed themselves into a corner, as their entire messaging strategy is built around demonizing progressives by fomenting fear and uncertainty. That is to say, their musical scale has but one note, their color palate is monochrome, and their pony only ever learned the one trick. Lies and distortions are used instead of rational argument. They are too busy repeating false claims of non-existent economic prowess, demonstrably empty claims of support for Law & Order, and ludicrous misstatements about our founding documents. They are not a group of innovative thinkers seeking to adapt and overcome. They can’t afford to alienate their base, so they’ll keep playing the same tired refrain until they fade back into the swamp from which they spawned.
Looking forward, part of our task as we gear up for another election cycle is to search to find useful metaphor(s) that resonate positively with the majority of American voters. Not every construction will reach every voter, so the job is to be on point and pithy without being pedantic, preachy, or pretentious.
We have the power. We have the ability. We can and we will do this.
Slava Ukraini!
Remember the Children
Screw you, Samuel Alito
Stray Thought: In this holiday season, as we watch all the flop sweat streaming from enlarged republican pores, would it be correct to refer to them as self-basting lie gobblers? After all, they’ve proven themselves to be a large flock of overfed turkeys several times over.
Another Stray Thought: Remember when tfg was ranting about that 400lb. guy sitting in his grandmother’s basement, making up lies? I think he was calling Elon Musk fat.
*Metaphors We Live By is my favorite book about Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. I highly recommend it. It is very approachable for non-linguists.
Stephen has some fun at Empty Greene’s expense
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Seth had some thoughts about Greene as well.
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How about a little holiday(ish) music before we examine the news?
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All the news that fits.
There Is No Way Kevin Is Sleeping Well
Being a moral coward has its downside. McCarthy is in the throes of that downside right now. He’s busy selling whatever dregs of humanity he has left, after he already forfeit his soul to tfg, in the hope he can become speaker.
While all this is still puppet theatre until those votes actually happen on January 3rd, the optics of
republicans in disarray is consuming media cycles that would otherwise be spend bashing Biden. That’s a good thing. Every single bit of self-immolative extremism performed by the Reich Wing fringe is another nail in the coffin of the republican party. “Carry on,” I say, “Carry on!”
This particular slant on McCarthy’s nightmare is being reported by conservative leaning source, The Hill.
The Hill: Emily Brooks: Behind-the-scenes hunt builds for McCarthy Speaker alternative
Searches for a Speaker alternative to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) are slowly building momentum as he faces opposition that threatens to sink his bid. On one side, McCarthy’s fiercest detractors are teasing that there are people interested in being a viable GOP consensus substitute for the current minority leader. On the other, members say preliminary conversations are happening among Republicans and Democrats about a possible contingency candidate if McCarthy cannot win the gavel after multiple ballots in the new GOP-majority House next month.✂️ “If somebody were to come out now and we didn’t deliver enough votes to stop Mr. McCarthy, that there would be a real potential for blowback,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), a former chair of the House Freedom Caucus who has mounted a protest challenge to McCarthy for the House GOP nomination, a bid he is continuing as he searches for an alternative. “They want to be very careful. So I think I think people are interested. They’ve expressed it to some of us … I think people are being wary.”
Cannon Got Spanked and Returned to Her Room
Another obstacle overcome. Another delay removed. I wonder how uncomfortable is was for Cannon to be forced to vacate her rulings and dismiss tfg’s lawsuit.
Unrelated aside: Looking back, I’m kind of surprised tfg didn’t have Tom DeLay on his team of advisors. He checked all the boxes — disgraced politician, crooked to the core and he is named after tfg’s favorite legal tactic.
Ok, back to Cannon. One thing is clear — she is not a judicial Canon and has no business on the bench. Here’s hoping she gets relegated to an office in a converted broom closet and is only allowed to preside over cases involving unpaid parking fines.
Vanity Fair: Bess Levin: Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Special Master Gambit Comes to Sad Little Conclusion
Ten days after an appeals court issued a scathing ruling saying the federal judge who intervened on Donald Trump’s behalf to appoint a special master in the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case had no authority to do so, the ex-president’s attempt to jam up the investigation into the Justice Department’s criminal probe has come to an end. On Monday, that judge, Aileen Cannon, officially dismissed Trump’s lawsuit challenging the August search of Mar-a-Lago, which had led to the appointment of special master Raymond Dearie and temporarily blocked prosecutors from using the classified documents seized during the FBI search as part of their investigation. In a one-page order, Cannon wrote that she was throwing out the case due to “lack of jurisdiction.” As CNN notes, the move “now gives the Justice Department full access to tens of thousands of records and other items found among documents marked as classified in Trump’s beach club and private office.” The appeals court ruling, which came earlier this month, was seen as a clear victory for the Justice Department and an obvious defeat for both Trump and Cannon. The opinion, issued by a three-judge panel of conservatives—two of whom were appointed by none other than Trump—excoriated Cannon, calling her installation of the special master a “dramatic and unwarranted” intervention that was not hers to make. As legal journalist Chris Geidner put it, “I would simply not leave the house ever again if a panel of fellow-traveler judges did this to me in an opinion.” In perhaps a sign of just how thoroughly the appeals court upbraided Cannon, and made it clear Trump did not deserve the treatment she afforded him, the ex-president did not appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, which he had the option to do. Previously, Cannon had delivered major legal wins for Trump, the first one being when she blocked the DOJ from using the classified documents the FBI had seized as part of their probe into the ex-president, and the second one being when she told the ex-president he didn’t have to follow the special master’s orders.
Reading the Tea Leaves
I have no clue what specifically prompted this move. I just hope it’s because he’s afraid of shifting opinions inside Russia. His exit from the world stage is long overdue (much like that of his bevy of American proteges).
Politico: Wilhelmina Preussen: Putin cancels year-end address for first time in a decade
Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t hold his traditional year-end press conference for the first time in at least a decade as Russian troops continue to lose ground in Ukraine.✂️ The annual event has in the past run on for hours, offering Putin the opportunity to display his mastery of policy and his grip on power on live national TV. The event often had a festive atmosphere, with regional journalists holding up signs to catch Putin’s attention. Surprise questions were, however, a rarity. Putin, who turned 70 in November, is also at the center of intense speculation over his health — and was seen swaying on camera in a public appearance earlier this week. Aides have repeatedly denied that he is unwell.
There Really Is No Bottom
Even though Lauren Boebert is ready to take up Louie Gohmert’s mantle as the dumbest member of Congress, Empty Greene is out there in Crazytown, trying very hard to carve out a reputation as Congress’ most stupid shameless panderer. She may think she’s gaining points by throwing red meat to her base, but she’s also throwing evidence to a potential grand jury. Calling for armed insurrection is, wait for it, … insurrection. Her pivot to McCarthy and the middle didn’t even last for half of a Scaramucci.
Slate: Ben Mathis-Lilley: Marjorie Taylor Greene Says Jan. 6 Insurrection Should Have Been Armed
Very recently—three days ago, in fact—a top priority of Republicans in Congress was to communicate that the party does not want to ally with white supremacists to overthrow the government, a clarification that was necessary because Donald Trump recently had dinner with two high-profile advocates of Nazism (Ye and Nick Fuentes) and then said that the Constitution should be terminated in order to restore his presidency. One surprising participant in the disavowal of the far right was Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. She went out of her way to tell reporters that she was shocked by Fuentes’ extreme beliefs and, separately, that she supports current Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Speaker of the House candidacy. (McCarthy is what passes for a “mainstream” Republican in the House at the moment, and he is being challenged by more-hard-line MAGA members.)✂️ Overthrowing the government was also a theme of Greene’s speech to the assembled group, SPLC reports, quoting her as saying that if she and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon had “organized” the Jan. 6 riot, “we would have won,” and “it would have been armed.” (Bannon, who was also present, has a long association with the white supremacist movement as well; he has, for example, repeatedly endorsed The Camp of the Saints, a novel about race war popular among neo-Nazis.) The event’s organizer, New York Young Republican Club president Gavin Wax, said at the event that Republicans “must be prepared to do battle in every arena,” including “in the streets.”
There was some pushback from the White House (crickets from republicans). Greene claimed she was being sarcastic and that the White House should learn about how sarcasm works. I don’t think Greene has even the tiniest clue what sarcastic means.
Huffington Post: Lydia O’Connor: White House Slams Marjorie Taylor Greene For Saying She'd Have 'Won' Jan. 6 Riot
The White House on Monday condemned Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for her recent boast that if she’d been in charge of organizing last year’s violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, people would have shown up armed and “won.” Greene’s remarks, deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement, are a “slap in the face” to the law enforcement officers who risked their lives to keep members of Congress safe during the attack. “It goes against our fundamental values as a country for a Member of Congress to wish that the carnage of January 6th had been even worse, and to boast that she would have succeeded in an armed insurrection against the United States government,” Bates said.
That Exceedingly Fine Grind Is Almost Ready to Percolate
On one side of the room we have all the folks who are stuck in a “They always get away with everything” loop of pessimistic defeatism, squawking about how Merrick Garland is protecting tfg. On the other side of the room we have hope and the promise of justice. I know which side of the room I’m in. By the way, Jack Smith lives in the promise of justice side of the room.
Raw Story: Tom Boggioni: Special counsel Jack Smith is already 'moving fast' on Trump criminal probes much differently than Robert Mueller: report
According to a report from CNN, newly appointed special counsel Jack Smith has hit the ground running after taking over at least two criminal probes into Donald Trump's links to the Jan. 6 insurrection and his hiding of government documents at Mar-a-Lago. As the report notes, Smith will not follow in the footsteps of former special counsel Robert Mueller in how he deals with Trump's criminality and will instead conduct in the management style of a U.S. Attorney. CNN reports, "Smith takes over a staff that’s already nearly twice the size of Robert Mueller’s team of lawyers who worked on the Russia probe. A team of 20 prosecutors investigating January 6 and the effort to overturn the 2020 election is in the process of moving to work under Smith, according to multiple people familiar with the team," before adding, "According to several people familiar with his appointment, Smith will operate more like a US Attorney – managing an existing team of career prosecutors already working on the cases, and signing off on evidence they bring him – rather than as a de facto-department head like Mueller, who tapped several lawyers from outside the Justice Department to pursue parts of the Russia investigation from scratch."
The Year in Review
Oh, hell! It’s that time of year. We are about to be inundated with endless articles summarizing the events of the past year. Fair use compelled me to omit the sections about the other four notorious face-planters. In case your were wondering and aren’t planning to read the entire article, they were 5. — Kari Lake; 4. — Doctor Oz; 3. — Herschel Walker; and 2. — Stewart Rhodes.
Salon: Amanda Marcotte: 2022 was a bad year for MAGA Republicans: Here are the GOP's 5 biggest faceplants
Indictment Insight
Howell has already ruled against the contempt motion, but these points are still valid. If you are on indictment watch, here’s a few little tidbits to help you while away the hours.
The Bulwark: Lawrence H. Tribe, Dennis Aftergut: What the New Trump Contempt Motion Tells Us About the Mar-a-Lago Documents Prosecution
The Justice Department’s contempt motion against the Office of Donald Trump—being heard today in Washington, D.C. behind the closed courtroom doors of U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell—tells us three things, regardless of how Judge Howell rules. First, Special Counsel Jack Smith has plainly lost patience with former President Donald Trump’s lawlessness. Second, it’s even safer now than it was days ago to expect Smith to indict Trump. Few things motivate prosecutors more than contempt for the law and especially for grand jury investigations. Third, it’s also safe to expect that indictment to come in Washington rather than in Florida, where Trump improperly kept government documents after he left office. They included some of the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets.
A View from a Recovering Republican
When republicans wake up from their dazed and glazed state of acceptance of all things (R), they can be very insightful about their former belief system.
Salon: Rich Logis: A prayer before dying: On the Republican Party's terminal illness
The Republican Party is terminally ill, and most of its voters are oblivious to this fact.✂️ The irrefutable fact is: the Republican Party appealed (habitually, I talk of the party in the past tense) to those who think moving backward is moving forward. Whether that means looking to an imaginary version of 1776, the "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy, the 1950s as America's apogee of greatness or relitigating the 2020 election, the entire GOP product is backward-facing. I know this oh so well, having been politically traumatized myself, by the GOP's offering; and having spent considerable time, for years, among similarly traumatized fellow Republicans, convinced I was one of the "real Americans" prepared to water the trees of liberty with the blood of my mortal enemies. Everyone had better understand what "make America great again" really means.✂️ The GOP has not been an active or proactive political force for years. It is reactive and reactionary — it adopted the politically traumatizing, hysterical and paranoid mythologies disseminated throughout the right-wing infotainment system, often crafted in the deepest and darkest bowels of the rabbit-holed internet, and then regurgitated them. No politically traumatizing pundit on the right ever said, "As Ted Cruz" — or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Donald Trump or whoever else — "so eloquently put it"; rather, the so-called "leaders" of the GOP simply inhaled the vapors of the politically traumatizing Murdoch/Breitbart/Alex Jones propaganda abattoirs and responded accordingly.
Remembering Andy Borowitz
I remembered to include another Andy Borowitz article. It was close, but the streak of including Borowitz articles remains intact. Whew!
The New Yorker: Satire from the Borowitz Report: Nation Shocked to Learn That Kyrsten Sinema Had Been a Democrat
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Across the country, Americans awoke on Friday to the shocking news that Kyrsten Sinema had been a Democrat. In interviews from coast to coast, citizens expressed a combination of puzzlement and disbelief at the bombshell that the Arizona senator had had any sort of affiliation with the Democratic Party. “I saw her on TV saying that she had been a Democrat, but maybe she misspoke?” Tracy Klugian, who lives in Miami, said. “Politicians mess up like that all the time.” “I’m definitely going to have to Google ‘Kyrsten Sinema’ and ‘Democrat,’ ” Carol Foyler, a resident of St. Louis, said. “It seems like some kind of a hoax.”
Potential for the Future
This is a big deal. But, before you rip off your clothes and run naked through the streets, screaming, “Eureka!”, they only managed to generate enough excess energy to boil a few pots of water and the entire duration of the experiment was only a few seconds long. There’s some work on scaling to do before this is ready for the real world.
CNN: Ella Nilsen, René Marsh: US scientists reach long-awaited nuclear fusion breakthrough, source says
For the first time ever, US scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net energy gain, a source familiar with the project confirmed to CNN. The US Department of Energy is expected to officially announce the breakthrough Tuesday. The result of the experiment would be a massive step in a decadeslong quest to unleash an infinite source of clean energy that could help end dependence on fossil fuels. Researchers for decades have attempted to recreate nuclear fusion – replicating the fusion that powers the sun. US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will make an announcement Tuesday on a “major scientific breakthrough,” the department announced Sunday. The breakthrough was first reported by the Financial Times.
This Is Neither Good nor Bad, Just Interesting
I’ve been interested in linguistics most of my adult life. I once did some research on cross-cultural cursing in Europe, so I found this interesting. I hope some of you might find this of interest as well.
Scientific American: Emily Willingham: The Linguistics of Swearing Explain Why We Substitute Darn for Damn
When Douglas Adams’s U.S. publisher asked him to substitute something less offensive for the f-word in in his novel Life, the Universe, and Everything (one of the sequels to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Adams made a cheeky decision to swap in the name of an entire country with a reputation for maintaining a diplomatic middle ground. A new linguistic analysis suggests that the choice Adams made—substituting in the word “Belgium” at every instance—may unconsciously have reflected a cross-language pattern of using certain consonant sounds to soften “taboo” words. The findings, published on December 6 in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, support the idea that speakers may euphemize swear words, or “mince oaths”—think using “darn” for “damn”—by substituting harder consonant sounds with softer ones known as approximants. The pattern was detectable among speakers of several different languages, hinting at a possible universality to softening swears by swapping in more subtle sounds.✂️ But the sounds in “taboo words” tend to be specific to a given language and not to show the same pattern for similar words in another language. English, for example, relies on “k,” “t” and “p” in such words (you can probably think of a few that contain these consonants), yet that’s not necessarily a pattern in other languages. The surprise with these new findings, Bergen says “is that this is the first time someone has documented a [sound symbolism] effect with something as abstract as taboo language” across different languages. Using less harsh sounds to mince oaths could be related to mitigating the intended force behind the words. The results may have more general implications and “raise questions about whether words that serve other communicative functions” also might share patterns among different languages, he says.
Finish on a High Note
Going back to the moon 50 years later. How cool is that?
NPR: Ashley Ahn: NASA's Artemis I returns from the moon with hopes to get astronauts back there soon
NASA's new multibillion-dollar spacecraft successfully returned from the moon Sunday, taking the agency one step closer to getting U.S. astronauts back on the moon by 2025. The Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California at 9:40 a.m. PT, marking a successful phase one of NASA's Artemis program. Artemis 1 traveled 1.4 million miles, circling the moon, and returned within 25 and a half days, a feat no other human-rated spacecraft has achieved. Robert D. Cabana, NASA's associate administrator, said aside from a few minor glitches along the way, the spacecraft performed "flawlessly." The capsule performed a "skip entry" descent where it dipped in and out of the atmosphere to slow down the vehicle before re-entry. This type of descent will provide data for splashdown sites for future crewed missions, NASA spokesperson Rob Navias said on NASA's live stream on Sunday.
Musical Interlude
Playing for Change’s Songs Around the World are way up high on my listen/watch list. Music brings us together.
I sat my little child down
When he was old enough to know
I said I fell in this big wide world
You're gonna be all kinda froze
I said son it all comes down to just one simple rule
That you treat everybody just the way
You want them to treat you
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Ukrainian Music
DakhaBrakha gives us a gift of Shakespeare swaddled in Ukrainian wrapping paper.
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On the Lighter Side (with an Edge)
Closing Notes
Today we’ll end with the Dead’s cover of Bonnie Dotson’s 1962 contemporary folk, post-apocalyptic lament, Morning Dew. The Dead included this on their first album in 1967
Where have all the people gone my honey
Where have all the people gone today
There's no need for you to be worrying about all those people
You never see those people anyway
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[END]
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