I was watching a re-run of Stephen Colbert last night, the one where he consults with Republican strategist Frank Luntz regarding the message that Colbert Super-Pac wants to sell to the American people: Corporations are people, too.
Luntz is a master of the summing up complex concepts into soundbites.
Let me rephrase that: he’s the master of summing up noxious concepts into palatable soundbites and vice versa (for example, he came up with “death taxes” for estate taxes.)
His phrasing evokes emotional responses. He’s very good at that.
We have to get better. And here’s where this ties in to the current situation in this country.
Occupy Wall Street terrifies the people in charge. After all, there are tens of thousands of people nationwide who are camping, day in and day out, to protest the inherent inequality of income and the inherent unfairness of the US tax code.
I’ve been straining to recall when a Teabagger rally on similar topics lasted for more than a few hours, and that was in clement weather in the spring and summer. These kids have made it through a freak snowstorm and are still hanging in there.
How could the powers that be not be afraid?
Think about that imagery: the right, via their useful idiots and tools, has tried to cast OWS as a bunch of spoiled white lefty brats who’s mommies and daddies cut them out of the will because they were dope-addled and sexually promiscuous (itself, a pretty powerful trope: the scary hippy.)
That imagery, which had some legs at first because of the way the news reported the story (up until the pepper-spray incident,) as a bunch of disgruntled interns and low-level clerical workers with English degrees getting fired and thrown out of their apartments, sort of falls apart after the first week of camp-outs, much less the subsequent brute force by the police, the cooling temperatures, the world-wide solidarity, and the general genial mien taken by the protestors.
The right couldn’t just mash this into the dirt and cover it over, is what I’m saying.
The imagery the OWS folks have out there is now too powerful, and although the colder weather will likely lessen in its impact, it can always be picked up again in the spring. It’s an emotional, gut protest, and people have responded to it.
This is the kind of imagery and argument we need to raise elsewhere. Right now, the craftsmen of the right, like Luntz, have co-opted the dialogue. We need to get it back. But how?
We need to look to marry language to logic, but also to emotions. We need arguments that are so simple and so powerful that they defy rebuttal.
Let’s take the abortion argument for a moment. The single biggest protest in America is the annual March For Life. March for Life attracts upwards of a quarter-million people consistently.
Abortion is an emotional matter for them. We can cite statistics until we’re blue in the face, like how the US birth rate has not declined one bit despite all these “millions of dead babies” (their term,) or we can talk about the improvement in the quality of living the babies which are eventually born not to teenage mothers but to women with jobs and careers and long-term partners will have. Not one second of these arguments will sway a single mind on the right.
And those are perfectly logical arguments. But why not tie those to the alternative: women who spend twenty years in servitude (slavery even) because they’ve made a mistake.
Why not provide imagery, in the form of a counter-protest: get five thousand women to march in torn dirty muslin smocks, chained at the neck and feet with dolls dangling from the other end of those chains?
After all, if the scare tactic of showing photos of an aborted fetus is within bounds for the religious right, then equally alarming and disturbing imagery ought to be utilized in response.
We need to make an emotional case to the American people about the progressive agenda. We don’t have much time and there is much to be done. The nation is heading down a bleak path, even if we can all pull together and we must all pull together or things will get dire, indeed.
”Levying assesments for the monetarily endowed minority of the American citizenry” that sounds allright for an Obama sound byte.
He could not, but my guess is, would not simplify.
Talking like that to a nation that hates intellectuals, is a nice strategy if you want your bills to fail.
“We are the 99%”
Is there anyone who hasn’t heard of that or know exactly what it means? This slogan didn’t even exist 3 months ago, they’ve only been at this for 2 months. Give them room to breathe and grow, they are doing just fine so far.
because they don’t brand themselves that way.
Some of the original tea bag types, before the movement got co-opted, are among that crowd of OWSers.
I did inhale.
please, leave Republican\Democrat out of it. We are far beyond party politics.
And they got it as good as republicans, it’s Obama and his gang thet don’t get it. Why can’t he learn a few tricks from OWS? What the heck is his problem? May be he doen’t perceive he’s got a message problem.
I wish we could leave politics behind, but improving or changing laws and closing loopholes IS a matter of politics not just policy.
in marking them as left leaning they are more able to write them off as bunch of lazy hippies. Luckily the movement recognizes this.
Is nobody doing anything to get rid of those individuals, banks, administrators and their fraudulent methods? It’s been going on for years on ends. If the solution is not political, what can the law do?
Ans is OWS going to force the legislative branch into acting upon these matters? Seems the whole apparutus is paralyzed.
it’s an interesting scene. there is a lot of frustration with getting the process working. But it seems like usually the basic principles that emerge are pretty solid. At the OWS General Assembly a couple nights ago, a Demands group (which has been pretty hard to find the meetings for) floated a proposal to make the big demand basically a WPA program, as well as things like ending all wars.
That is nto really a horrible demand but at the same time it’s also ‘giving away the farm’ mainly for an 80 year old program, which is not really a good tradeoff. I hope that they can develop a better way to intake demand paragraphs from other occupations – more of a modular approach – as well as to get demands to bubble up from the other operations and movement groups. It kind of smelled to me like a very mainstream sort of direction beforehand like 10 days ago, and now it’s not good.
Oh well I will probably try to get up live video of their meetings as I can. They have a group listed on http://NYCGA.NET if you want to check that. Our live video is at http://globalrevolution.tv the global channel, http://livestream.com/occupynyc for the local stuff.
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Hongpong.com
This was my point. I’d like to expand this awareness that OWS has to the general liberal population.
We tend to analyze and intellectualize things. That’s fine but most of the nation, a huge majority which includes other liberals, don’t get that easily, if at all.
We gotta hit them in the breadbasket
Cam from organizations that make the progressives in this nation look like right-wing KKK members.
So left leaning is understating the case. I was being polite.
but life would be so bland without a dash of hypocracy to keep it tasty
If I could wish for one demand, it would be to remove all money from political elections and completely revoke corporate personhood. I’m sure that wouldn’t do it all, but it would be a helluva good first step. If we the people could somehow wrest our govt back from the money tides, we would at least have a chance of doing this peaceably.
I know, good f’n’ luck with that zot23!
Was watching CNN today for a few minutes and they went to a report on the ‘anti-capitalist’ protests.
Carib
that the other part of the problem is the press and that nexts needs to be cleaned up