It was 2007 in Northern California, so the months and seasons meshed into one long May. Restlessness dragged me out of a bar on College Avenue in Rockridge and into a bookstore. Before I could begin to leer at the racks, a talk began.
George Lakoff was giving a brief introduction to his latest book, Thinking Points.
The next thirty minutes changed my mind. Politics — a subject I devoted much of my free time and brain matter since I was a seven-year-old Alex P. Keaton wannabe— finally made some sense.
The strict-father/nurturing parent dichotomy he presented, with a quick introduction about metaphors starring Anna Nicole Smith, helped explain to me how we ended up with a “decider” as president who was failing in every possible way without the slightest acknowledgement of fault. It also promised a way out without having to fumble around sifting for compromises in polls.
I wish I could say that I’ve taken everything I learned from reading and listening to Lakoff in practice. The truth is that almost no one has. At least, not yet. The bi-conceptual nature of real media generally gets drowned out or dragged along by the uncompromising nature of the strict-father media, built for scolding us into oblivion.
However, heading into an election that will decide if we will falter and lose our freedoms because we destroyed ourselves, the work of George Lakoff that has continued on through the
with Gil Duran matters more than ever.That’s why I’m proud to have published two pieces in FrameLab that do my best to make sense of how to use our brains to get out of the helping Donald Trump and/or Elon Musk business.
Here’s the gist of the two pieces. Please click on either to read more. And subscribe to
if you haven’t!