My problem with Lakoff

[eridani]

I think that the whole 'framing' issue has been seriously compromised by the success of the corporate media in, above all, making so many people passive. That way the first step in reaching them is couched in terms of political parties framing their issues as if the government is supposed to be our parent.

I think what we should be looking for instead is adulthood. The government isn't really supposed to be our parent, whether nurturing or strict. WE are supposed to be the government! That is we, as equal adults, consulting with each other about how to manage the public sphere. (Given that these management tasks are specialized, in practice it means overseeing the practices of those specialists.)The Repubs, of course, think that the public sphere shouldn't really exist except to transfer as many public goods as possible to their private cronies.

A framing that I particularly like--

http://www.counterpunch.org/smith05052003.html

'Customer' and 'consumer' were not the only words being used to change the nature of citizenship. David Kemmis, the mayor of Missoula, MT, pointed out that the word 'taxpayer' now "regularly holds the place which in a true democracy would be occupied by 'citizen.' Taxpayers bear a dual relationship to government, neither half of which has anything at all to do with democracy. Taxpayers pay tribute to the government and they receive services from it. So does every subject of a totalitarian regime. What taxpayers do not do, and what people who call themselves taxpayers have long since stopped even imagining themselves doing, is governing."

Then there was growing use of the term "stakeholder" that covertly diminished the citizens' role to that of a minor participant. Ironically, 'stakeholder' literally means a person who holds the money while two other people bet. Whoever wins, the stakeholder gets nothing.

Another phrase that started cropping up was 'civil society,' a patronizing description of people who, in a democracy, are meant to be running the place. The term has come to used in elite circles with roughly the same condescension of a bishop talking about a church altar guild.