The Difference Between a Dog Whistle and a History Book
Friday, January 11, 2008

For those of you who participated in last night's Institutional Memory Quiz, the answer is: Adolph Hitler.

One commenter noted: "I didn't want to go there, as the whole Republican=Nazi narrative is insulting to many, but if I am correct I may just weep."

I agree that any sane person would be insulted to be compared to the founder of the Third Reich, and personally, I hate it when terms like "feminazi" and "fascist" get thrown around with abandon (and without any substantiating, factual evidence to back such characterizations) -- and that, my friends, is the difference between a "dog-whistle" and a history book.

You may have seen/heard the term "dog-whistle" quite a bit lately -- it generally refers to the use of a coded phrase which allows the speaker to "signal" a certain meaning to a targeted population which understands this meaning, while maintaining plausible deniability if they are called out.

I'd like to talk about what I call the "pavlovian dog whistle", which is the use of a word or phrase that touches on pre-existing enculturated fears and biases -- I believe that we see a lot of these in the news, and in political speech today.

I believe that this is why the phrase "Homosexual Agenda" works so well to inflame the radical Right.

The word "Homosexual", all on its lonesome, seems to engender a visceral response in those who have been trained, from birth, to believe that homosexuality is Teh Evil (yes, even in me, a die-hard queer).

Quite honestly, I've always found"homosexual" a fairly unpleasant word, in both sound and structure. It has too many syllables, for one thing, yet the first part of it simply cannot roll off the tongue in the light and lilting manner that the greater-syllabled "hetero-" seems to do.

Add to this the fact that, in order to pronounce "homosexual", you have to say the word "homo", which lingers in most English-speaking brains as the most withering school-yard taunt possible -- a word so awful that children had to point out that their milk was "homo"genized, and then dare each other to drink it. Yuk. Yuk.

Take this nasty, dreadful word and tack on the word "Agenda", and Voila! -- you summon the image of meetings, plans, organized action, and the dire plottings of the kids you terrorized on the playground by calling them a "homo", now bent en masse on exacting their revenge.

Now that's scary.

The thing is: There has never, in the history of civilization, been a mass take-over of any country by "homosexuals". Never. Homosexuals have never instigated executions of heterosexuals, or closed down heterosexual night-clubs, or made laws that prohibited heterosexuals from enjoying sex or marriage with their chosen partners. Never. Not once.

There are all sorts of pavlovian dog-whistles out there these days, rousing the hounds who consciously want to continue racism, sexism, antisemitism, and xenophobia -- and worse, evoking responses in people who don't consciously embrace such views, but who may be unaware that certain deeply enculturated biases are being stimulated in them.

I hear them all the time -- the most prominent being: "Be afraid. Be very afraid."

This meme saturates the "news"-media. It doesn't really matter what "they" say, or imply, you "should" be afraid of -- the big black guy, the money-grubbing jew, the conniving woman, the homo who wants to molest your kids, the Muslim terrorist, the illegal-alien -- it just matters that you're afraid.

Some could argue that, by posting my Institutional Memory Quiz, I'm blowing a Bush=Hitler dog-whistle -- however, to me there is a difference, and that difference rests in what I'm asking you to do with the information. I'm asking you to take a look at documented actions of one individual, and compare them to documented actions of another individual -- not so that you will be afraid, not so that you will demonize that individual, but so that you will critically consider those actions, and draw your own correlations and conclusions.

We, as a species, within living memory, have seen actions like these before. Our parents and grandparents can speak to us about the likely consequences of such actions. They can tell us where these roads lead, so that we can take a different path.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ~ George Santayana

Insanity: Doing the same thing and expecting different results.

Posted byPortlyDyke at 11:45 PM 4 comments  

Labels: Institutional Memory, Media Lies, No More Fear, Politics, Queers

Institutional Memory -- A Thing of The Future
Thursday, January 10, 2008

When I was younger (pre-30s), I most often hung around with people who were older than I was, because the people "my age" didn't seem all that interested in what I was interested in (poetry, politics, thinking, etc.)

Now, I find that I often hang around/resonate with people who are younger than I am, because most of the people "my age" don't seem all that interested in what I'm interested in.

I find that many people "my age" are interested primarily in their stocks and bonds, property values, retirement funds, etc. -- even though they used to be hippies (hmmm -- guess I have a judgment about that).

I'm a pretty "live and let live" kind of gal, so I tend to respect their choices, but choose to share my deepest interactions with people who are more interested in personal transformation, evolutionary thinking, etc. (no matter what that might mean for their financial "bottom line").

I know. Call me wacky.

One of the only things that troubles me about interacting with friends who are much younger than I am is this: I've actually watched a half-century pass, and I have (I believe) a few insights about certain things which are cyclic, and things that are truly new.

With my younger friends, I work very hard to not be uber-pendantic about what I affectionately refer to as "institutional memory". At the same time, I sometimes want to wave a big red flag in front of them (about one inch from their eyes) and scream: "Helloooo!!!! This is not a 'new' drama! It's been done!!!"

This relates to both personal and political situations.

I want to learn to share what I know with my younger friends without bludgeoning them over the head with my half-century of experience, and going all "elder" on their asses, because I realize that some/most of them were not even alive during the Nixon era, much less the original moon-walk (not the Michael Jackson version), or JFK's assassination. While most of my younger friends are old enough to have completed college, I realize that many of them may not have studied history in any real depth.

However --for friends who are my age or older I find that I don't have as much tolerance for their "institutional amnesia". I want to say: "Hey! Eyes up here!! Wake up! We've been through this before. Don't you remember?"

I do tend to grant some level of dispensation to those who have had "conversion" experiences over the past half-century -- people who started out as die-hard conservatives and later became die-hard liberals -- folks who used to think that life was simply suffering, but who now realize that life could just be an amazing circus ride -- people who didn't have a clue about why civil rights were important for everyone, but who had an awakening that brought them to the understanding that "if anyone is oppressed, everyone is oppressed" -- stuff like that -- because I realize that there may be nuances to past situations that were completely transparent to them at the time, and in some arenas of society, there have been a fuck of a lot of changes since 1956.

However.

If you're over the age of 30, you've been able to buy booze since 1998, and able to vote since 1995. You were at least a teenager when the first "Gulf War" was fought.

If you're over the age of 40, you were a legal adult by 1985, so you witnessed the craptacticness of "Reaganomics".

If you're over the age of 50, you were a legal adult by 1975, and . Etc., etc., etc..

If you were college-educated, you had ample opportunity to study history.

So, I thought I'd come up with a little "Institutional Memory Test", to help oldsters sharpen up their skills, and give the youngsters the benefit of my rather long and jaded memory, plus my mad history skillz.

1. Prior to George W. Bush, what other democratically elected leader of a western nation did all of the below:
   
   
   • Was elected to office without the majority of the popular vote, due to oddities of "proportional voting" schemes.
   
   
   • Circumvented previous protections in the national constitution which allowed infringement on the privacy of personal communications of the citizens of his nation (post, telegraph, and telephone).
   
   
   • Initiated a war on foreign soul against a nation that had never attacked his country.
   
   
   • Permitted the use of enhanced/sharpened "interrogation" techniques such as 1) sleep deprivation, 2) exhaustion exercises, 3) darkened cells, and 4) physical brutality as long as a doctor was present for some types of physical brutality, in the case that "the prisoner can give information about important facts, connections or plans hostile to the state or the legal system".
   
   Please pick up your pencils and begin now. You have 15 minutes.
   

Posted byPortlyDyke at 10:30 PM 9 comments  

Labels: Institutional Memory, Politics

The Bless-ed Balm of Truth
Monday, July 2, 2007

I had this great post in my head last night, all about the wash of relief I experienced after reading some great posts over at Shakespeare's Sister on the rather transparent attempts by the MSM to continue the Campaign to Terrorize America, and how important it is that each of us resist these attempts.

Today, after reading the news about Scooter Libby's commutation, I almost got dismal enough to abandon hope and put my post aside.

However, I think that today's events only heighten my sense of how crucial this issue really is.

The constant hammering of the MSM's message that the world is a "dangerous" place, that our families are in peril every moment, and that the "others" (and they are legion, those "others" -- other races, other religions, other genders, other orientations) are out to get "our" stuff, "our" jobs, "our" nation, "our" values -- this barrage of crap is, in my opinion, simply designed to turn the viewer/reader/listener into a paranoid, dis-empowered, quivering mass of paralyzed inertia.

And I'm not buying it.

In my own life, I've worked with a number of strategies to handle "MSM Infections"

I've gone on hard-core "media fasts".

I've listened to/watched/read MSM, but only while I played "Death and Destruction Bingo" (a game where you make a hash-mark on your score card every time the announcer uses a word like "crisis", or "mayhem", or "tragedy", or "threat").

I invented Death and Destruction Bingo in 1999, while listening to a radio report about a plane crash in which there was no suspicion of a bombing. While reporting this, the newscaster managed to say the word "bomb" over 45 times in a five-minute report. Just so -- you know -- we wouldn't be worried that there was a bomb on the plane.

Capitalizing on "Bad News" is nothing new for mainstream newspapers, radio, or television news. However, in the "olden days", I was always told "Don't believe everything you read in the papers, kid."

Last summer, my Dad said to me "Well, you know we're already in World War III".

"Really?" I replied, "Where'd you hear that?"

"It was on the radio," he replied.

Wow. This from the guy who told me: "Don't believe everything you read in the papers, kid."

A spiritual teacher once pointed out to me that, although we are constantly told how much more violent, and awful, and horrible our world is today, if we looked back a mere 60 years and compared it at a purely logical level:

• 1942 -- World War II involved nearly every nation on the planet (only 8 nations were actually considered true "neutrals") -- Casualties conservatively were figured at 61 million people (probably more like 72 million), and the majority of people on the planet were actually feeling pretty consolidated about the idea that this war must be fought.
  
• 2002 -- According to Wikipedia, there are currently 29 ongoing armed conflicts going on in the world. War death-rates globally for the years 1998 - 2002 are estimated at 1.5 million according to the Human Security Report. And the majority of people on the planet are actually feeling pretty consolidated about the idea that war, in general, is a stupid fucking waste of resources and lives.

The point that the teacher made was that these statistics would seem to indicate that we are becoming less violent, rather than more violent. He also pointed out that, on the streets of the town where I currently reside -- 100 years ago people walked down the street with loaded guns on their hips, 50 years ago, people beat their children in public, and 25 years ago, apartheid still existed in South Africa.

Actually, I encourage you to go and take a good long look at the Human Security Report. It's a refreshing view from someone other than the MSM -- to me, it's all about the reality of our evolution as a species.

Supposition: If humans were just vile, destructive, nasty creatures, and if our population had tripled since 1950, then wouldn't it stand to reason that our vileness, destructiveness, and nastiness would have grown exponentially as well?

You probably know by now that I am a pacifist and an advocate of non-violence. I think one tiny bit of war is too much -- I want the troops out of Iraq right now -- all of them. I don't post this to encourage you to become complacent, or accept the 1.5 million deaths that have occurred as an acceptable ratio just because it speaks to a possible proof of our collective spiritual evolution. I just wanted to provide another perspective here -- one that flies in the face of the attempts of the media machine to terrorize you.

I believe that the MSM would really love for you to believe that your neighbor is dangerous, your neighboring nation is dangerous, and that planet over there is dangerous. I believe that the MSM would really like you to believe that you are fucked no matter what you do -- that you are an insignificant, ineffective bit of flotsam floating on the tide of "circumstances beyond your control".

I don't believe it though. I want to encourage you not to believe it either. I agree with William Wolfrum -- it's time for America to deal with it's fear addiction.

My new motto: Fear -- Just Say No.

Posted byPortlyDyke at 7:42 PM 3 comments  

Labels: Consciousness, Hope, Institutional Memory, Media Lies, No More Fear, Politics, Truth