And now the red ones make me fly And the blue ones help me fall

Gary Farber is chronicling the phenomenon of America's Learned Helplessness, which is what happens when you have the Anti-Roosevelt in the White House. (via Avedon) Dr. Renata Brooks warned us about this over five years ago.

Poll after poll demonstrates that Bush's political agenda is out of step with most Americans' core beliefs. Yet the public, their electoral resistance broken down by empty language and persuaded by personalization, is susceptible to Bush's most frequently used linguistic technique: negative framework. A negative framework is a pessimistic image of the world. Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners' minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from advertising and hypnosis to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us. Catastrophic words and phrases are repeatedly drilled into the listener's head until the opposition feels such a high level of anxiety that it appears pointless to do anything other than cower.

Good news!  The antidote is hope.

DR. TIMOTHY WEBER: Calamity and disaster, threats, potential disasters, war. This is how they [Armageddonists] said it would look and this is how most people see the world today.

BILL MOYERS: It seems to be on the front page of THE NEW YORK TIMES playing out what they've read in the Bible.

RABBI MICHAEL LERNER: I think the dispensationalists are onto something. They have a sense, they just have the wrong analysis of why it's all going to end.

BILL MOYERS: But what do you mean they're onto something?

RABBI MICHAEL LERNER: They are onto the growing depression that people are feeling, a deep emotional depression in the United States -- a lack of any hopeful picture of what the world could be.  And that failure is not a failure of dispensationalists, it's a failure of the mainstream political framework in this country that-- to address the major questions facing the world in the 21st century.

Which is enough of a reason to become an Obamabot.  (Until he's elected and then it's all about  unrelenting pressure from the left, I swear.)

Comments

[yonick]

"Which is enough of a reason to become an Obamabot"

Yes! I was getting worried about casa de factesque. He may disappoint us, but let's get him elected and THEN start in.

-johnny a-list

[eRobin]

My fear is that people on the Left will never start in and stay in Protect the Candidate mode at all costs.

[mick arran]

Good point. One of the side effects of the all-out assault on Clinton has been to make liberals reluctant to push from the left. Understandable but we need to remember that one of the things that got Bush elected was "unity at any price" by a GOP that refused to question its own candidate. Yeah, he got elected but look what "unity" cost the country. The planet, fer chrissake.

And I think Rob's right - again, because of Clinton lefties are going to be very protective of BO even after he wins and very slow to recognize, much less admit, that the man in whom they've invested all their energy and hope is just another politician who talks better than average but doesn't do hardly anything to rock the corporate/conservative boat.

I think a much better strategy is to support him conditionally with a number of fundamental (meaning everybody can agree on them) ifs. If he works to undo the recent crippling of the Bill of Rights, for example.