I'm still grokking the world I inhabited yesterday, in which I saw "Farenheit 9/11" with my daughter and came home to watch an hour or so of the Democratic Convention on broadcast TV.
The puzzle to us is why George Bush has such a loyal following. What do these people see that we can't? Michael Moore highlights this question well, simply by following scenes of anguish and carnage in Iraq with a segue to Britney Spears saying earnestly, "I think we should trust our President," or something to that effect.
It's so...high-school.
High-school. Traditional 50's-era memory-glorified high-school.
Linguists say that we individuals each maintain hundreds or thousands of dialects in our cognitive database, and answer within the appropriate dialect according to the situation we find ourselves in. I've often perceived an extension of this, in that the dialect just as likely predicates the actual response--its content as well as the style of the language. It's how our knowledge is stored: within our interactions with each other.
George Bush's mannerisms and capabilities seem to me to correspond to the successful high-school president or team captain. At that level, he would be a success. That's the level at which he functions, and, while so many of us are constantly appalled at his inappropriatness as a leader in the world, others may be (unconsciously) soothed and reassured as he fulfils familiar patterns of their primal experience.
So, is a "conservative" someone who reveres and operates within and hearkens to the shared ideal of 50's high-school behavior and a "liberal" someone who reveres and operates within and hearkens to the archetype of the 70's college student?
Maybe it's as simple as identifying the subset of those Americans who center their behavior in Philosophic cognitive patterns (Does this align with conservative?) and those who center their behavior in Ironic cognitive patterns (Does this align with liberal?).
1 comment:
I think the first problem as to why you don't understand is because you seem to think that Farenheit 9/11 is something more than fiction?! Michael Moore had more errors and out-and-out lies in that movie than anything else. So if you use that joke of a movie as a standard to understand the president or anyone else, no wonder you're at a loss.
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