Discontented Soul

Beyond Lakoff’s Strict Father vs. Nurturant Parent, A Strong Community Manifesto
by Frances Moore Lappé
Published on Thursday, May 26, 2005 by Guerrilla News Network

George Lakoff’s new best-seller Don’t Think of an Elephant has been heralded as the “bible” for battered progressives searching for direction in the post-election doldrums. Lakoff himself has become the Left’s answer to Frank Luntz, the focus-group genius behind the branding of Bush’s “death tax,” “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” initiatives.
“Frames,” according to Lakoff, are the key to understanding how political ideas are received. Human beings don’t absorb information as raw material; we sift input through frames of meaning carried in the language we use.
Lakoff’s central idea is that conservatives see the world through a “strict father” frame emphasizing discipline, self-reliance, forceful defense, while progressives see the world through a “nurturant parent” frame—supportive, nourishing, emphasizing mutual responsibility. Lakoff claims that thirty-five to 40 percent of Americans fall into each camp, although most are some sort of mix.
The Right, Lakoff points out, is extremely good at selling their policies in clear, easy to understand “strict father” frames. Progressives, on the other hand, too often seem to offer laundry lists of issues lacking any overarching moral framework...
But two big dangers loom.
First: Too narrowly focusing on getting the frame right might delude progressives into believing that’s all they need to win, since we all share a common, democratic playing field...
Time to grow up
Second, the frame Lakoff identifies with progressives – “nurturant parent” – itself needs critical thought.
Nurturant parent – what could be worse for progressives?
They’re already stereotyped as coddlers of the lazy poor; dubbed “bleeding hearts” who refuse to require people to take responsibility for themselves. A nurturant parent framing may confirm the caricature. Lakoff is careful to distinguish his parent model from “mother,” but I fear it is too easily received as a soft mother alternative to strict father.
The question few seem to be asking is: Are “strict father” (Right) versus “nurturant parent” (Left) our only choices, or can we move beyond the nuclear family metaphors?
If the Left is indeed stuck with nuclear-family metaphors, they’re seriously out of luck; in scary times like these “strong father” will win out over what is seen as “soft mother” every time. Thankfully, the narrow, Western psychoanalytic, nuclear-family frame itself is becoming dated.
Maybe we’re entering a new stage that has much in common with eras before the invention of the nuclear family. Maybe, in many respects, we’re moving beyond hierarchy, which any parent-centered frame necessarily must be. Big shifts are underway:...
Any parent frame fails the test; it is inevitably one-directional, and hierarchical. So let’s bury the family metaphor and search for a more robust frame—one that suggests communities that work for all because they are connected, responsible, compassionate and therefore strong...
A New Frame: Strong Communities
In times of war, when fear is being consciously stoked to keep a populace in “freeze” mode, the Right’s strict father frame carries strong appeal. Fearful creatures duck for cover. We try to cast out those who might rock the boat. Frightened, we look for a strong protector. And this is precisely why progressives must not fall back on nurturing themes...

Let’s salute George Lakoff and his colleagues for rallying progressives to frame our “issues” in a compelling moral vision. But rather than reacting to the “strict father” frame by searching for a better use of a “nurturing parent” frame, let’s reframe the entire conversation to one that begins with a definition of citizens as responsible grown-ups, not helpless children. In this progressive moral vision we strive to live in strong communities—safer and more viable than ones that rely on a strict father, who on deeper examination may turn out to be only a stubborn loner, a bully bringing on the very threats from which he claims to protect us?
Let’s choose frames that capture what most people intuit: We all share one small – shrinking – planet, and our real hope therefore lies in creating strong communities.

Adding Insult to Injury: Halliburton Contractors Denied Insurance Benefits
by David Phinney
Published on Wednesday, May 25, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

Mark Baltazar was between jobs operating heavy construction equipment when he heard he could make $84,000 doing the same work in Iraq. When he took the job, his plan was to save up the tax-free money and then buy a new home for his family back in Texas.
A suicide bomber near Mosul changed all that last December, just one month and three weeks after Baltazar started work with Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), the largest military contractor in Iraq...
Six months later, like many civilian workers injured in Iraq, Baltazar is still battling with KBR's insurance adjusters. If he wins, he hopes to be paid the disability benefits he needs to support himself and his family.
Instead of saving for a new home, Baltazar finds himself worse off then he was when he left for Iraq; he's jobless because of his injuries, living in a Houston apartment, and relying on a $368 disability check every two weeks.
"You make more money working at McDonald's," he says dejectedly.
Because he worked for Halliburton's KBR, which uses Cayman Island subsidiaries to employ 70 percent of it's workers, Baltazar is not eligible for unemployment.
Baltazar's lawyer says he is also being denied full insurance coverage worth more than $1,000 a week as outlined in the Defense Base Act (DBA). The DBA requires businesses working overseas under U.S. funded contracts to provide insurance coverage for injuries and disabilities of all employees. Subcontractors are responsible for providing similar coverage to their workers. Baltazar's projected DBA amount is a sum based on the comparative annual income he would be making if he hadn't been injured...

Morality a casualty
DON ALLAN

I DON'T know about you but I am confused by the fact that, according to the US, the non-Afghans fighting on the Afghan side in the war against terrorism aren't prisoners of war but unlawful combatants.
I am further confused by the fact that, try as I might, I have not been able to find out what makes someone an unlawful combatant. But what makes me even more confused is that an army of legal experts, special advisers, United Nations officials and the like also doesn't seem to know what makes an unlawful combatant.
Not that the US Government is confused. Its point of view seems to be that anyone not a citizen of a country that is fighting against the US is an unlawful combatant, a view that puts David Hicks, the Australian captured while fighting for the Taliban, into that category.
Now whether or not you agree with what Hicks has done, it has always been my understanding that soldiers captured during a war are prisoners of war. If David Hicks is not a prisoner of war then what war is the US and its allies fighting?
It is to be hoped the US definition of unlawful combatant does not gain credence. If it does, many Australians could end up as unlawful combatants who would need detaining if Australia became involved in military conflicts with other countries.
Wouldn't that cause a problem? Where would the Government put them? Nauru? Papua New Guinea? Woomera?
Millions of people who want terrorism stamped out believe the US is acting illegally and immorally by treating Hicks and others as unlawful combatants, not as prisoners of war.
It seems inconceivable to me that the experts don't think the same. I think they do but lack the guts to say so because of their dependence on the US. They think, and perhaps they have reason to think so, that if they criticise the US, their comfort will be affected. In a sense, that makes them more prisoners of the US than Hicks and the others.
On another level, time has allowed citizens in those countries allied with the US in the war against terrorism to reflect on the war. The result of that reflection is that support for the war has diminished in those countries, partly because of a growing belief that the US is acting in a dictatorial fashion.
In increasing numbers they are saying that the US is arrogant; t

The pope has minimized priests' crimes while wagging a finger at gays
by Robert Scheer
Published on Tuesday, May 24, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times

One of the most sexually repressed institutions in human history has been caught with its pants down yet again but still insists on wagging its disapproving finger at the rest of us...
This is all especially outrageous considering that the openly gay community has offered a model of honest and socially accountable behavior, while the Catholic Church — secretive and unaccountable — has provided exactly the opposite. In fact, the church's history of sexual abuse by "celibate" priests and nuns makes the case that the repression of natural impulses leads to, rather than discourages, sexual abuse. Is it too much to ask that a religious institution sporting such an abysmal record in dealing with these matters stop dictating the bedroom behavior of its millions of followers?
Sadly, it probably is. The church will continue to face eruptions of sexual scandal because of its renewed insistence on a sanctimonious medieval morality ignoring the main lesson of this sorry affair: Sex is natural, becoming ugly and exploitive only when denied healthy outlets.
For our civil society, the message is even more compelling: Yes to the life decisions of responsible adults, gay or heterosexual; no to the sexual dictates of a church that cannot be trusted to monitor its own behavior.

Newsweek Didn't Create White House Image
by Helen Thomas
Published on Tuesday, May 24, 2005 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

It was an act of desperation when the White House tried to blame Newsweek magazine for the United States' low esteem around the world, particularly in the Middle East.
The Bush administration could look in the mirror and see that the real cause for rampant anti-Americanism is the US invasion of Iraq...

The Harvest of Messianic Foreign Policy: Anti-US Radical Islam
by Ivan Eland
Published on Tuesday, May 24, 2005 by the Independent Institute

An interventionist US foreign policy, fueled by the Bush administration’s messianic zeal to make the world more democratic, has contributed to a dramatic rise in radical political Islam around the world. In fact, the current administration’s campaign is even more ambitious than Woodrow Wilson’s naïve policy of “making the world safe for democracy.” Provided that the Bush administration is actually sincere about its rhetoric (which is questionable given its mild criticism of despotic allies, such as the governments of Egypt and Uzbekistan, which have recently cracked down on dissidents or simply shot them en masse), both the Wilson and Bush policies derive from a virulent strain of American “exceptionalism,” the idea that the United States is special among the nations of the world...

Sadly, (Name Withheld, Letters, CT, Mon 23 May), the moral paradigm of society in 2005 dictates that the rich are, in fact, more deserving than the rest of us. This worldview, of US origin like much in our society, is based on the attempts of the Franco-Swiss theologian John Calvin to provide a respectably Christian justification for aggressive capitalism. Dismissing the “Camel and the Eye of the Needle,” Calvin asserted that being wealthy is not merely NOT a barrier to salvation, but a sign of Divine Favour, an indication that the well-heeled have evinced great virtue by being energetic in accumulating the necessities of life and restrained in defraying the resources thus gathered. Moreover, since virtue is its own reward, affluence derived from the virtues of industry and thrift attracts more affluence, and so the wealthier people are, the “better” they are in moral terms.
One cannot be discrete about such a divinely ordained philosophy, but rather it must be proclaimed at every opportunity. Hence, believers will loudly and incessantly call attention to what they see as the source of their good fortune. Such constant evocation of the deity may be de rigueur in the US, or among the evangelicals so beloved of John Howard’s ministers, but is seen by traditional Australians as “God-bothering.” You see, (Name Withheld, Letters, CT, Mon 23 May), most Australians are not anti-religious — they simply regard religion as a private affair, and anyone who has to mention god fifty times in a sentence of sixty words as a sanctimonious milksop or a fanatical bully, and, if one were to dig deeply enough, probably a hypocrite as well!Sadly, M Smith of Curtin (Letters, CT, Mon 23 May), the moral paradigm of society in 2005 dictates that the rich are, in fact, more deserving than the rest of us. This worldview, of US origin like much in our society, is based on the attempts of the Franco-Swiss theologian John Calvin to provide a respectably Christian justification for aggressive capitalism. Dismissing the “Camel and the Eye of the Needle,” Calvin asserted that being wealthy is not merely NOT a barrier to salvation, but a sign of Divine Favour, an indication that the well-heeled have evinced great virtue by being energetic in accumulating the necessities of life and restrained in defraying the resources thus gathered. Moreover, since virtue is its own reward, affluence derived from the virtues of industry and thrift attracts more affluence, and so the wealthier people are, the “better” they are in moral terms.
One cannot be discrete about such a divinely ordained philosophy, but rather it must be proclaimed at every opportunity. Hence, believers will loudly and incessantly call attention to what they see as the source of their good fortune. Such constant evocation of the deity may be de rigueur in the US, or among the evangelicals so beloved of John Howard’s ministers, but is seen by traditional Australians as “God-bothering.” You see, S Jackman of Spence (Letters, CT, Mon 23 May), most Australians are not anti-religious — they simply regard religion as a private affair, and anyone who has to mention god fifty times in a sentence of sixty words as a sanctimonious milksop or a fanatical bully, and, if one were to dig deeply enough, probably a hypocrite as well!

Occupation, Insurgency Feed Each Other
by William Pfaff
Published on Friday, May 20, 2005 by the Korea Herald

The Bush administration's acute anxiety about Iraq was demonstrated by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to that country on Sunday, as it was during Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's earlier Iraq trip.
Once again the administration's illusions have betrayed it. The Bush ideology says that everyone is a natural democrat. When you remove the obstacle to democracy, such as a dictator, and call an election, democratic government will spring forth. Never mind that Iraq is a society dominated by complex religious, tribal and family traditions, allegiances and obligations...

The insurgents are fighting because of the occupation, and the occupation forces are fighting because there is resistance...
A large overall majority wants the United States out. Does the Bush administration want to get out? Yes and no. It wants an exit, but won't accept defeat. It wants permanent bases in Iraq, and enough control over the country's oil industry to influence the international oil price. No fully independent Iraq government is likely to agree to either.
What should Washington do? Last year it could have announced a timetable for complete withdrawal. Now it could still promise to leave by the new year, when a new parliament is supposed to be elected - but the insurrection might wreck that timetable. American public opinion already disapproves of the war. One way or another, the United States has to leave. But leaving is much more complicated, and perhaps more dangerous, than it was getting in.

Quran Desecration: Far Worse than Abu Ghraib
by M. A. Muqtedar Khan
Published on Thursday, May 19, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

The reports in the media that Americans at Guantanamo facility allegedly desecrated the Quran to torture prisoners has unleashed an intense wave of anti-Americanism in the Muslim World, which has already caused 16 deaths. This is worse than Abu Ghraib; Abu Ghraib represents the physical and psychological torture of a few Muslims, Quran desecration represents a spiritual, emotional and psychological torture of all Muslims. Even if it turns out that the Newsweek report was false, most people will see it as a cover up and another American attempt to eschew accountability...

The US government has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to improve US image in the Islamic World, commissioning initiatives that include radio programs, Satellite TV, youth magazines and civil society empowerment programs. But all the gains from these expensive initiatives are dramatically undermined by a periodic display of civilizational insensitivity that reeks of acute disregard for Muslim sentiments...
The use of the word 'Crusades' by President Bush to describe his war on terror, the continuous revelations about the torture and abuse of Muslim prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Guantanamo, Cuba, the reluctance to punish General Boykin for his Islamophobic bigotry are examples of how periodically the US government seeks to remind Muslims of its callous attitudes towards their rights and their religion....

The Unknown Unknowns of the Abu Ghraib Scandal
by Seymour Hersh
Published on Saturday, May 21, 2005 by the Guardian (UK)

It's been over a year since I published a series of articles in the New Yorker outlining the abuses at Abu Ghraib. There have been at least 10 official military investigations since then - none of which has challenged the official Bush administration line that there was no high-level policy condoning or overlooking such abuse. The buck always stops with the handful of enlisted army reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company whose images fill the iconic Abu Ghraib photos with their inappropriate smiles and sadistic posing of the prisoners.
It's a dreary pattern. The reports and the subsequent Senate proceedings are sometimes criticized on editorial pages. There are calls for a truly independent investigation by the Senate or House. Then, as months pass with no official action, the issue withers away, until the next set of revelations revives it.
There is much more to be learned. What do I know?

...[I]t is what was not done that is significant. There is no evidence that President Bush, upon learning of the devastating conduct at Abu Ghraib, asked any hard questions of Rumsfeld and his own aides in the White House; no evidence that they took any significant steps, upon learning in mid-January of the abuses, to review and modify the military's policy toward prisoners. I was told by a high-level former intelligence official that within days of the first reports the judicial system was programmed to begin prosecuting the enlisted men and women in the photos and to go no further up the chain of command...
Despite Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo - not to mention Iraq and the failure of intelligence - and the various roles they played in what went wrong, Rumsfeld kept his job; Rice was promoted to secretary of state; Alberto Gonzales, who commissioned the memos justifying torture, became attorney general; deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz was nominated to the presidency of the World Bank; and Stephen Cambone, under-secretary of defense for intelligence and one of those most directly involved in the policies on prisoners, was still one of Rumsfeld's closest confidants. President Bush, asked about accountability, told the Washington Post before his second inauguration that the American people had supplied all the accountability needed - by re-electing him. Only seven enlisted men and women have been charged or pleaded guilty to offenses relating to Abu Ghraib. No officer is facing criminal proceedings...

© 2005 Guardian Newspapers, Ltd.