28 September 04

A New Word for Today: “Bleh”

Feathers of Hope was born when the blogosphere was overwhelmed with political blogs: in the leadup to the war in Iraq we were both reading lots every day. For one reason or another, although our banner says this is a blog about nature and place, the design arts, politics, and baseball, we don’t write much about politics. I tried to articulate why in Where Are My Words?—my feelings of outrage were trumped by my feelings of helplessness.

We’re there again, but for other reasons. For the past few days I’ve been writing letters to single unregistered women in swing states through MMOB—not that I’m Mainstreet or a Mom, but they’ll take anyone.

Turns out even this might be the wrong target; soccer moms have become security moms, apparently, believing that Bush will keep their kids safer than Kerry will.

I can’t promise them that he won’t. But the world is certainly less safe because of this adminstration’s unforgivable excesses of power, greed, arrogance. It will take decades to restore our standing in the world, so forget about one presidential term.

Whoever wins this election—and of course I hope it’s not Bush—will have the biggest mess to fix since the Great Depression, or possibly ever at least in terms of foreign policy. It’s practically hopeless.

Numenius thought the security moms thing sounded like something cooked up by the Republicans as explored by George Lakoff in his latest book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, which we first read about on Daily Kos. Sounds like a must read, particularly with regard to the Republican hijacking of rhetoric about the family. One more for the list…

Posted by at 04:32 PM in Politics | Link |
  1. “soccer moms have become security moms, apparently, believing that Bush will keep their kids safer than Kerry will”

    There’s another reason not to have kids.



    Chris Clarke    29. September 2004, 05:48    Link
  2. Numenius may well be on the right (ha, get the pun?) track about this. Framing issues—and I know that this has been picked up lately as a meme in the blogosphere, but I have studied this process in the 1980s in Communication Studies at SFU in Canada—is a political startegy, and an effective one at that. The Right has been very good at it, for reasons that are too complex to go into inside the limiting “frame” of a comment.

    Still, I don’t think you should abandon the writing of those letters, because it is not hopeless!

    maria    29. September 2004, 09:50    Link
  3. Hi Pica, I tried to email you (re: your comment on Siona’s site) but I couldn’t get through – maybe your spam-blocker blocked me? Anyway, if you email me, maybe I can reply to you and it’ll work that way!

    leslee    29. September 2004, 10:52    Link

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