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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: October 31, 2004
Latest Update: October 31, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Rhetoric and Reason and Ideology and Governance Discourse and . . .As the election nears many of us are expressing the anxiety we feel. That is addressed in an article by Todd S. Purdum in the Sunday, October 31, 2004, New York Times Week in Review Section. The Year of Passion . . .Backup. Purdum reflects a lot of what we've been saying about transforming dominant discourse. This election has been passionate. People who often could care less about voting are beginning to understand that voting matters. Not all of them. In message #430 on transform_dom Alicia's aunt is certainly an exception:
"I asked my aunt who she thought she was going to vote for, and what she thought about the election. She told me she didn't care and she had not even looked at the information that had been mailed to her about the propositions and the candidates. She told me that she would vote for Bush because he fits the images of what a president looks like."The thing is that in the past that wasn't so unusual an attitude. Nor was it an unusual attitude for the peasants in Brazil when Paulo Freire began to teach them that they could make differences in their live and they did not have to accept the disempowerment so long imposed upon them. Voting has always been a privilege. But it's not a privilege if you don't believe it's real. Purdum quotes Boyte on how desperately we need to make it all real again:
"After a rash of recent elections described in this newspaper as "The Year of the Yawn" or Seinfeldian - that is, about nothing - hasn't the nation finally got what the nattering nabobs always ask for? A passionate electorate, little apathy, candidates with starkly divergent personalities and world views, all displayed in substantive, well-watched debates." 'The answer is maybe," said Harry C. Boyte, co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. "If you think of democracy as elections and voting, then this is a great moment. If you think of democracy as more a way of life, it's very uncertain what the result is going to be, and the polarization is very troubling.'
"Polarization is nothing new in American life. Today's red and blue are pale shadows of the Civil War's blue and gray. In 1828, an editorial cartoonist recalling Andrew Jackson's execution of Seminole Indian sympathizers in his militia days, showed Old Hickory hoisting a man in a noose and declared: "Jackson is to be President and you will be HANGED."
"But the breakdown of party organizations, the decline of labor unions, the atomizing intensity of television and the lack of near-universal military service for draft-age men have combined to make democracy seem more like "a kind of consumer good and spectator sport," as Mr. Boyte put it, than a workaday commitment in which victors join with vanquished to get things done. "So the real question is whether this highly charged electoral season can help revive a larger civic culture, and a productive citizenship," he said. "Whether people can learn to deal with people they disagree with, or may even hate, for the sake of fixing their neighborhood park or school."
If we go from the passionate discussions and illocutionary exhanges of the last two months to "four more years" of life with dominant discourse, then Alicia's aunt may be right. It's a game of much ado about nothing. But Freire didn't believe that those of so little trust in each other were right. Neither do I. But when you get right down to it, opinion doesn't matter here. And there's not much research to guide us either. What matters is our determination to make democracy work, to use the power of the agency we do have to make our voices heard, to sanction or protest our nation-state's decisions so that nation-state policy reflects our beliefs and values as a people.
Read the piece on democracy at the Center for Democracy and Citizenship. It says elegantly how hard you're going to have to work to make Freire's dreams come true. It's not easy. It's a lot easier to say, "There's nothing I can do to make it better, so why shouldn't I just take what I can get and make the most of it?" Why? Because that attitude makes you complicit in the very pattern of dominance that has made you feel disempowered. It's a lot easier to disempower you if you don't fight back.
Now I'm going to ask you to link to Kurt Lewin's Psychological Life Space and Understanding Difference, which is where I was writing before the kids started to come early for Halloween. I came back and couldn't find the file. But Halloween was fun. One of the parents exclaimed "Oh, this is interactive!" You betcha. We let the kids fish for magnetic fish and then pick a prize when they caught one. Yes, life is interactive, and we need to keep reminding ourselves of that. Gotta love that parent. Even gotta love the media that at least they've made that much clear. Now we recognize interactivity when we see it.
One little girl was intimidated by the fishing gear. She preferred interpassivity. But then she watched as another kid picked out his prize, and she decided that interactivity might just be more fun. She liked it so much she wanted to keep fishing. Think we could extrapolate that to say that "Hey, voting's not so bad. Try it. You might like it." Just don't do it more than once an election. That might be fun, but it's illegal.
More on Kurt Lewin's Psychological Life Space and Understanding Difference, and I'll have more to say. It's just that right now I've got a kitchen full of fishing debris and am exhausted. More soon. jeanne Kurt Lewin's Psychological Life Space
and Understanding Difference
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