cross-posted to 8040

In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, specifically, chapter 11, Ideology and Affective Epidemics, Lawrence Grossberg describes how new conservatives have politicized place and everyday life, and also how they have depoliticized politics (281). I was stuck (am still stuck?) on how conservatives might have depoliticized politics and politicized place. Isn’t every act or inaction political? How does place become politicized? I’ll take a try at this…
If conservatives enact “affective epidemics’ that keep people in fear, but ultimately cause people to remain passive and not question or debate issues because doing so is unpatriotic, then well, I guess I can see how that would quell the “sensibilities which made postwar pop culture different” (281). Some hope and optimism after the war soon led to consumerism. It seems to me that now spending is being connected with being a patriotic American. And, because people are too busy buying stuff to pay attention, America has become a place “emptied of any meaning or difference” (291).
Grossberg also talks about how conservatives have co-opted family values. I read this as any attack on the initiatives of the conservatives’ family values program can then be seen as an attack on the family. This idea reminds me of the book by George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Lakoff describes how conservatives frame issues to their advantage. He says, “If you keep their language and their framing and just argue against it, you lose because you are reinforcing their frame” (33). Lakoff uses examples such as the No Child Left Behind program, that has actually left more children behind, or the Clean Skies Initiative that actually results in more polluted air to breathe. In other words, if they can convince people they have solved the problem in a sound bite, then people will mistakenly believe that conservatives have solved the real issue.

Lakoff uses the frame “strict father figure” to describe the conservative frame because the world needs a “strict father who can: Protect the family in the dangerous world…” (7). This helps me understand Grossberg a little better when he talks about affective epidemics. Keeping people in fear is an affective epidemic and it keeps people from paying attention to what really matters.
When Grossberg uses the example of fighting the drug war as an example of an affective epidemic, it makes me think how American-conservative it sounds to “fight” the drug war, rather than to “fund” programs and solutions that might actually go to the root of problems. Nevermind that the actual cost to “fight the war” might be more monetarily and certainly less humane.
I think Grossberg would agree with Lakoff who says that people don’t necessarily want to hear the truth (18). Grossberg says they want to hear how they belong to the dominant group: “Mattering places are transformed into vectors so that the concerns and investments of real social history become the ruins of a displaced, perhaps even misplaced, paranoia” (284). I think real places and people disconnect when we’re afraid to talk with each other, much less debate each other on issues.

You know, I think this culture of fear that politicizes America, or politicizes peoples’ “mattering places” also politicizes other places and people too. Wrongly, people and places “over there” are all to be feared because they’re not like us. In trying to get us to think like this, they quash difference when acknowledging difference is what is needed. As someone reminded me recently, “We’re all related.” Conservatives would have us believe that this just ain’t so.