I'm one of Us

I just want to commend Robin Lakoff for pointing out her bias from the beginning. Robin, I appreciate it. Although, I found The Language War to be a slug—I felt like I was dragging my feet through 12 inches of snow, Lakoff did have many very interesting points: I would like to start with her analysis of Henry Hyde. Generally, I am one of the first to admit that hypocrisy is a part of life, although, it may not appear to be hypocrisy from the hypocrites perspective. I also tend to find hypocrisy amusing—as I did in Hyde’s case:

1. His stances on campus speech codes and support of the Communications Decency Act are so blatantly opposite extremes of the same argument, First Amendment rights. I am curious as to how Hyde would have defended his position.
   
   
2. Hyde was supporting the curtail of campus speech codes at the same time he

“was enthusiastically supporting a May 1991 Supreme Court decision (Rust v. Sullivan) that forbade medical personnel in hospitals of clinics that received and government support from so much as mentioning abortion to their clients (Lakoff 102)”

Funny stuff. And now, more Republican Hypocricy. In an article on AOL News, two abortion clinics in Kansas called for Bill O'Reilly and Phill Kline to be investigated after O’Reilly made claims of having Kansas abortion records. O’Reilly claims that George Tiller was performing abortions on women because they were depressed. I picked this article for two reasons:

1. Bill O’Reilly’s choice of words—
   
   “executing babies!”
   
   
   
   
2. and one point that is buried deep in the article:

“Tiller, one of the few U.S. doctors to perform late-term abortions, has been targeted by protesters for years, his clinic was bombed in 1985 and he was shot by a protester in 1991” (AOL NEWS).

Some of the tactics used in protest of abortion clinics aren't amusing.

Lakoff says that what politicians are trying to do is pin their opponent as the "other". Well, in O’Reilly’s attempt at controlling meaning, he is clearly trying to pin Tiller as an OTHER. Most normal people do not “execute babies;” therefore, Tiller is the "extremist" outsider and O’Reilly has asserted his meaning-making control.

But O’Reilly may not have been effective at all. The public is generally knowledgeable about abortion, and may find that, in fact, O’Reilly is being extreme in his claims. This could potentially have a reverse effect on O’Reilly, positioning him as the extremist. Time will tell.




Another section of Lakoff’s book that I found rather interesting was exnomination. I was familiar with this concept before this book, because once I attended a feminist discussion panel. A member of the audience asked why there isn’t masculinism since there was feminism. The answer was, basically, that ...

everything already was masculinistic and because it was the “status quo” no one realized it. Feminism exists in order to achieve balance. (As Lakoff would say, re-nominate the exnominated.)

I feel that Lakoff’s title is perfect. She weaves through the texts that display that politics is a

battle over semantics

and as long as we are the exnominated party, we will have little to complain about.

In this book, I also found the importance (and ambiguity) of pronouns . I knew all along that pronouns were non-descriptive. I knew that using a pronoun was a way to vary sentence structure. But pronouns are powerful little words.