USA

Lesson 1 – 8/03

A country is in the throes of numerous crisis which risk tearing the country apart: the USA went and is going
through numerous crisis which are important to talk about.

Some crises that America is facing right now are:

- Grave economic crisis as a result of the pandemic and the way it was treated by Trump and his
administration.
- 520000 deaths due to Covid, far more than any other country in the world.
- Also so politically divided that there seems to be no dialogue across the isles: no dialogue between
the democrats and the republicans: the United States is a bi-party (or two-party) system; the other
parties have no chance of rising to power in the USA.
- For the first time in history, the seat and the symbol of the government, the Capitol, where the two
bodies of Congress meet, was attacked by some citizens who said they were following orders of
President Trump (still President on January 6).
Since Trump left the office, he’s still vowing to retake the country in the upcoming years and still insists that
the election was rigged (stolen) even though he has no evidence to back up his claim. Accusatory
affirmation of this kind without proof are a part of a more general problem, post-fact or post-truth era:
without the need to appeal to a fact-based account of reality, millions of Americans, following Trump’s
lead, are disavowing (denying) the election results and feel the elected President, Joe Biden, is not their
President, even though the electoral system as run its course and even though the Court has said that it
was a perfectly legitimate election. This accusation is not base or founded in evidence which however is still
being claimed: there are millions of Americans who are insisting that Trump is right in his claim that the
election was rigged. If the election was stolen and some citizens don’t recognize the government that is in
office, the country has an enormous problem. We need to understand what the nature of this problem is
and what these problems are about.
If the government in power doesn’t represent you, this negation of a fact-based account of reality has
consequences which are much more far reaching than just reneging the government: for example, it
reneges fact-driven science (regarding Covid or the environment).
When there is no consensus in a democracy about the general rules and principles upon which the nation is
based, the very foundations of that democracy are thrown into question. America has been touted as the
longest standing democracy in the world but right now is facing a lot of problems.

We need to read the culture: reading a culture other than one’s own is always a difficult task because we
naturally apply our own cultural values and visions when we frame our understandings of other cultures.
Many of the things we consider about America are being faced even by other countries: for example, Brexit
starts right when Trump is campaigning for the 2016 election; Cameron called the referendum knowing it
was going to be defeated and Boris Johnson was ironic when he talked about Brexit before the referendum
so it’s interesting that Brexit was another perfect example of a post-fact social media high-tech hyper-
reality type of moment.
Other similarities concern the rise of a certain type of populist leaders: Brazil, Philippines, Russia, India and
Italy, all generally from the right, except for Venezuela.
Reading cultures is a really important but even difficult task for a few reasons: reading anything is a difficult
work because we tend to assume a passive and naïve position towards what reading is.
Discourse (oral or written) is never objective: texts are produced by individuals with other individuals or
institutions in mind, they are expressions of ideas and narrative styles reveal something about the person,
the culture and the historical period of their production. What stops our ability to see things this way has to
do with the way they are presented to us; often we encounter what linguists call a rhetoric of objectivity,
that way affirmations are framed, and framing is very important: by the way they are framed, they make us

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believe that they are value-neutral, that they voice the truth. On one hand we have the post-fact era and
on the other hand we are saying that a “fact” does not exist: however, this is not a paradox and the
important thing is that facts don’t exist without a context in which the facts are placed, facts are always in
language and therefore within a culture, within a society, within a history, etc.
For example, if we are given a headline from after a 9/11 plane crashes that says “2906 killed in the 9/11
attacks – Never again” in a daily paper (United States on the basis of those attacks went to war with
Afghanistan and then with Iraq because it was unthinkable that terrorists could attack a symbol of the USA
and kill so many people) and compare the number of deaths with the number of deaths due to Covid, the
effect of 9/11 completely disappears and yet the 2906 were enough for the USA to decide to go to war: so
is it really the fact that is so important (so the deaths) or is it the way that 2906 is framed?

Similarly, the study of history is never simply the past speaking for itself: history does not tell us what really
happened; the past simply does not speak, we in the present look back on the past, we pose questions
about specific things that supposedly happened in the past to get answers or to justify the present for the
future. It’s never simply the culture or the ideology of the past which we come to know: we attempt to
understand something about the past but we look at it with the gaze of what it is that we have experienced
in the present; we are not getting in touch with what reality was like in the past; it’s the present making
sense of cultural and ideological artifacts from the past, filtering them through the eyes of the present.
Example to explain why facts mean little if they aren’t placed into a narrative which allows the interlocutor
to make sense of them and determine their significance (both meaning and importance): Coronavirus. We
use the same expression to talk about the virus and about the way we communicate: the virus is spread
through transmission and it’s also communicated through transmission.
Around communication of the virus a great deal could be understood about how Italians, Americans,
French, etc. think: even before the outbreak of the virus in Italy, newspapers and TV were full of data about
its spread in China; daily we would receive what we can call a war bulletin (bollettino di Guerra) with
numbers of infected people and deaths, updated almost hour by hour.
The numbers were supposed to speak for themselves, but in fact they both did and didn’t: they did because
the reception created effects (worry, anxiety, nervousness…), for example it created acts of discrimination
towards the Chinese or Asians in general (Trump started to call the virus, the China virus because China
seemed to be the cause of America’s problems); a year after the appearance of the virus in the USA, the
acts of hostility and intimidation towards Asian-Americans has gone up by 200-300% percent as a result.
At the same time, the numbers didn’t speak for themselves: the narrative seemed like a casualty count; the
more the battle rages on, the higher the number of casualties get, but in a battle or war you know your
enemy and you can arm yourself to stop the advance of the enemy. The effect of the rising numbers only
contributed to mounting angst because the enemy was not known: if these numbers were just facts and
therefore value-neutral, they wouldn’t provoke something so extremely emotionally charged; as with
everything else we read into the data, we attempt to make sense of it, which means we interpret it. Now
we have grown numb, insensitive, and we take the situation now on one level less seriously than we took it
one year ago.

Trump had the idea to “make America great again” which meant that he wanted to make America white
again so that white population could be in charge again. Joe Biden is making efforts to do the exact
opposite.

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Lesson 2 – 11/03

Last time we talked about the elimination of the idea that a language is, or can ever be objective, and open
ourselves up to the idea that a (necessarily) non-objective communication presents. All cultural problems
are linguistic problems which we can deal with.

As we already said, there is nothing that is just a fact: simply because as soon as I communicate a fact to
someone, for it to have a consequence in their life, that fact gets put into a narrative, it gets framed.

The problem has to come down to what’s the relationship between this thing that seems to be so
empirical, so truth-related and the question of reading and interpreting (subjectivity): it seems like a fact is
objective, but none of us can be objective in anything we do; we can assume a rhetoric of objectivity in
order to get the rest of us to think that what we are saying is simply true. BUT is it simply true? (key words:
truth, fact, reality, objectivity).

Examples:

- What is the number of babies born in Italy per average household/family? 1.481.
- Where do you think Italy places vis a vis all the countries in the world (188)? Italy places 166th, one
of the lowest natality rates in the world.
- How much Italy’s population has increased in the last decade (2010-2020), given the recent influx
of immigrants and the fact that Italians live longer than they used to? It has decreased by 400000
people.

This is interesting because if we were listening to mass media and to the way Italy’s problems were
portrayed to us, we can understand that Salvini gets power around the fear of the immigrants coming to
our country: the population is worried about immigrants, because they fear they don’t have any “room” for
these people; however, the perception that many Italians have seems not to correspond with the facts we
just talked about. On one hand we have situations in which we cherry-pick the facts, and other situations in
which we decide to accept or not accept the facts (for example, the numbers of deaths for Covid): a fact is
never just in itself and for itself, the fact is there to persuade you of something, so obviously it partakes of a
narrative, in a subjective positioning. Anything we see must succumb to interpretation.

Why are Italians not having kids? Everyone would say it’s for the economic crisis.

However:

- Modena is the 3rd wealthiest province in Europe.

- People coming from the south have more people than people coming from the north, and the
south is generally poorer than the north.
- In any case, none is going to say that Italy is the 166th poorest country in the world.

The facts really mean very little if we want to call them that: we have cultural ways of understanding why
we are doing or not doing something.

Looking to the USA in comparison to Italy, we can see that in Italy the family is a unit and this works, it’s far
more functional than in the USA: most people in Italy are on good speaking-terms with their parents and
look up to at least one of their parents, while it’s much rarer in the USA.

From a cultural point of view, why is it that a country which is not poor and that has very functional
families, has a different response than a country such as the USA, where the families have some sort of
problems? Yet in the USA people have more children and people get married more. People in Italy
sometimes don’t even get married: you are disillusioned, it’s no longer a priority.
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We tend to take as natural things, truths within our cultural domain.

How is the American government and the political system structured?

There are 3 branches: Executive, Legislative and Judicial.

Executive branch: powers of the President and The Cabinet. The president, so the nation’s representative,
heads the Executive branch and has unique powers including executive orders, vetoes, appointing federal
judges or the heads of federal agencies. The President also acts as the commander-in-chief of the military.
The Cabinet (ministri) is nominated by the President and is itself part of the Executive branch and also acts
as an advisory board to the President with the chief executive of each agency, known as the secretary of
each department (education, health…). The President doesn’t have absolute power to make these
appointments: the Senate votes to confirm the president’s appointees: one example of the checks and
balances. Cabinet members also make up part of the presidential line of succession in the event that the
current president becomes incapacitated, resigns, dies or removed from office. First in line is the Vice
President, then the Speaker of the house and then the Senate President pro tempore. The President also
appoints the head of more than 50 independent federal commissions: as well ambassadors and federal
judges, even though these nominees need to be confirmed by the Senate as well.

The President also checks Congress and has the power to pardon and grant clemency for federal crimes,
except for cases of impeachment on both the state and federal level.

To become president is required the age of 35, to be a natural born citizen and to have lived in the US for
the last 14 years; Presidents are limited with two four-year terms, stipulated by the 22nd amendment
ratified in 1951.

In the US, the President is elected every 4 years through the Electoral College, so citizens at the polls vote
for electors (Grandi elettori) who will cast their vote on their behalf. Every State is divided in Counties that
are in relation with the number of citizens in that State. Each State decides for itself, unless it goes to the
Supreme Court.

Legislative branch: is comprised of the US Congress, the bicameral legislature responsible for writing and
passing all federal laws, trying to balance the national power with the individual states. The Founding
fathers settled on a legislative branch with two houses: the House of Representatives and the Senate,
which together form the Congress. The Art. 1 of the Constitution describes the functions, powers and
parameters of the Congress and its individual representatives. A congressman’s primary responsibilities
include representing the interests of the constituents, working together to write laws, overseeing other
government agencies, and passing bills.

The House of Representatives (lower house) is made up of 435 elected officials and each state, determined
by the number of population, has its representatives. To become a member of the house you must be at
least 25, have lived in the US for the last 7 years and live in the State you will represent and be elected by
the people. Congressmen serve 2-years terms and are up for re-election every even year. The House is led
by the Speaker of the House who is elected by The House itself. Only the House Representatives can initiate
tax laws and spending Bills and can initiate Impeachment of a president or other government officials.

The Senate (upper House) is made up of 100 elected members with two senators from each State that are
elected by the people. To run for Senate, you have to be 20, have lived in the US for the last 9 years and
live in the state that you will represent. Senators serve 6-years terms, every even year 1/3 of the Senate is
up for re-election. The Vice president serves as the head of the Senate. The Senate has the exclusive power
to approve presidential appointments and treaties in addition to trying eventual impeachments.

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Together both Houses have the power to tax, coin money, declare war and regulate foreign and interstate
commerce. Congress’s livelihood is writing and passing bills.

How to get a Bill passed: a Bill can originate in either the House or the Senate, but before it gets voted
upon, it goes through a series of committees and amendments and floor debates, then to the chambers
and at least the House of Senate must vote to approve any editing. If it passes, it goes to the President’s
desk for approval and becomes a law.

What’s an Impeachment: the House of Representatives votes that, on a basis of its investigations, the
President is culpable of high crimes, things that endanger the country for the benefit of a group within the
country without having any right to do so.

Judicial branch: is made up of the Supreme Court and other federal courts whose function is to rule on all
matters related to the law and the Constitution. The Supreme Court has a huge power that has continued
to grow since its inception in 1789. The first version of the court had only 6 justices: in 1869 that number
grew to 9 and still is that way. Unlike the other branches of government, justices are not elected: the
President nominates the Court members, federal courts of appeals and district court judges; the Senate
then has to vote and confirm or reject the appointment. Justices do not have term limits, they’re able to
serve until they die, retire or are removed by Congress through Impeachment and conviction and this role
doesn’t request specific requirements.

The Constitution does not explain specifically the Supreme Court’s power; it originates in 1803, in the
“Marbury versus Madison” case, where the court’s mandate of judicial review was born: it’s the Supreme
Court that has the responsibility to interpret the constitutionality of laws, in other words to decide what is
legal or not.

When the Supreme Court makes a ruling all the courts must follow it, and their verdicts are final, unless a
future Supreme Court finds that decision unconstitutional. One famous judgement happened in 1954,
“Brown versus Board of education”, when a Supreme Court rule said that racial segregation was
unconstitutional, and it was a formal discrimination that must be eradicated. This overruled the Supreme
Court’s 1896 decision in “Plessy versus Ferguson”, which had legally protected segregation as separate but
equal. When the Supreme Court makes a ruling, all other courts must follow this precedent. Courts only act
if someone brings forward a valid case and unlike the legislative and executive branches, the judicial branch
operates outside of elections and voter input, but it has a profound effect on our daily lives by evaluating
the constitutionality of laws to keep our government in check

The person in charge of nominating new judges is the president, so Trump needed to do that because two
judges of the Supreme Court were dead: it is a risky process because if the new judges are not chosen
properly, there’s a risk to alter the balance within the judges. The president looks for judges on the basis of
their previous decisions, generally because these decisions go in a certain direction, or maybe because they
follow determined political believes. In the USA there are over 250 federal judges and the judges are in
place for life, so it is quite relevant to put a certain person instead of another, based on that person’s
personal views.

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Lesson 3 – 12/03

- How does the mechanism of checks and balances in the US work?

The political system in the USA is based on the principle of checks and balances: it is the heart of the
American democracy. It ensures that the new laws and policies are the fruit of mediation and compromise.
The principle of checks and balances can be seen in different ways: among everything it is essential for
peaceful transition to one president to the other. It also slows the possibility to make a radical change.

The principle of checks and balances is advantageous but it is obstructing the policy in terms of making
progress. It’s a process that takes time. It takes so much time that people feel alienated from the
government, they feel distant from the political system. On one hand someone thinks it must become
faster, one the other, someone else thinks it is a way to guarantee that not just the majority and the
president take decisions: it’s the fruit of agreement of not just the majority or the party of the president,
but it’s the fruit of a discussion.

The issue is that nowadays people are always looking for quick and easy solutions for very complex
problems, people are growing disaffected, and are losing faith in government. The president is getting more
and more power and he is seen as the most powerful role in the system because he gets things done, so
the perception is that the system works better when there’s only one person that’s able to decide what
things need to be done. But in doing so they are bypassing the democratic process.

There are many different mechanisms of checks and balances in the USA:

- division between state’s rights and government’s rights: on the state level, the state’s legislature
and the state government have the right to pass certain laws and to determine the rules of
regulation that are to be observed within each particular state;
USA IS one country, not plural: The United States IS … (not “ARE”).

VS the individual states, which are many.

We have three branches of government, that are supposed to have equal power: local government, state
government and federal government. There is a relationship between what the federal government can do
and what the states can do: each state has an enormous number of rights and laws that are different from
those of the other states. Unless there’s a law which has come though the federal government, the state
has the right to decide the law on its own.

Many crimes are state crimes, others are considered federal crimes instead: the crimes involving the post
office are federal crimes because it concerns the US post office. If you mug or beat someone, this is a local
or a state crime, instead. This goes as far as the taxes you pay: you pay different taxes to the city, to the
state, and to the federal government, due to the fact that each city decides how to spend its money. There
are cities that prefer to spend their money on education rather than other fields and vice versa. Therefore,
the different educational systems are very uneven. It’s a very fragmented and unproportionate state
system.

None of these 3 branches can decide on their own. If the Supreme Court judges should decide on
something that’s unpopular, the Congress can go and change the law and therefore they can stop whatever
the Supreme Court has decided. If the Congress wants to pass a law that the President is not happy about,
then the President vetoes the law, and this law has to be changed. If the President wants to get an
executive order passed and the Supreme Court affirms that that’s not constitutional, it can stop the
President from doing so. The President can propose a new judge for the Supreme Court: this decision is
discussed in the Senate and voted upon; if the Senate approves, this person becomes a judge.

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 - Does the two-party system give Americans a right representation or is it limiting?

In the past, there have been 3rd parties, but it’s difficult for third parties to get a grip on a system that
privileges the two main parties. Furthermore, it is incredibly expensive to run for governor or for a position
in the senate, or in the house of representative: the parties have to support themselves and the cost of
publicity is enormous. Also, Americans don’t read newspapers, they don’t know much about politics,
everything they know about it, they know it thanks to the advertisements on television, so the campaigns
are very expensive. For these reasons, the people who can run for the presidential campaign are a few,
mostly billionaires or millionaires.

There’s also another issue going on: corporations give the most money to the candidates, at a state level or
at a federal level. There are organizations or corporations who lend a huge amount of money in order to
sponsor a certain candidate. The candidate gets the money from the lobby, it’s a problematic way to get
the money for the electoral campaigns, but thanks to that the parties are able to get enough money to
keep going. For example, the National Rifle Association sponsors certain candidates who are in favour of
liberalizing gun laws: it becomes clear that if you know you can get billions of dollars by supporting the
National Rifle Association, you have well decided that’s going to be an issue that you are going to make
public.

It’s unlikely for a third party to come in, because in all probability it’s not going to assume the political
weight to get itself into the system in a significant way. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen in future; it
will be possible in the very near future, because the republican party is highly divided: Trump is holding the
power within the republican party because many Americans are still Trump supporters, he has created a
power base among certain Americans such that other republicans within the party are scared to go against
Trump; if you go against him, you’ll probably lose the next election. Trump makes the environment hostile
for those who are against him, he says that someone is a traitor and people can go to that person’s house
and intimidate him, so they are scared. More and more republicans are very unhappy with this situation.
Even the people that took part in his own cabinet became against Trump, so it is possible that there will be
a split in the republican party. Besides, it may happen the opposite: the other wing of the republican party
could go against him and depose him (linking process).

A similar situation may occur on the other side, but as long as the democratic party is in power, its
probability to split into two factions is very doubtful. Nevertheless, there are two main and distinguished
wings into it: the first is the central-left wing (conservative democrats), and the second is the left wing,
where Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren militate. On the left wing there’s also AOC, who’s a very
interesting political figure: she’s very young and dynamic and she is able to create a circle of constituency
that has no equal; she has a different way of thinking politics.

- What is the difference between republicans and democrats? Are there any other reasons for which
they are so divided beyond the political view? How has Trump changed the conservative and far-
right narrative?

(CFR: required reading “Twilight of Democracy” by Anne Applebaum)

What’s happening in the US is phenomenon that’s happening in general in the west world: the traditional
parties and the ideas they stand for are changing rapidly. In this atmosphere populism thrives, populism is
game-changing for the time being: this is upsetting the political tradition of the west.

In Italy for example we assist to the arise of the 5 stars movement, that’s become a party. The 5 stars
movement is a typical example of populism. Italy has seen populism from before its political leader Grillo:
Berlusconi was the first real example of Italian populism before populism became so popular. He organized
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a party around his own charismatic figure: his party is literally the party of Berlusconi, instead of the party
of Forza Italia, just as Trump has taken over the Republican Party.

Similar situations are occurring in other near countries: in France there’s a far-right party under Marie Le
Pen; in the UK, along with the Brexit phenomenon.

If the rise of populism in west world is something new, in Brazil, Philippines or India this is something
widespread. Also, with the end of the cold war that caused a huge division between the western world and
the east world, the former distinction between the right and the left is slowly fading: what makes the right
right? What makes the left left? What is the new way in which these ideas are being understood? Which
things distinguish the center-left and the center-right? How distinct are politics today? What are the ideas
dominating the stage of politics in present countries?

The distinction is certainly less clear in the mind of the electors nowadays: for example, in the UK, Tony
Blair (Labour) usurps the language and the political space of the Tories and creates a total chaos amongst
the conservative because basically labour assumed the position that the conservatives had and they were
more convincing; so, the conservatives had to find something new, for example Brexit. This is paradoxical
because the first who were in favour of coming into the EU were the conservatives themselves.

In general, we have problems in understanding what a political party stands for and in the US it’s obviously
no different.

The party of Ronald Regan was the last very famous republican President and it’s largely different from the
party Trump and even from the George Bush Junior’s party.

Republicanism is a party of conservative’s values, but Trump wasn’t conservatives in any way. His main
purpose was to come to an economic deal with anyone who was willing to do business with him. Everything
he did, he did from his personal point of view. Conservatives today are mostly known because they are
interested in easing laws and restrictions: the market should decide for itself and this hides a sort of laissez-
faire logic.

Trump supported the trickle-down economics (economia a cascata): a billionaire with huge corporations
behind him; this type of economics makes it easier for him to expand: on conservatives minds everyone will
benefit from this kind of process, it’s a top-down logic and it is still a wide-spread idea among republicans.
An example of this is brought about by Henry Ford who basically invented capitalism: “what’s good for
business is good for America”. The problem with this sentence is that we are living in a globalized world, so
the question is: if I get more money why would I invest this money necessarily in the US, where the costs
are much higher than in other parts of the world: in the globalized world a capitalist invests in Mexico, or
wherever the costs are lower. Otherwise, as a capitalist I can import things, instead of producing them
inland. Two possible solutions are subside or threaten: neither of these is possible to realize because they
don’t coincide with the free market; if you subside someone you are artificially giving them money and if
you threaten them you are politically imposing certain rules on their economic well-being.

The main differences between republicans and democrats concern:

- Foreign politics: more or less, they have the same position. The Trump Phenomenon was crazy: it was
deviating compared to the work of other previous presidents. He thought that what was important was
economic competition, politics gets resolved if you have economic understanding. He tried to make friends
with other country leaders basing this “friendships” on the money policy. The two parties are very close in
terms of foreign policy: someone would say that the American foreign policy is imperialist, in the sense that
American’s role is to protect and to safeguard the world. Most people, both in the democratic and in the
republican party, see the role of America as the country who is in charge of guaranteeing the survival of
democracy around the world. Nevertheless, American foreign policy is made of lights and shadows; for
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example, the US is not going against Saudi Arabian government because it is a very powerful country.
America had taken the sides of the Sunnites over the Shiites In Iraq. America chooses who to be friend with
on the basis of a political strategy. Since ordinary people don’t care much about the foreign politics, the
government makes its own decisions based on what it considers more convenient. Suffice to say that up to
80% of the people born in the US have never left the country. Basically, they think that their state is the
whole world (it often happens with states that are also continents, like China for example). This percentage
says something about the difference between the rural part of the country and the more cosmopolitan part
of the country too.

- Social welfare: democrats want to help the poor, make it easier for them, and so they want to elevate the
minimum wage; on the contrary republicans think the minimum wage should remain as it is. Biden has
already allocated billions of dollars to be devoted to unemployed, ethnic disadvantaged groups, farmers,
women who are not under any privilege. In contrast, republicans want to give this money to entrepreneurs.

- Healthcare: it was basically private, before the Obama presidency. Looking at the data, healthcare system
in the US is terrible. Obama contributed to lower the price of health insurance, so anyone could have access
to medical assistance at a reasonable price.

- Education: democrats are for putting more money into educations, both lower and higher education. On
the contrary, republicans don’t want to, because they are not interested into public education, they want
to allocate money in order to potentiate private education: like for example religious colleges or home-
schooling. Smaller groups of people that are homogeneous, they are controlled about what they learn and
how they learn. Trump minister of education was trying to tear down part of the public education system.
Even when it’s public, it costs a considerable amount of money. Democrats want to give more money to
university students in order to help the families to send their children to university, since universities in US
have very high prices. In contrast, republicans don’t want to. The cost of the universities is extremely high:
middle class family start saving when they are just children, in order to assure them a certain level of
education. They go into debts to make them study and to guarantee them a proper education. If they go to
university, when they’re out they get a high paid job, because there’s more difference between who didn’t
go to university and who did, who made a good and prestigious university of who did a “standard”
university. There is a huge hierarchy of opportunities on which the system is based on: poor are able to get
a scholarship, but the problem is that if you are truly poor you haven’t gone through school in such way
that you could ever get into a high-league university.

- Environment: most republicans deny that there’s a climate change going on: the economy has to be the
king, they generally are not in favour of an ecological transition in order to improve the conditions of the
environment. The reason lies is the fact an ecological transition would require a huge amount of
investment, furthermore they are conservatives, and so against changes. On the contrary, democrats are in
favour of these changes and to allocate funds to be invested in the green economy. The Green New Deal is
proposed by Elizabeth Warren. Since after Covid-19 the US has to restart the economy, they are willing to
spend money mainly to improve the conditions of the environment: electric cars, wind-power and so on.

- Support for cities and infrastructures: during the Trump Era the government rhetoric was to “drain the
swamp” (=prosciugare la palude) where the swamp is the state, the government, when it comes to
republicans, they are much more in favour of decentralizing the government, but on the other hand, they
are not in favour to give money to big cities and states. On one side, they don’t want to give money to their
adversaries, as big cities are historically democratic forts. On the other side, democrats are in favour of
reinforcing the government, the agencies, the diplomacies, republicans wanted to reduce it instead. For
exTrump withdraws ambassadors from their roles into states because he thought he could just do a deal
himself, without passing through all the state bureaucracy.

9
Lesson 4 – 15/03

Required reading: “Metaphor in Discourse” by Elena Semino, “Don’t think of an elephant” and “Moral
politics” by George Lakoff.

Questions regarding the impeachment proceedings: what is impeachment? Why was Trump accused of it?

First of all, impeachment is something that exists outside of the United States as well as in the United
States, but obviously it takes on a particular form in each country.
Impeachment is just the process by which a legislative body or any other legally constituted tribunal,
initiate charges against the public official, usually for misconduct.
In the US, in the Federal system, Article 1 of the US Constitution provides that the house of representatives
has the sole power of the impeachment, and the Senate has the sole power to try all impeachments.
Furthermore, Article 2 provides that the President, the vice President and all the civil officers shall be
removed from office on impeachment for on conviction of treason, bribery or other high crimes.
In US, impeachment is the first step of two stages: an official may be impeached by a majority vote of the
house, but conviction and removal from office in the Senate requires 2/3 majority.
According to the house manual, impeachment is a constitutional remedy to address serious offenses
against the system of government. It is the first step in a remedium process, that is a removal from public
office and possible disqualification from holding further office.
The purpose of the impeachment is not punishment, rather its function is primarily to maintain
constitutional government: the President doesn’t go to jail.
Impeachment may be understood as a unique process involving both political and legal elements. The
Constitution provides that “judgment in case of impeachment shall not extend forward than the removal
from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honour, trust or profit under the US, that
the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable subject indictment trial judgment punishment according to
law”.
Basically, this means that: if Trump had been convicted, he loses all rights as a president, he can’t come
back and try to be elected again, he won’t enjoy any other President privilege after the end of his
mandatory, but he could also be tried in a normal court of law. Even though Trump was not convicted, he
can still be tried in a court of law, he can’t any longer be tried in Congress because the Senate did not
convict him with 2/3 of the vote.
Since the birth of the US, there have been 21 times impeachment of officials:
- 4 times for presidents
- 15 times for federal judges
- 1 cabinet secretary
- 1 senator
Of the 21, the senate voted to remove 8, they were all federal judges.
The 4 presidents were:
- Andrew Johnson (1868) – right after the federal war
- Bill Clinton (1998)
- Donald Trump (twice: 2019 and 2021)

An impeachment process was also held against Richard Nixon but he resigned in 1964 to avoid a likely
removal from office. Watergate scandal: Nixon was involved because he had some people stealing the
documents so he could gain an advantage in the upcoming elections. It was a smoking gun, it was explicit
that he could be tried in a court of law for this, and so he had to give dismissals and leave the office.

Trump’s first impeachment (2019)

The 1st time Trump was impeached (2019), the impeachment had to do with the accusation that Trump had
attempted to persuade the new President of the Ukraine to “quote on quote”, investigate Hunter Biden
(Joe’s son) and investigate the idea that election interference by the Russians in 2016 election was actually
spired headed in the Ukraine and not in Russia. Ukraine (in the moment in which there were national
10
elections and Russia was making lots of pressure on a particular part of the country: Crimea) had a
desperate need of help, despite the fact that the US had already decided to give its support to Ukraine,
Trump decided to hold up the military support, he made it known to the ukraines that he would free up the
aid and the military support if only the new President would say that he was going to investigate on Joe
Biden’s son, and also say that he was going to investigate the possibility that the interference in the 2016
elections was actually done by the Ukrainians and not by the Russians. Trump kept on insisting that the
Russians had nothing to do with the election in 2016 because he had spoken with Putin, who said that from
Russia there was no interference, despite the fact that all the secret services in the US kept on saying that
Russia had effectively interfered with the election of 2016. Trump wanted to show that the elections in
2016 were legitimate and that the Russians had nothing to do with it by getting the ukranian new President
to say that Ukraine was responsible for the interference.
Secondly, he figured that if he could show that Biden’s son was on the board of a large corporation for
suspicious reasons, or that he was appointed to that role just because he was the son of Joe Biden, he could
make Biden look bad enough in the eyes of the electors. Trump’s plan was quite clear, but you cannot
blackmail another government for personal reasons, to do something just because you want them to do
that: it’s illegal and it’s tempering with the electoral process and democracy.
There were 2 acts of impeachment that were brought against him, and the thing was debated in a College
of lawyers which stay their case, and the President has the right to defend his case with his own group of
lawyers. What happened was that this time all the republicans in the Senate decided not to vote to
impeach, Trump decided not to hand over any documents from the executive branch of the government.
No one who was close to the President and knew what happened was allowed to testify, and so the
defense insisted that there was no immediate proof that Trump actually did what he was accused of doing.
However, the fact is that it was a political decision not to convict Trump, all democrats voted in favour, and
only one republican voted against, together with the democrats, and this ended the first impeachment.

Trump’s second impeachment (2021)

January 6th (the two cameras were in session, both the house of representatives and the senate) was the
day in which the electoral college was going to ratify the vote, and in doing so Joe Biden was going to
become the next President. Trump holds a big rally, and here he says that the elections had been stolen,
frauded, accusations that he had attempted to bring to the courts and that had already been thrown out
every single time. He said to the crowd that they had to storm to the Capitol in order to stop the session of
the two cameras and prevent Biden from becoming the President because the elections had been stolen. A
good part of those people broke into the congress violently, as a consequence five people got killed. The
protestors keep crying to “hang Pence” because, even though he is a republican, he didn’t do the right
thing. The symbols of the American government had never been attacked by American people before that
day.
The accusation of impeachment this time was for insiding insurrection, sedition; there was only one article
of the impeachment, which was done very quickly, because they had other business to mind considering
that Biden was becoming the new President and Trump was finishing his mandatory in a few days (and you
can’t impeach a non-standing President).
Part of the republicans voted against Trump with the democrats but not enough to impeach him.
Republicans had just voted not to convict Donald Trump, and Mitch McConnell (republican) gave a speech
which is just absolutely against Trump because he said that there was no doubt that Trump was guilty, but
they couldn’t convict him as a non-standing president. The republicans said that they didn’t vote to convict
Trump even though it was explicit that he was guilty because of this semantic distinction in the
Constitution.

Bill Clinton’s impeachment (1998): Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Republicans found out that Clinton (democrat) had been having an extra-marital affair with one of the
interns. When asked, Clinton denied that he had intercourse with this woman, which is true, but what
happened is that they took her dress and there was sperm on it. So denying that they didn’t have any
sexual encounter, he had lied to the American people, and for this reason he was accused of forgery, in

11
other words, lying officially to the public. In order not to make the democratic party go to such a
humiliation, he decided to leave.

Questions about white supremacy and BLM:

- Are far right and white supremacy-oriented groups still relevant today?
- After the BLM movement, has something truly changed in the American reality?
- What is white supremacy? Why are people still denying it?
- How was white supremacy in America capable of fuelling so much violence and the frequent black
deaths nowadays?

Trump definitely encouraged right wing and far-right wing groups (Proud boys, Neo-nazi groups) and
conspiracy theories groups (QAnon) too. He gave them his support implicitly, basically by failing to
condemn them when there was violence. He said that he was a non-political President, he’s part of the
republican party but he doesn’t come from politics, he comes from business, casinos, from television. He
didn’t want to qualify himself as a politician, so he has a anti-government rhetoric. He always says DRAIN
THE SWAMP (trad. prosciugare la palude), the swamp because Washington was built on a swamp. The
government is itself a metaphor of the swamp, so what Trump said was: I come to drain it.
When there were disorders caused by the groups from the far-right wing, democrats kept on saying that he
needed to condemn them because they were dangerous, and that he had to call them with the right
expression: domestic terrorists. Trump never did so, he never condemned this kind of movements. There
was a famous protest to take down the statue of Robert Lee, a general from the south who is a symbol of
slavery. What happens is that after the first protest, the extreme right-wing groups came down in the street
to do a counter protest, and one of these counter protestors drives with a car against protestors that were
peacefully protesting and kills a woman. Secondly, the right-wing people stage a visual in which she holds a
flame with white cap, like the symbol of the Ku Klux Klan. When Trump is asked to condemn these
behaviours Trump says that there were good and bad people on both sides.
Trump brings most of these groups out from their “”clandestine”” condition, because before him, they
weren’t certainly raising their heads. Fox news’ moderator asks him whether he was going to condemn
Proud boys or not, and his answer was that he doesn’t know anything about these proud boys: “stand
down and stand ready”.
He just goes with the flow, because they support him and he doesn't want to bring them down, for a
personal purpose, for personal interests. These people are dangerous because they are heavily armed, and
they are very anti-government. These are the reasons why these groups are more relevant today than they
were before.

BLM movement
It is a very interesting movement because it had inter-racial support and also international support, when
the BLM people demonstrated because of the black deaths, the crowd was made up by people of all skin
colors, mainly young people, and that’s very important.
Now that Biden has been elected, it is interesting to see if this movement will keep the same strength.
There are also other movements, like the “ME TOO” movement, that have a central focus on the left and
on the youth of the USA. Having a democratic president into his cabinet and into relevant political positions
appointing people of all skin colors, from all religions: he wants to point directly to a multicultural image of
America. Lots of people thought that Barack Obama was the sign that America had finally turned the page;
what actually happened was a part of the population had a wake-up call, in the 8 years of Obama
presidency, a part of the population really began to develop a great hostility towards the government and a
fear that America was losing what had always, for them, made America a strong democratic place: the fact
that white had always dominated. After the election of a black president, there was a backlash which led
the way to a right-wing president: Donald Trump.

12
Questions about Trump:
- Is there any possibility that Trump will re-take power in the next elections?
- What were the key-points in his campaign that allowed Trump to win in 2016?
- How can Trump be nominated for the Nobel peace prize? No one was ever going to consider him
seriously, it was just a nomination from his supporters.

Trump’s campaign was very surprising for everyone in the USA, positively and negatively surprisingly.
Trump is not disappearing, even though he won’t run for the next elections (because he’s old) there are
people in his family and very influential people who stayed with him, who could think of running, and so
the people in politics who supported him. There is the possibility that many people who are very similar to
Trump in terms of ideology, will run for the next elections. If Trumps runs again there are not many
possibilities that he will be re-elected because he went so far into the right but also so far off. It’s
unthinkable that you will support someone who for months and months prevented the government from
doing anything to contrast the pandemic. Even moderate republicans wouldn’t re-elect a person like
Trump. On the contrary, Biden has made a very extreme change.
Trump didn’t do very much in terms of things he promised: the first promise he made was to build a wall
between Mexico and US, and he didn’t even built it, apart from a few kilometers, and he wasted so much
American money for nothing. His rhetoric has been extremely important.

In terms of the key-points: he is a campaigner who slams his opponents, he goes far beyond what other
politicians had ever said about his competitors and political adversaries. He above all showed that he was
not a politician, what impressed a part of the country.
In 2016 he accused Hilary Clinton of being corrupted, dishonest and so on, and everytime he would have a
rally there were people screaming “lock her up!” because they believed him. To turn the country against a
secretary state is a big deal, and there were no proofs that what he was saying was true.
In his second campaign, he didn’t say anything he would have done in his second mandatory, so no doubt
that Biden was a far better choice.

Question about gun owning:

- Do American feel safer owning guns?

There are millions and millions of guns, but there are not guns in the hands of every American: there are
some Americans with many many guns in their hands, and many Americans with no gun in their hands. In a
big city it’s far less likely you have a gun, if you live in the suburbs is more likely, if you live in the
countryside it is more and more likely.
How the phenomenon of owning guns is becoming more and more debated.
In a moment where people don’t trust other people and there is a wide-spread idea that people must
protect themselves from others (the second amendment says owning a gun is a right of the citizens to
protect themselves). There are people who are arming themselves, the number of incidents of domestic
killings. People are in great tension, and some of them are crazy, they could just go out on their hotel
balcony and shoot people in the street.
Secondly, there’s the idea that you need to protect yourself from the outside, because American was
always related to the idea of wilderness. Hence in the past, guns were essential to protect your property
from wild animals and stuff. They still have this idea, and no one can take it away from their minds. Sadly,
despite this rooted idea, most of the times, people who own guns don’t protect themselves from others
who try to rob or to murder them, they kill each other for mistake. You hear a noise and you shot someone
in the backyard even if this person wasn’t going to do anything bad to you. There are some measures that
are being taken in order to prevent this kind of deaths:
- automatic and semi-automatic guns are not necessary;
- people with mental health issues should go through further checks, before being able to buy a gun;
- guns should all be registered.

13
Question on the american political system:
- What are the reasons for the huge polarization of the political american system?

After the cold war, America looked like it was going to have an explosion of well-being, they had won, so
there was enormous optimism. All the politicians are pushing for globalization in order to make America
the central market of the world. Things like gay, women, black rights were on the bottom, no one could
care less about them until 1990, because government avoided this kind of discourses, so social issues
became important again.
Optimism goes down after 2001 and after 2008. America’s globalization as a part of the American culture,
and as a thing that should have brought America to a state of complete wellness is a lie, because no one
from the working class and from the middle-class is getting advantages from this condition. Their wealth is
decreasing instead of increasing. The middle class is poorer than before and so the working class, so there
are discontentments. People are blaming this on globalization, and this is one of the reasons why Trump
got all the success he got with his slogan “make America great again”: a symptom of nationalism.
Globalization is already a reality, we can’t just privilege America, it is not how the world works. (Episode of
the planes the day after his election) Everyone thinks that companies produce out of America because the
costs are lower and so outside of the national borders, and they produce the minimum part of Boeing.
Instead, lots of the parts of the boeing are produced in Italy, in Germany, in Japan, and these are the most
technological part of it. So other countries ship pieces of Boeing and in the US Boeing is assembled with the
pieces that they receive. 80% of the new orders for Boeing planes were from other countries.
In a globalized world it’s easy to come up with a nationalist rhetoric.

Question about a political alternative to Trump:

- Is there a strong alternative to Trumpism as a way to gain political support as we speak?

Biden, with his 1.9 trillion dollars rescue aid package, clearly wants to become like Roosevelt, a new New
Deal, a very big and sweeping governmental plan to get the economy back on its feet, in order to transform
the economy in major ways, in order to make people work again. The first part of this New Deal regards the
infrastructure bill, modernise American infrastructure (internet, roads and so on..) also in terms of heavy
investments for green economy, alternative energy.
If Biden is able to do it, he’s a great alternative to Trumpism. Two views of the land and of the economy. In
terms of other problems like social media, fake news and so on… it is a particular way, a different way of
speaking. It will need a specific moment to talk about that (post-truth era).

Question about cancel culture:

- What is cancel culture?
It’s a culture that looks back at its past and I don’t like what I see, and so I want to cancel those people from
the past who had been considered heroes since this moment (Robert E. Lee). It’s not easy for the left to
manage with that, because if we speak about George Washington, we see that, apart from being a slaver,
he was the founding president of the US, he’s a symbol of the nation, so it’s difficult to justify his fame, his
statues. So how do you redefine the way in which the memory of this politician is thought?

14
 5
The first linguistics school: Lakoff’s Language in “Thinking Points: Communicating our
American values and vision”.

George Lakoff: professor of linguistics, outspoken progressive thinker, votes democrats in

elections and is a very fervent participant in what he considers to be the Democratic and
political process.
Look at the opening of one of his more recent books, “Thinking points communicating our
American values and Vision”. Interessant because what he says in no ways attempts to be
objective has little or nothing to do with normal academic prose. Lakoff right from the start he
makes explicit that he's part of a political struggle, which is taking place in the United States
at the moment and as a linguist he feels obliged to enter the struggle in the best way he
knows how, by offering a comprehensive cognitive analysis of the language being used.

Beginning of the book: “America today is in danger, it faces the threat of domination by
radical authoritarian right wing, that refers to itself as “conservative” as if it were preserving
and promoting American values. In fact it has been trampling on them. American values are
inherently progressive, but progressives have lost their way as traditional Americans, that is
as progressive Americans, we are beginning to lose our identity: the very values that have
made America a great and free country, a country where tolerance has led us to unity,
where diversity has given a strength, where acting for the common good has brought our
dreams to fruition and where respect for human dignity has increased opportunity, release
creativity and generated wealth.”

So the language contained in these first paragraphs is that, at all, typical a formal academic
prose: it makes no pretense to neutrality, it doesn't reference other authors or experts for
added support and it employs a register which is in no way geared to a specialised or expert
audience.This is interesting: what you have here is a affirmed academic, who's writing for a
more general public and using a language which is not typical of academics, both in terms of
the register uses and in terms of some of the ways that he writes what you write. He's taking
up a position and he doesn't hide his position, with respect to the ideas that he's espousing
in the text. The other thing is he doesn't make reference, in this part, to other experts, which
is a typical rhetorical mechanism, that academics use to say there is more credence in what
it has been said.
Interesting:
- the fact that he is applying his linguistic theories to a real problem, and therefore
showing how academic theories can have a practical effect in daily life, that they
could actually change people's lives. This is a very different pretentious for the use of
what he's doing in linguistics is not an abstract linguistic theory offering us, he's
offering us linguistic theories, which are made to be applied to the political, social and
economic situation.
- The language, which is of course an analysis of Trump's language as well, isn't
centred so much on what he or they say he, that is on the contact the signified or the
other in self, but rather on how these positions are communicated. The willingness of
his or their listening public to accept the positions expressed. The idea: there is
something in the way that things are being written or the way that things have been
said, the how, which may be more important than the what is being said.
 - Finally, his suggestions for opposing this authoritarian right, for example, come in the
form of argumentation strategies geared to counteracting cultural bias. This allows us
both to see how he feels arguments should be developed, as well as to make sense
or to gather the cultural milieu these people are coming from.

Analysis of Lakoff’s language and how he says what he says, in other words it's a good
policy if we want to be critical readers not only to accept it at face value what experts say,
but to do to the best of our capability our own analysis of how his language and text hold
together.

Analyzing Lakoff’s Initial Argument

First paragraph: “America today is a danger. It faces the threat of domination by radical,
authoritarian right-wing that refers to itself as “conservative”, as if it were preserving and
promoting American values. In fact, it has been trampling on them.”

First of all you should know the paragraph structure (he is not “punto a capo”): it's all part of
one idea that he wants to express, the idea that we have a critical situation and that there is
a threat, created to the country that's having that situation, by a particular party or by a
particular group of people. Therefore the three sentences of this paragraph express one
basic idea. If you notice this is going to express the idea of the group of people or party, and
what they stand for and what relationship they have to the present situation in America.

- let's start simply by looking at the subject: America. America is crap up a number of
times in the text and we also see pronouns for America. The subject is America and
it's both expressed through the word America, American, therefore words that are
associating the subject with, for example, adjectival form like “American values”
“country”, which is a substitute for America, it, which is a substitute for America...etc.
- Once we've isolated the subject, we have something which is peculiar. He says:
“America today is in danger”. The question I would have is “why does he use that
today? What function does today have in that sentence? The sense is perfectly
coherent, understandable, the meaning is more or less the same by saying “America
is in danger”. It's understood that we're referring to today, otherwise we will say
“America was in danger” or “will be in danger”. “America's endangered” means it's in
danger today, utilising the day however reinforces the sense of immediacy and
therefore refers to the danger. It heightens the danger strangely enough, in a certain
way. It highlights, punctuates, emphasizes the aspect of the danger, and of course
the danger is the threat. In the very next settings we see words like faces threat,
which reinforce what the idea of a danger is. Also, the word faces: if you face
something which is a challenge or something which is a hardship or danger.
Therefore, faces is going to have a type of negative prosody when you see it. So
America is in danger. It faces the threat of domination. Domination of course is a very
strong word. Domination refers to domination is referring to radical authoritarian
right wing. These are the people who would be doing the Domination.
- This right wing refers to itself as Conservatives, but notice he puts the ”scare quote
around conservative. What does ``single " means in an academic but also rhetorical
sense? It means, the authors saying “I know or they know that the word is being used
in a special and potentially improper way”. The words they refer to themselves as
 “Conservatives”, that's the way they refer to themselves, but that isn't good. They are
not really conservative, they are using conservative and Conservatives to cover up
what they're radical authoritarian right wing values. We see this immediately after the
word conservative what he is saying: if it were preserving and promoting American
values. In fact, it has been trampling on them.
- Words in bordeaux colour: the as if and in fact. In fact, in other words, it's the
opposite, it's an appositional, opposition of value. It's not anything that will reinforce
the as if it's something which subverts the as if. They are pretending, their are
preserving and promoting in the American values, but in reality they have been
trampling on these values. We have an opposition, a dichotomy being expressed
here and what are the values that are going into the dichotomy of trampling as
opposed to preserving. They stayed there preserving American values, in reality
they're trampling American values. Trampling= calpestare.
In the first paragraph we get what the right wing are, the author has talked about the
Republicans today, what the Republicans are doing now.

The second paragraph is going to be what the Democrats are doing or not doing.
Notice how astute he is rhetorically in how he frames the second paragraph and therefore
how he frames the Democrats: “American values are inherently progressive.” The use of
inherently is quite interesting. If something is inherent, it's part of the foundation, it's there
from the start and it's part and parcel of these values. You cannot separate progressive from
American values because they are inherently progressive. There from the start, there from
the foundation. The author slides to the people who prefer these values to the people who
incarnate these values in the form of progressives. Obviously, the sliding from the values to
the people who have those values. Progressives is another way of saying liberals or
Democrats. So, the inherently progressive values are also inherently part of what
progressives have or stand for. What is the problem now with the progressive? They've lost
their way, there's something wrong with them, but now, once he says lost their way he gets
back to the first part of the sentence and he gives us another way of talking, identifying
progressives: He says: “As traditional Americans”. Progressives and traditional Americans
are synonyms. He actually goes so far as to tell us that they are overlapping or synonyms
because he says that is, as progressive Americans. So, traditional Americans are
progressive Americans, therefore there is a property between traditional and progressive,
which is overlapping. At this point up we have American values or progressive values
embodied by progressives, who are also traditional which makes sense, because if a value
is inherently progressive, then progressives have to be traditional, because inherently means
right from the start. Notice what he does after the word progressive Americans: “We are”. All
the sudden he is situating himself in the text. The first person plural, it's quite clear obviously
right from the start of the text that he is spells in his own opinions, but it isn't until this
moment then he says “I am one of these people”, not as when he says them in the beginning
of the first sentence of the second paragraph. But progressives have lost their way, he
doesn't say we have lost our way but they've lost their way. Then, in the next settings we are
beginning to lose our identity, so he identifies with the group as progressives who are losing
their identity but he's not exactly saying that he has lost his way. They've lost their way, he's
got the solution to the problem and that's going to be the purpose of his book. He's putting
himself into the text in the first person. It's in the first person because he is embedded in that
we obviously and the end and is embedded in the our and then it goes: “The very values that
have made America a great and free country- a country where tolerance has let us to unity,
where diversity has given us strength, where acting for the common good has brought our
dreams to fruition, and where respect for human dignity has increased opportunity, released
creativity and generated wealth.”

Remark: repetition of where. Where tolerance where diversity where acting, where respect,
whenever there is a repetition of this sort, you have a parallel structure and the one is
reinforcing the other is reinforcing the other and so on. This is a very used technique above
all in political discourse because it's a highlighter or accentuator and obviously here he is
accentuating certain qualities or characteristics of the Democrats and their values, which he
believes and he identifies with.
Values that have made America a great and free country: tolerance, unity, diversity, acting
for the common good, dreams, respect for dignity, opportunity, creativity. You see there's a
whole chain of concepts, that he's pudding and associating with progressives and which he
is insisting upon, as being traditional American values and ideas.
The verb forms he's using: his given, has brought, has increased, released, generated…
they are action verbs, verbs of activity that people do. Therefore, the passive verbs that
they're not existential markers. The verbs to increase, to release, to generate, these are
simply verbs that are directly connected to human activity or human action. As opposed to
other forms for other verbs, which might be less detached from your action, might be part of
human condition or thinking… he's chosen these because they correspond to what people
do.
Progressive doesn't have to be traditional, as a matter of fact, Lakoff is pudding to terms that
normally never go together, progressive and traditional, together on purpose. This is a
rhetorical objective he has inputting progressive and traditional together. In other words, he's
trying to frame progressives liberals as traditional. Why would you want to do this? In the
United States during the Cold War from or less 1946 right up to 1989. That's over 50 years,
when the basic dynamic within the country politically but also culturally, socially,
economically, is geared to a simple division between us and them, good and evil, democratic
and totalitarian, capitalist and communist and this created, on the political level, a certain
type of logic and a certain type of discourse. The Republicans, from the 19th early 1950s
right up to the end of the Cold War, they exploited this, by saying that “we republicans, we
conservatives are for traditional American values”, whereas “the liberals, the democrats, we
have to be careful about them because we're not 100% sure whether or not they are really
Americans, maybe they're just socialist or communist covered as Americans. For over 50-
years, the Conservatives shared out on some of the values that were being espoused by
liberals, as potentially viruses which would lead to socialism communism. The Obamacare
health plan, not only Obama but Clinton before him, are trying to get a health plan, which
simply says that the government should ensure that every American can get medical care
regardless of how wealthy or poor they are. Of course, the Republicans immediately paint
this as a socialist plan. By doing this, Lakoff is saying: “people, the values, that are at the
heart of the founding of America, which are therefore inherently part of America. are actually
progressive values, they're not what the Republicans are saying”. Therefore, you can be a
traditional American and have traditional American values and be a Democrat. And even
here one could say “Wouldn't Republicans say the same thing?” yes, they were and that's
exactly what he's trying to do. Lakoff is saying like you do not have a monopoly on traditional
American values, for us, the Democrats, we have just as much a part of these traditional
values as you. Actually, he's saying “we have a lot more”. The Founding Fathers were
lightning thinkers, they were ahead of their time. They weren't puritanical religious thinkers,
as many of the Conservatives would like us to believe. Therefore, he is reframing the debate
on what it means to be left or right in America today. The word framing is important for the
cognitivists, the idea that their framing something in a particular way.

Basis of the cognitive model of linguistics: it's an approach to the analysis of natural
language as an instrument for organising, processing and conveying information. It
originates between the late 70s and early 80s, in the work of George Lakoff and focuses on
the way natural language contributes to people's knowledge of the world. Although cognitive
linguistics does not embrace a single well-defined theory of language or doctrine, it's sort of
a cluster of approaches with only a certain number of aspects in common. What connects all
of its various approaches, is the common belief that linguistic knowledge is not limited to
knowledge of a language, but also to knowledge of the world as mediated by the language.
Considerate language to be embedded in the cognitive, the mental capacities, of human
beings. The formal structures of language are studied not as if they were autonomous, but
it's reflections of general conceptual organisation, categorisation, principles processing,
processing mechanism and experiential and environmental influences. The formal structures
of language for the cognitivist are not just language studied as language, but language as
intrinsically tied to the mind of human beings of the structuring of the mind, the mental
processes. Therefore, the language interferes with experience in environmental things, but
the experience in environmental things has an influence on language. It's all connected and
interconnected. One of these influences is the idea that our experience of the world is
reflected in our everyday language and therefore can be perceived from the way we express
our thoughts. Ex: we say the car breaks down and we say that the chair breaks. Now if we
think about it, we know that a car breaks down in a very different way, from the way that a
chair would break, but we are using the same term for both. Now, even though most of us
don't really have a very precise understanding of how cars work, we all had to have a fairly
clear idea of a chair and what it means when a chair breaks. Therefore, what we tend to do,
for the cognitivists, is use our knowledge of familiar objects, like chairs, to understand what
happens with cars in car engines when the car suddenly stops working. People tend to use
experience of the world surrounding them, to talk about and understand things which are
more abstract, less familiar to them. We use things that are more concrete, more present,
more familiar with that we have more experience with, to refer to and understand things are
more things that are more abstract, complex or problematic for us. As can be noticed from
the example of the car breaking down and the chair breaking as well, that metaphor is
pervasive in everyday life. It's pervasive both in terms of action and also in terms of thought.
As a matter of fact, for Lakoff and Johnston, our concepts structure shapes that's the way we
perceive and interact with the world around us and our conceptual system is largely
metaphorical. Therefore, the way we think what we experience and what we do every day, is
very much a matter of metaphor. The cognitivists are pudding metaphor centrestage, making
into core of their linguistic analysis, but also saying, at the same time, that metaphor is at the
core or at the heart of our mental functioning.
It is different from other linguistic schools of thinking, because metaphor has generally been
seen, within Western scientific tradition, as a purely linguistic construction, whereas the
essential thrust of the cognitive work is to demonstrate that metaphors are a primarily
conceptual construction, and are in fact central to the development of thought itself. For
Lakoff our ordinary conceptual system, from which we both think and act, is fundamentally
metaphorical in nature. For Lakoff, none metaphorical thought is possible only when we talk
about purely physical reality. The greater the level of abstraction, the more layers of
metaphor are required to express it. People don't know this for a number of reasons,
including the fact it's some metaphors becoming what you can call dead, in the sense that
we no longer even recognise their origin. Another reason is that we just don't see what is
going on. If I use the sentence “we don't see what is going on”, I've just used two
methaphores, because in the literal sense. What I've taken as and a perfectly normal
sentence, most of you probably wouldn't say as being centrally metaphoric, is precisely that
for Lakoff.
One thing that underpins cognitive theory is that what we say and think is largely
unconscious.

Difference between the school of thinking of the cognitivist and some other schools of
language though. Lakoff says 90% of what we think and say is functionally unconscious for
us.

I was taught that language definitions start with denotation, then we get connotation and
then we get metaphoric language. So metaphoric language is the last thing to come in our
development as humans. This is what I was taught at school. Lakoff says this ridiculous, but
it's just as likely that what we're calling denotation is something that we've invented to root
things in place, because we don't want to deal with the problems that language, as
essentially metaphoric, might pose to us. The idea here is that metaphors are at the heart of
language and language is at the heart of the structuring of our brain and the way we think,
and they're very interrelated. If I take the example, we were talking about the chair breaking,
how do we refer to a denotational, how do we refer to the parts of a chair? What are the
parts of a chair? You have the legs of a chair and you have the back of a chair. What are
legs and back? If you've taken linguistics the examples of what we call catachresis, without
using a big word. Let's just say the examples of metaphor, because a chair does not have a
leg in the physical sense of the term. We can say that we use legs for chairs because
familiar with our own legs, legs of humans, it's easier to describe in terms of our own two
legs, these four wooden or metal objects that hold up the seat of the chair. At the heart of
something, which we are cons Just as right, the back of the chair is because my back is
buttressed against the back of the chair.

Gaudi: wonderful exhibition of chairs where he takes the metaphor recipe of the chair and
makes it a real. What is the genius of the artist is just simply reverses that which is
metaphorical which, we don't even understand this metaphor.
Conceptual metaphors are visible in language and are visible in their everyday lives. That is
the basis of what their language theories are about. They shape not only our communication,
but also the way we think and act. Lakoff demonstrates how everyday language is filled with
metaphors, and we are largely unaware of.

Conceptual metaphors, which Lakoff calls Argument is war or Argument is struggle:

- He won that argument
This metaphor shapes the way we view argument, we view argument as a barrel or war to
be won or lost. It's not uncommon to hear someone say “I won the argument” or “he shot me
down”, which is to say he wouldn't let me argue my points or my criticisms were right on
target. The very way argument is solved, is shaped by this metaphor of arguments being
wars or metaphors being battles that must be won. This relation he wants to get us to see is
not natural, it's not a natural relationship.In English we use this concept to shape the way we
think of argument and the way we go about arguing. For cognitive linguistics, conceptual
metaphors are defined as systematic sets of correspondences or what they call mappings,
across conceptual domains. Such that a target domain, in this case our knowledge of
arguments, is partly structured in terms of a source domain (e.g. our knowledge of war).
These sentences or linguistic realisations of the war, where war is the source domain and
the argument is the target domains.
Mapping: there are two main roles for the conceptual domains posited in conceptual
metaphors:
- source domain: the conceptual domain, from which we draw metaphorical
expressions. IExample: love is a journey. Journey therefore is the source domain.
Let's think of some expressions of love is a journey: I would cross the earth for you,
from this day forward for better for worse for Richer for poorer in Sickness and health
Until Death Do Us Part. You see metaphorically we're on a journey, moving ahead in
time or in space. The journey is a geophysical or temporal movement. Therefore, we
know what a journey is, we know what trips are, we know what these things are, we
have an extendable understanding of what's involved when you go on a trip. We
have less tangible understanding of what love is, we have been singing about it,
riding about it or doing poetry about it for centuries, without any better understanding
now then we had in the past. We're taking the target of main focus on the abstract,
complicated term in the metaphor and we're going to express the complicated term
through a simpler more concrete term.
Mapping is the systematic set of correspondences that exist between constituent
elements of the source and the target domain. Many elements of the target concept
come from source domains and they are not preexisting. To know a conceptual
metaphor, is to know the set of mappings that applies to a given source target
pairing.
For Lakoff, the same idea of mapping, between source and target, is used to
describe analogical reasoning, influences, even mathematical equations. The
mapping of the mind is the same as the mapping of language, Lakoff doesn't make a
separation from mathematical and linguistic or verbal mapping. Primary intent of this
theory is that metaphors are a matter of thought and not merely of language. It's
logical that they should call them conceptual metaphors. The metaphor may seem to
consist of words or other linguistic expressions that come from the terminology of the
more concrete conceptual domain, but conceptual metaphors underlie a system of
related metaphorical expressions, that appear on the linguistic surface. Similarly, the
mappings of a conceptual metaphor are themselves motivated by what they call
image schemes, which are understood to be prelinguistic, which concern space-time
moving, controlling and other core elements of embodied human experience. They
have this idea, that adult in certain sense, our origins in the beginning there are
mentally, cognitively therefore, notions, basic notions of spatiality and temporality
movement, control and these core elements are and form part of our experience and
therefore these elements are probably going to be the ones that most inform some of
our source domaine metaphors. By the metaphorical expressions, we understand
more easily because we are more used to them. Whether they're genetic or whatever
is not explained.
Just to repeat once again, conceptual metaphors typically employ more abstract
concepts as target, as love, and a more concrete or physical concept as source, as
journey, which of course, in order to understand the journey, we have done the same
something about time and space, which are parts of these image schemas that were
basically born with.
Another example of all this is understanding of quantity in terms of directionality.
Image schema: conception that part of the structure of the human mind, right from
the beginning, for little babies, is that we have some idea or notion, whether it be
genetic or something else, of spatial contour, of temporal contour. Of certain ideas of
movement, certain ideas of control. These things are experienced for all human
beings more or less from the beginning of our lives. Therefore, these are the
underpinnings, these are the things that inform the articulation of the kettle, the
conceptual metaphors. A conceptual metaphor goes from something which is more
abstract, more difficult to understand or to put ones that say mind around and we
express these things in terms of things that are a lot more simple or real, basic and
that have to do with things that are like space-time, control, movement..
The image scheme is nothing but that which for the cognitivists is in certain sense at
the very heart or basis of the metaphoric movement. If I look a quantity in terms of
directionality, being a special coordinate, which is a very basic for all of us, and I say
something like the price of peace is rising or I say I spent too much time studying
today, these are example for the idea that I spend too much time studying I'm
understanding time in terms of money, that time is obviously something very abstract
and money is something is a bit more concrete to me.
If the most general sense of metaphor is to construct something in terms of
something else, then it is the particularity of that something which received the focus.
Metaphors which highlight some aspects of the target domain, are also going to hide
other aspects of the target domain. If I say argument is war, it highlights the
competitive, aggressive, confrontational aspects of argument, but, at the same time,
it hides the co-operative. constructive aspects. It frames the argument in a certain
way and it represses or hides other types of argument or other potentials the
argument might have, because it's framing it in terms of war. According to Lakoff, this
may not only affect the ways of talking and thinking about arguments, but possibly
even the ways we act during arguments. If I say to you I got into an argument with
Michaela, you're going to interpret that I got into a verbal fight in an altercation with
her, but maybe it can be possible to have a constructive argument, where, through
disagreeing, we come to see something that neither of us initially saw. In other
words, we benefit from the dialogue, which is the argument. We sort of know that can
be the case but we take arguments with others to be negative all the same.
Therefore, we actually only think of arguments as things we need to avoid, if
possible, and we miss out on the possibility of entertaining other more dialectical
forms of conversation, based on this sort of confrontation and questioning. You can
even take this a step further and ask yourself if this way of thinking hasn't influenced
the way you choose your friends. In other words, we generally seek out people who
think like us, people we can not argue with, people who see things in a similar way as
we do and who support us in whatever we say. The way we frame these conceptual
metaphors make a big difference in not only the way we use language, but in the way
we think, within a society. You can say it may be possible to exploit alternative,
conventional metaphors for the same target domain or you can even create new
metaphors there for new ways of making sense.
Lakoff and Johnson pointed out that in English arguments are also conventionally
constructed in terms of journeys, in terms of containers, in terms of buildings and you
can explore hypothetical alternative conceptualizations of argument. What if instead
of saying argument is war we said argument is dance? Now, we could say that
unfortunately in the English language there is no conceptual metaphor for argument
is dance, in other words we do not express argument in terms of the ways we would
express dance, ok but if had that type of metaphor construction, right arguments
would be very different in dialogical collective ways of making our points. On the
other hand, when particular uses of metaphor become the dominant way of talking
about a particular aspect of reality, within a particular discourse, they could be
particularly difficult to perceive and challenge, since they come to represent the
common sense or natural view of things.They become so much part of our shared
beliefs, assumptions or ideologies that we no longer see them as being metaphorical
doing anyway. The fact that we conceive of time as something which we don't have
enough of and we always expressed I'm in this way Don't Waste My Time, I wish I
had the time to help you, sorry your time is of, it's late I have to run, I didn't have
enough time… or even let's go the reverse way it's hard to express time in any other
way, but even if you say for you darling I have all the time in the world, I really using
the very same logic the idea is that since I'm in love with you or I really like you I have
an abundance of time because you are a special person for me, you're not like all the
others.
Trump’s Gettysburg speech
- End Illegal Immigration Act: “Fully funds the construction of a wall on our southern
border. Don't worry about it. Remember, I said Mexico is paying for the wall, with the full
understanding that the country of Mexico will be reimbursing the United States for the full
cost of such a wall, OK? We're going to have the wall. Mexico is going to pay for the
wall.Mexico's -- by the way I met with the president of Mexico two and a half months
ago, wonderful meeting, wonderful person. But I told him, it's a two-way highway, not a
one-way highway. We have our people. We have to take care of our people.We have to
protect our people. So it's got to be a two-way street, otherwise it's going to be a whole
different deal. But, it establishes a two-year mandatory minimum federal prison sentence
if people come in illegally for illegally re-entering the United States after a previous
deportation. And a five-year mandatory, minimum for illegally re-entering for those with
felony convictions, multiple misdemeanor convictions or two or more prior deportations.
So, when somebody comes in, we send them out. They come back in, they go to prison
for quite a while. If they come back, if they come back again, they go five years.
Because what's happening is they're coming back ten times. And I could go case after
case, they come back. Look at what happened in San Francisco. Five times he came
back. On the fifth time, he killed Kate, five times. But so many others, one ten times
came back, killed somebody after ten times. When they get deported, they stay out.
Otherwise, they have very serious prison terms. They will stay out. Once you do that,
they will stay out. Right now, they have no consequence. They have no consequences.
Also, reforms on visa rules to enhance penalties for overstaying and to ensure open jobs
are offered to American workers first.”

Gettysburg speech: Trumps pronounces it relatively early on in his presidency. Back to the
beginning of his presidency, even when he was campaigning, he was talking about the
importance of building a wall on the southern border. A Great Wall as he called it, and it was
going to stretch a few thousand kilometres along the border between Mexico and Texas. End
illegal immigration act: we're going to look at this from the point of view of cognitive linguistics.
It's important to see that the lexical items in this passage have current meanings, which four
cardinal linguistics are constituted by neural networks that can be modelled. The most obvious
image schema is that of a container. A number of lexical items in this text require the container
metaphor or the container schema in their processing and we see these in red. The word wall,
border, prison etc... These words immediately offer the motion of a container, because the wall
obviously is a separate something spatially and, therefore, it's going to separate an inside from
an outside. The wall is being made to keep people out. The wall is a spatial separator, it
includes enclosure, surrounding and the relation between the self (me, us, Americans…) and
the other (the immigrants). The schema is repeatedly activated by Trump in the opening
sentence, and again at the end of the extract, when he states “they will stay out”. We have it at
the beginning and we have it at the end. iThe word prison also depends on the container
schema right because it's linked to a particular datacard value. The second time we see prison
we send them out they come back they go to prison for quite a while, otherwise it's going to be a
whole different deal. The function of the container is just constantly echoed through words like
wall and prison. Obviously we use our social and social frames, we use our knowledge and
what's activated through this idea of a container are thoughts and images that a prison would
come in our mind and therefore he's activating and emotion, affective response on part of the
crowd as well as on part of the population. The embodied conditions involved in stimulating
mental representations of the other are complementary. Prisons keep us safe by containing the
other and holding them in, blocking them from coming out. The border walls keep us safe from
the others entrance. It's because these basic bodily schemas are in play, and repeated by the
speaker that they trigger emotional response, on the part of the people listening to the speech.
At this level they have a persuasive power. An overriding argumentation and evidence, his
metaphors and repetition paint this picture and it's little arming picture substitutes the need for a
reason, explanation of the problem, which would be supported by evidence. He's not offering us
any evidence that there's a problem. Why is he not offering evidence but he's stating something
as though there is a problem? As if we all know there's a problem and he plays on our emotions
by using certain ideas, certain schemes of a container and being inside a container, being
outside a container, being safe or potentially being under threat, which plays on the emotions of
the people listening to a speech. The container image or metaphor is activated in combination
with another of these metaphors, which Lakoff calls a path metaphor, which intent is combined
with deictic conceptualisation. Deictic conceptualization has to do with the idea that we all know,
through our experience, where path goes, leads. We all have an idea of movement inside and
movement outside of containers or spaces. The dark red indicates movement verbs that are
directional and they also trigger container concerts, together with other conceptual features that
are grounded in image schemes. The darker words like coming in or re-entering, deportation,
come in, send out, come back, stay out. These terms offer us the idea of a passage which is
blocked. The concept of immigration, which is an important element in the whole mental
structure that constitutes the historical institution of the state, is framed repeatedly as coming in,
going out, staying out and by implication staying in for those given the right to do. Americans
have the right to stay in the emigrants have to stay out. It's interesting here that the constant
repetition of a certain type of verb (going in, going out, staying in, staying out…) signs a switch
from Latin to germanic to Anglo-Saxon Lexus. English is positioned onto 2 roots: one is the latin
root and the other is the Anglo-Saxon, the German. The words that come from Latin are
generally the longer words, are also considered the words which are more formal, more
intellectual in the English language, where's the germanic or Anglo-Saxon words are very short
words and typically the phrasal verbs would be examples of them. More typical of colloquial
speech. Trump is planning on a difference of register, between the longer words and the
shorter, more colloquial words. It's not simply the activation of path and container that are
relevant here but how the verbs expressing path or selectively are managed,

In all languages verbs have their own conceptual schemas that assign roles to participants in an
action or relation, depending on the particular conceptualisation. The particular meaning of the
verb. In the case of path verbs, who or what is moving. The question is, when he's using his
past verbs, who is undergoing the action of the movement. Is the motion being caused and if so
by whom?
The movement and direction are also partly expressed in adverbs and prepositional phrases, as
well as via assumptions and implications. In the Trump text, entering and re-entering are always
constructed with them as grammatical subjects, in most cases in the role of active other, moving
under their own volition. Only in one instance is subject them the patient, the adjective that
causes motion brought about by we, or not represented, as in motion but rather by implication
as the victim of them. Repeated penetrations of containing space already imply danger and
threat. The embedded narration look what happened refers to a nameless individual, a
nameless Other (them) who is the agent of kill, the actual processing of which verb requires
activation of fear neurons.
Finally, note that verbs of protection and defending conceptually presuppose threat, and their
main meaning component may also draw on the container as its grounding.
The grammatical frame in which they occur is significant. The grammatical subject and
conceptual agent here is a use of we that is distinctive in the passage. It occurs within the first
embedded narrative in which the speaker represents his conversation with a head of state; he
appears to refer to himself as we or perhaps himself together with the US government. We have
to take care of our people, he says I met with the president of Mexico two-and-a-half years ago,
wonderful person ok but I told them this is a two-way Highway. These sentences are also the
only ones that involve modal expressions- we have too-, plausibly interpreting a deontic sense
as well as necessity sense (protecting is presented as an essential duty). The significant point is
that the speaker is representing himself in the role of protector of the people, in a context that is
evoking emotions of threat and fear. This protector role is also present implicitly in the last six
sentences of this section of the speech, where the speaker presents future actions that prevent
future actions, penetrations of the container. It will be obvious that there's a more general
narrative scheme available for interpretation and latently triggered: that in which a home territory
is threatened by an enemy who is countered by a hero and a saviour.

He starts by saying: fully fund the construction of a wall, on our southern border ok so it's a way
that he is getting funded on the American side of the border. He shifts from the idea of the act
funds the construction of wall on a southern border and soon he says don't worry about it, we
not sure what that it refers to yet. It will be invested with meaning after the next sentence:
remember I said mexico's paying for the wall. The It refers to the act, but it also refers to the
wall. We have an act which funds the construction of a wall, which however he's saying Mexico
is going to pay for. He's now talking about a problem of who has the take care of this thing and
who's got a pay for the thing. He is going to quickly move from there into the wall itself, but in
this part of speech we see with the full understanding that the country of Mexico will be
reimbursing United States for the full cost of such a what we have a return of the use of full fully
funds, full understanding, full cost, reimbursement.Therefore, the semantic field is that of
finance and economics and who is going to be responsible Mexico, who is he going to favour
the United States. Then we have the ok, which is addressing immediately to the people who in
front of us. That obviously elicits and solicit a reaction on that part and they're very happy. We
are going to have the wall, there is we once again and it's obviously we are Americans, we're
going to have the wall. Therefore, it's our wall and Mexico is going to pay for the wall: so he
goes back to paying again. He changes his mind and goes “by the way I met with the president
to Mexico two-and-a-half months ago ok wonderful meaning wonderful person”, so he is not
putting blame on the person and he insist that the meeting went very well, but, and here we
have the oppositional term, I told him this is a two-way highway. Now, meaning of itself this
would make no sense, but we understand what he means when he says this is a two-way
highway from the candidate point of view, because we know that walls separate space and you
get inside and outside of a wall through a path, in this case the path is the highway. A two-way
Highway really means a highway that goes in one Direction but also goes in the other direction.
So I told him this is a two-way highway (but Mexico will pay the entire price of the wall) so
already here you see certain type of logical dysfunctions in the rhetoric here. We have our
people, which means we have to take care of our people, we have to protect our people. What
does that imply? What's implicit here is that our people are being damaged economically or
potentially hurt by your people, who are coming into the country. Here he is immediately framing
the immigrants who are coming into the United States as people you have to protect ourselves
from. If it's economically we have to make sure these immigrants are taking our jobs and if we
have to protect our people we have to make sure that these immigrants are going to hurt us.
Therefore, they are dangerous people.
Notice what happens immediately after it: what the it is referring to? This it's what they call the
dummy hit. It's empty, it's not referring to anything really. It is used because he's organised the
syntax of his settings in a certain way. So the it leads us, we're not 100-percent sure, because
usually the it is pointing to something, it's a pronoun form or something. So that we're looking for
what is referring to.
It is used three times: 1) it's got to be a two-way street otherwise it's going to be a whole
different deal and then it goes 2) but it is established as a 2-year mandatory minimum federal
prison sets 3) refers to the illegal immigration act it establishes a two-year mandatory it can only
be the act that establishes that mandatory settings.
First two uses of it are dummy, they're not really referring to anything specifically in the text, but
notice here what happens between the so sentence and the otherwise sentence: you have a
break. In other words, if it's not going to be a two-way straight there's got to be held to pay, it's
going to be a whole different deal. First he is indirectly speaking with the president of Mexico
(he's giving us an indirect speech) then, saying otherwise it's going to be a whole different deal,
his speech is going back to the people in the crowd. What is gonna be the different deal? The
different deal: it establishes a 2-year mandatory minimum federal prison settings. Prison is
certainly not for the Americans, the prison sentence, the people who would go to prison, would
be this illegal immigrants as he calls them, trying to come into the country or coming into the
country and then being locked up. Within the space of the United States, if he should people
should come in by any chance, if they should get through and come into our space, then we're
going to give them a special container and what that container it's called a prison.
Now he gives us the definition: this is people coming in illegally, so we have the the path into
the United States they're coming in and how they coming in illegally. For illegally re-entering the
United States after a previous deputation and a 5-year mandatory minimum for illegally re-
entering for those with felony.You get two years if you are coming after you've been kicked out
once and you get 5-years if you reacted and you were convicted of felony. of a crime.
Either of felony or multiple misdemeanor convictions (a misdemeanor conviction could be a
driving ticket or two or more prior deprecations). So, when someone comes in, we send them
out, they come back, in they go to prison for quite a while, they come back, they come back
again for 5-years. Here he is illustrating for us what he has put into the anti immigration act, he's
talking about things they're actually appearing in the act. Everything what is he doing here is
because of what's happening, he's going to tell us what's happening, he's going to give us his
truth about what's happening: they are coming back 10 times and I could go case after case. So
who is coming back 10 times? they are, they means illegal immigrants. They're coming back 10
times. I could go case after case. They come back on the fifth time he killed Kate. We have an
unknown subject, he doesn't give us a name but who does he kills Kate: he gives us the first
name of the person who presumably was killed. We have no way of verifying who Kate is but
obviously we're going to be emotionally attached to someone called Kate. Then he goes: but so
many others ten times came back killed somebody after 10 times, think of that and then it goes
when they get deported they stay out, otherwise they have very serious prison terms. They will
stay out once you do that, they will stay out right now they have no consequences.
Here is a way in which Trump is positioning the immigrants in such a way that the immigrants
become culpable of heinous crimes and deeds like killing people, and there's no distinction
being made here. Everything has to do with the importance of security, the importance of
protecting ourselves from these criminals. There's a very clear distinction between two different
spaces: a safe space and a not-so safe space. We have to make sure that our space stay safe
and the way to do this is to make sure that the punishment is so great that these people won't
even try to come back and therefore, I President Trump am promising that this will be done for
you the American people and what's more that you won't even have to pay for it.

One of the very first things that he did when he got into the presidency was he wanted to kick
out all the children who were Dreamers who were already in the country, he wanted to get rid of
them. When it says a two-way stream he's not is a metaphor clearly because he's not talking
about Americans going to Mexico, are the two-way street had may have to do with economic
relations with Mexico, may have to do with good relations and general with Mexico but it
certainly is not referring to Americans who want to live in Mexico.
Who is this he that killed Kate? Trump talks about it as if we all know who he is, and he uses a
pronoun before he has actually said the name to the pronoun refers to. Trump is talking about
someone, almost always in these cases he has made up the incident. What some of the
mainstream Media would do was that they were search on Trump at this point. Was there
actually someone who killed the Kate or wasn't there? He just decided and just decided that
someone an immigrant killed Kate, but it's services rhetorical purpose in the course of the
speech, because none of us identify he: doesn't have a name and secondly he killed Kate, Kate
could be you know a friend of yours but your daughter, your wife. This is a strategic rhetorical
use of language. Came back killed somebody after 10 time: that's completely grammatically
illogical. We have so many others and then we have one, ten times came back. I have to
assume that so many others came back 1 to 10 times.
We understand what he means but nothing that he says is strictly logically or even necessarily
syntactical grammatically correct. This is why it's so fascinating to listen to Trump, because he's
all over the place and he's doing things that you should not be doing, because when you say
when they get deported they stay out after you just said killed somebody after 10 times, you're
saying that basically this one person (we don't even know who was or if the person actually did
kill somebody) that one person becomes all immigrants.
Trump has a whole speechwriters all the time but they would give him the speech and then he
doesn't follow the speech, he just goes and the beat them. He just starts to and this is what his
people love, this is exactly what the people identify with trump. They identify with that when he
does this he's not a politician, is speaking honestly, he speaking what he believes. People
generally think the politicians never really say what they believe.
Trying why and how people support trump and why analysts and commentators were taken so
much by surprise. According to Lakoff two things bewildered reporters and commentators or
even political scientists when dealing with Trump and his supporters:
1) how Donald Trump was able to make statements or state a position and then do an
about face and express the very opposite in the space of just a few days, or weeks;
2) why his supporters supported even though his expressed opinions may be radically
different from their own.
How is it possible that so many Americans support trump even though they know that he is not
expressing the truth? or that he's double back on things that he says? they don't even agree
with it?
1) As for the first, one perfect example: the great wall that Trump promised to build and get
the Mexican government to pay for. He repeated his promise in almost every campaign
speech and well into his first two years in office. He would repeat it over and over again.
He then said that the building of the wall was already underway and that the Mexicans
were about to pay for it. Then at a certain point, it became absolutely clear that the
Mexicans were not going to pay for the wall, because the president domestico said in no
 way is Mexico going to pay for this thing. After that he finally had to admit that the wall
wasn't being built at all. The icing on the cake came a year ago when he shut down the
government because congress wouldn’t give him funding for the wall. He shut down the
government, because the government needed to be up the budget, the government
needed to be approved and he said I'm not going to approve the budget unless you give
me money for the wall. That is completely in contradiction with what he had said, which
was the Great Wall was going to be built by the Mexicans and the Americans were going
to pay for the wall. Trump constantly gets caught up in what we can call contradictions
and these contradictions are oddly enough that has worried millions and millions of his
followers. He basically lies over and over and people continue to follow him all the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aFo_BV-UzI

Analysis of a discourse analysis of an interview that Trump had with the famous comedian while
he still was campaigning for president. It is interesting the way of reading language and seen
what's happening in someone's language.

Comedian: you discriminate against people based on their religion.

Trump: we have people coming into a country that are looking to do tremendous harm. Look at
what happened in Paris. I mean, these people they did not come from Sweden ok? Look what
happened in Paris, what happened last week in California, with in a 14 people dead other
people going to die, they're so badly injured. What I want to do is find out what is the problem,
the roots.
One of the things I find fascinating about Donald Trump is the way he uses language differently
than other candidates for political office, especially president of the United States. Whereas his
opponents and the political class in general seem hyper-aware that their words would be picked
apart and used against them, Trump willfully disregards this fact. As a lifelong salesman, he has
a huckster's knack for selling a feeling, even if the ideas and facts that underscore it are
spurious, racist or just plain incomprehensible. I thought it would be illuminating to look at a
Trump answer to a simple question. In this case Jimmy Kimmel asked Trump whether or not it’s
wrong to discriminate against people based on their religion, referring to Trump’s proposal to
temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the United States. This 220 word, exactly 1 minute
answer displays I think, a range of the things that Trump uses all the time in his speech. The
first thing to know is how simple this language is. Of the 220 words, 172, or 78%, are only one
syllable and often they come in a rhythmic series, like a volley of jabs, ending with one of his
buzz words we have to get down to the problem 39 words, or 17%, are two syllables long
only 4 words have 3 syllables, 3 of which are the word tremendous, tremendous, tremendous
and just two words are 4 syllables long, California, which he’s forced to use because it has less
syllables than San Bernardino and temporary, which he swallows. This breakdown fits with the
study done by the Boston Globe that put all 2016 presidential candidates’ announcement
speeches through the Flesch-Kincaid readability test to determine their respective grade level
rankings. Donald Trump’s speech came out at the 4th grade reading level. Now for reference,
Ben Carson came out at 6th grade, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush were speaking at an 8th grade
reading level and Bernie Sanders was a way up in high school, a sophomore, to be exact. Now
this isn’t only down to word or syllable choice, it’s about sentence construction, too. Trump
favors simple sentences like we have a real problem there is a tremendous hatred out there.
Rarely does he use complex sentences or independent clauses. He also favors the second
person a lot of the time, addressing listeners directly with commands: look at Paris, look at what
happened in California. Or implicating us in what he’s saying as if we’ve already agreed, he’s
really good at framing negative response as an over-reaction that was subsequently realized as
such.
If you remember, when I did that a week ago it was like bedlam. All of a sudden – and you
watch last, and you see people talking. They said, “Well Trump has a point. We have to get
down to the problem.
Maybe the most important technique Trump utilizes and he does this more than anyone I’ve
ever heard is ending his sentences with strong punchy words. A lot of times he’ll rearrange the
beginning of a sentence awkwardly, so that he can end strong. For example, here, it would
probably be more natural to say you can’t solve a problem until you find out what the root cause
is, but he brings this forward to end with the root cause. He does the same here and it looks like
he was going to about the same in the end, before Kimmel cuts him off. These final words are
crucial for Trump. They’re pointed and taken together to sketch the theme of the entire answer:
harm, dead, die, badly injured, problem, root cause, thank you, bedlam, point, problem, service,
problem. In some sense, it’s these words that audiences remember, especially when the rest of
the speech is incoherent. Like the best salesman, Trump keeps it simple, he repeats a lot
we have a real problem, what is the problem, we do have a problem, we have to get down to
the problem… and he uses his favorite words over and over: tremendous, tremendous,
tremendous service. He always seems to have friends who are part of the group that he’s
currently insulting, calling him up and thanking him for the privilege: many of them called me
they said you know Donald, you’re right, we have a problem and look, there is a problem.
Donald Trump knows when to sound incredulous, or forceful. He has good comedic instinct, you
can even call him witty, but you can’t call him smart or well informed. The best salesman could
sell you a TV without knowing anything about it, because the TV isn’t what matters. What
matters, is you. And if you are an American citizen who, for years has listened to politicians
sound sophisticated while accomplishing nothing, you might just be primed for something that is
everything they are not. But the next time you feel like Donald Trump has a point do yourself a
favor and look at his words.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16S2lQn5xgs Bernie Sanders

“Is there an increase in taxes on the middle class to pay for Medicare For All, or rather, where
would the tax burden go to pay for that?"
Like Trump, Bernie Sanders, who is currently leading the contest for the democratic nomination
for president, has a talent for communication. In a million ways that I won't enumerate here,
these two men are very different, obviously. But the polls and the votes show that they both
know how to connect with voters. And a significant reason for this, I think, is the way they wield
language.
Trump's speaking style and see how Sanders compares.
After all, both these answers happen to be the same number of words: 220. Though Sanders
takes an extra 30 seconds to get through them, which I'll get back to in a little bit. So these are
the four things I said about Trump's speech. The first two are about his simplicity, both in the
words he chooses and the way he constructs sentences. The third thing I noted was his ability
to re-frame an assumed negative reaction to what he was saying by his use of the point-of-view
and by implicating us in what he's saying, as if we've already agreed. Finally, I pointed out how
Trump likes to end his sentences with punch, with words that will leave you with a thematic
sense of the emotional content he's trying to convey.
So how does Bernie compare? What about his word choice? Trump favors short words, about
three-quarters of his answer were one syllable. Well, it was the same for Bernie: 74%. Here's
how he stacks up against Trump with more complicated words. Looks like Bernie uses
significantly more three-syllable words, but otherwise a somewhat similar breakdown. They both
understand that rhythmic series of short, simple words can burrow into the listener's head. Of
course, Bernie doesn't need to use short words to find rhythm. The reason he takes longer than
Trump to get through the same amount of words is because he gives every single syllable
space to breathe. Now in sentence construction, Bernie's answer is more complex than
Trump's. He uses more compound sentences. In fact, he starts his answer with two dependent
clauses, back-to-back. He's also talking a lot about things that require a basic understanding of
politics, health care, and taxation, which makes his language necessarily more sophisticated.
As for reframing negative reactions, he does that in a similar way to Trump, by putting the
listener directly into his answer, in this case using Colbert as a stand-in for all of us. And finally,
yes, he does end his sentences with punch, just not in the way that Trump does by using
thematic words. Sanders uses epistrophe, the stylistic device in which you repeat words at the
end of sentences for effect. "Just talked to a woman the other day who paid $1,700 a month,
$20,000 a year - gone. No more copayments - gone. No more out of pocket expenses - gone.
...All of that is gone...That's gone.
So there are actually some interesting similarities in the way Trump and Bernie speak. But of
course, these answers aren't perfectly comparable. And there are a lot of differences in their
styles as well. Trump is singular in the way he improves stream-of-consciousness rants that
often look incoherent when read back, yet connect with his supporters in the moment. Sanders,
on the other hand, has been preaching about the same things for decades. He's sharpened his
message to a fine point, which is extra impressive when you consider that so much of his
rhetoric has to do with context. "Is there an increase in taxes on the middle class to pay for
Medicare For All, or rather, where would the tax burden go to pay for that?" Colbert asks him if
he's going to raise taxes, and to his credit, he's willing to answer yes, but it's here, couched in
200 words of fine-tuned context. He has to explain why, in his view, raising taxes isn't the scary
thing it's assumed to be, when you factor in all your premiums and copayments, the artificially
high prices of prescriptions drugs set by a pharmaceutical industry that's ripping us off, he's
ensuring us that the richer will get taxed more, and struggling people not at all. Overall, we'll pay
less in taxes, he wants to say, since current health care costs are a tax in all but name, one that
can be and has been devastating to many among us. For Bernie, I've noticed that foregrounding
the important context is a game of volume—volume and emphasis. While it might seem like he's
yelling all the time, Bernie does modulate a lot, and if you pick out the moments when his pitch
or his volume ramps up, you can see a sketch of what he wants the listener to take away.
Sanders obviously has a good sense of rhythm and delivery and an iron grip on the points he
wants to make. But what's even more masterful is his ability to articulate an ideology out of all
the things that surround his answer to a question, in a way that often makes the questions feel
not only stupid, but a symptom of the stupid worldview that he's trying to fight against. Now, it
remains to be seen whether those principles can win the presidency or even the democratic
nomination. Regardless, they have a powerful messenger.

Trump is clearly a populist anti politician where Bernie Sanders has a very large backing of
young people, well educated young people and therefore he has a type of rupee following.
Although I don't think that that was really a populist a tendency to move in that direction and part
of the analysis that this person gave us showed just how his speech can be emotionally
appealing to so many people.
Main argument: Lakoff’s research on the differences between the two parties.
Lakoff’s research in the cognitive and brain sciences has been focused on understanding
how the various policy positions of conservatives and progressives, how is it possible that
political parties support opinions that would appear totally contradictory at first sight. For
example, with conservativism Lakoff asks himself: what does being against abortion have to
do with being for liberalising gun ownership? What does owning guns have to do with the
reality of global warming? How does being anti-government fit with wanting a stronger
military? How can you be pro-life and for the death penalty? And progressives of course
have the opposite views and their views hang together as well. Lakoff asks himself: “how is it
possible that you can have political parties that have positions which are in evidence
contradictory from a strictly rational logical perspective? How did these contradictions stick
together and how is that voters support these positions that are somewhat contradictory?

The answer: we tend to understand the nation metaphorically in family terms. This is logical
for cognitivists, because our experience from the earliest age is conditioned by the family.
We were born into families, therefore, our experiential universe from the day one is to a
certain extent conditioned by these people around us and the needs that we might have
reflected as well in the language.
For example, we talked about our founding fathers, we send our sons and daughters to war
and we talked about homeland security, we have the daughters of the American Revolution
or metaphor for the government and the army is Uncle Sam. There's fatherland, mother
russia or think of George Orwell's 1984 he talks about Big Brother. What do social issues in
politics have to do with the family? To scientists, we are first governed in our families and so
we grow up understanding governing institutions in terms of the governing system or
systems of families. The nation as a family directly informs our political worldview, even
though the influence is not conscious. The use of this metaphor is insidious, both because it
acts unconsciously, both because it is a structural frame for numerous other frames. It is like
a meta conceptual metaphor. It’s what Lakoff sees as precise mapping between the nation
and the family. The Homeland as home, the Citizens as siblings, the government or the head
of government as parent. The government's duty is to its citizens, just as a parents duty is to
its children: provide security, protection, make laws, say what can and cannot be done, run
the economy, provide public schools. The conservative and progressive worldviews, dividing
America, can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated
into very different common forms of family life. What Lakoff calls “the strict father family”
(the Conservatives moral view) and “the nurturing parent family” (the progressive view).
- The strict father family model: in the strict father family father knows best. He
knows right from wrong and has the ultimate authority to make sure his children and
his spouse do what he says, which is taking to be what is right. Many conservative
spouses accept this worldview, uphold the father's authority and are strict in those
rounds of family life, but they are in charge of. When children disobey, it is his moral
duty to punish them, even painfully or what's painfully enough, so that to avoid
punishment they will obey him the next time, they'll do what is right and not just do
what feels good. Through physical discipline, they are supposed to become obedient,
internally strong and able to prosper in the external world. In other words, the world is
considered a partially hostile place. If you're going to get a head in the world, you've
got to be strong, you've got to be independent, you have to be disciplined. The
father's job is to make you strong, independent and disciplined.
What if your children don't prosper? For the conservatives, that general means that
they are not disciplined. Therefore, they cannot be moral and so they deserve their
position in life, their poverty or if they do something wrong, they deserve to go to
prison or whatever. This reasoning shows up in conservative politics, in which the
poor are often seen as lazy, as undeserving, and the rich as deserving their wealth.
Responsibility is thus taken to be personal responsibility, not social responsibility.
What you become is only up to you. Society has little or nothing to do with it, you're
responsible for yourself, not for others, others are going to be responsible for
themselves. So in a world governed by personal responsibility and discipline, those
who win deserve to win: Donald Trump exhausts this tendency in conservative
thinking. Why does Donald Trump publicly insult candidates and other political
leaders mercilessly? Because he knows he can win out in the insult game. In strict
conservative eyes that makes him a formidable winner, who deserves to be elected
or re-elected. He portrays his presidency as a battle, where she is the victim of
abuse, his insults are, therefore, seen as deserved victories. Trump has heavily
criticised John McCain, who had run for president in the election before Trump,
against Obama. John McCain was a republican, but he was also a pleurisy decorated
military officer. He was a republican state senator former and he was shot down, he
was captured and imprisoned for a few years. He was tortured, and when he finally
came back to the United States, he was held as a great hero. Trump said that he was
anything but a hero. Trump’s reasoning was that McCain got shot down and
captured, but heroes for Trump don't get shot down, they don't get captured. Heroes
have to be winners,they defeat bad guys. People who get shot down, beating off
stuck in a cage, they are losers, not winners. This was so such an outrageous
statement on Trump's part that he was heavily criticized by Republicans themselves,
but he got away with it, no one else would have gotten away with something of this
sort. Americans have an enormous guilt complex. They have romanticized the idea of
America’s role in the world, the military have to bring democracy, to fight against
evil… . Therefore, when you have a soldier who gets caught, gets captured and is
tortured, there is usually an enormous outpouring of a positive sentiment for that
person. So when you get someone like McCain, coming from an illustrious military
family, he comes back, injured, his life will never be the same by his experience and
then he goes into politics and it becomes even a candidate for president of the United
States. No one would ever criticise McCain for his military service, because he's seen
from the point of view of most Americans as a morally superior person. He didn't sell
his own troops out just to get sent home earlier, he preferred being tortured and kept
in a cage for a year and a half because he didn't want to sell his country or his troops
out. Until Trump chooses to criticize him precisely for this fact, on the basis that he's
a loser. On the fact that if you got caught you must not be as great as you think. This
is totally an exaggerated use of the strict father model.
It is an example of the fact that Trump took the strip father model to such an extent
that he would actually criticise someone else, who in the general contour of the
society was considered of a higher or superior moral fiber. This just shows the extent
to which he assumed the position of moral leader: he determines what is moral and
what is not moral. He makes the rules in the laws.
The strict father logic extends even further. The basic idea is that authority is justified
by morality. In a well-ordered world, there should be a moral hierarchy, in which laws
traditionally dominated should dominate. The hierarchy is God above Man, Man
 above nature, the disciplined or strong people above the undisciplined or weak, the
rate above the poor, employers above employees, adults about children, Western
culture above other cultures, America above other Western countries…. The
hierarchy extends to men above women, christians above non-christians, straits
above gays etc.
According to Lakoff, we see these tendencies in most of the republican presidential
candidates and on the whole conservative policies flow from the strict father
worldview and the hierarchy that it creates. People want to see themselves as doing
right and not wrong, moral worldviews tend to be part of self definition. Who you most
deeply are and that's your moral worldview defines for you what the world should be
like. When it isn't that way, one could become frustrated and even angry.
- The nurturing family model: is the progressive model, in which there are two
parents, both are equally responsible for the moral development of the children. Their
primary duty is to love their children and nurture them to be happy in their lives.There
are two aspects to the concept of nurture: empathy and responsibility, both for
oneself and for others. The idea is that, to take care of others, you have to take care
of yourself. Two parents, each with equal importance, raise their children to nurture
others, which means that their children should have empathy for others and a sense
of social responsibility. In Lakoff’s opinion, this is the opposite of indulgence or
spoiling your children. According to this model, nurturing parents are authoritative
without being authoritarian. They set fair and reasonable limits and rules, and take
the time and trouble to discuss these rules with their children. Obedience derives
from love for parents, not from fear or punishment. Open and respectful
communication takes place between parents and children: parents explain their
decisions to legitimate authority, parents accept questioning by children as a positive
trait, but reserve the ultimate decision-making for themselves. Parents protect their
children from external threats, as a natural expression of their love and care.

We will look at the ramifications of implications of these two models on everything, from
political, economy... . Conservatives in general have a top-down view of the economy, a
trickle-down effect: you give faith and money to the big multinationals, they will hire. The
richer, the higher. People will benefit economically. The nurturing family model tends to see
a bottom-up logic, where you privilege responsibility of the individual on the lower level,
assuming that they will climb the ladder and this will benefit the economy.

View of economy

Conservatives: idea of a free market. The economy, capitalism or whatever it is the system
that we have, runs best when it's free to run on its own. If we accept the fact that the people
in the economy are morally responsible and, according to the strict father model, the higher
up you are within the society, the more morally responsible you are, it goes without saying
that the few are rules and regulations you will pose on the economy the better it's able to
work.
Progressives: generally the people who are in the nurturing family model want to impose
rules and regulations on the economy, because they don't trust simply the good will of the
people who are running the economy. Therefore, you need rules and regulations to become
socially responsible, and the rules and regulations have to be a part of the society and
therefore the family has to come up with rules and regulations in order to prosper. The
conservative model is that prospering means not being overly taxed, not being over
regulated.

The strict father model

The family needs a strong father to protect it from a hostile and competitive world. Morally,
there are absolute rights and wrongs. The strip father is inherently moral, he's the head of
the household. Obedience to the father is moral, disobedience is immoral: traditional value
system, where punishment is seen as necessary to teach morality, to teach people right from
wrong. These things do not come naturally. The mother, in the strict father model, supports
and upholds the authority of the father, but she's not strong enough to impose moral order
by herself. She provides affection, love, rewards right conduct and provides comfort when
children are punished. Children are seen as undisciplined at birth, they need discipline and
they need to learn right from wrong and that's the role of the parents, although the father is
the primary disciplinary and moral guide.

The nurturing parent parent model

There are two co-responsible parents, therefore they're equal. The key of nurturing is in two
ways, empathy and social responsibility. Parents are authoritative without being authoritarian
and one manifests obedience towards parents and the society through love, not through a
fear of punishment.

The Nation as Family

The metaphor of the nation as family is different from one model to the other.

The strict father model: moral authority principle, individual responsibility principle, free
market principle and the bootstraps principle.

- Moral authority principle: the head of the government at the head of the nation, he is
the moral guide. He is the person to look up to and follow, because he knows best.
Even if I might have doubt, about whether he's saying the right thing or doing the
right thing, I've got to trust him anyway, because he is the metaphor father of my
family, the nation.
Perfect example of the moral authority principle: after the attack in 200, George W
Bush Jr says “we've got to go and we've got to attack Afghanistan, but above all that
we got attacked Iraq” and his justification for attacking Iraq was based on the fact that
Saddam Hussein had direct relations to Al-Qaeda, that said in this government had
arms of mass destruction that they would use and that therefore we had to
preemptively strike them, before he struck us. However, there were absolutely clear
indications that what Bush was saying did not correspond to any real, factual
evidence. Bush wins the election would not with 50% of the vote, not even the
popular vote, this happens just a few weeks after he's elected, and if you saw a few
months after he's elected all of sudden gets 80% of the popular opinion behind him,
even to do things as crazy as to go in war. The moral authority principle in the United
States works: he's our symbolic father, we have the back of the father in times of
great danger and need and therefore he is the father of our nation.
 - Individual responsibility principle: goes back to Protestant work ethic, goes back to
the idea that you are responsible for your moral, obviously economic growth and no
one can help you, neither institutions, nor other people. You have to make it on your
own. The idea is that you are strengths as a person, very often American is
considered a meritocracy. People believe that your merit is in demonstrating your
worth and you're worth comes from this individual responsibility principle. The
question of the individual responsibility principle as opposed to the expansion
of freedom principle when we look at the Gran Torino film.

- Free market principle: the less interference there is in the economy, the better it is.
Because everyone has an equal possibility of making it. People who believe a free
market principle, believe that if there were just no rules and regulations, everything
would work better, and that the people who have greater merit would be the people
who would make it to the top.

- Bootstraps principle: your bootstraps are your suspenders, the things that hold up
your pants. To pick yourself up from your bootstraps means that your discipline and
hard work will make it such that you will be able to not only survive, but prosper in
this society.

The nurturing parent model:

- Common good principle: what is good for one is good for all and what's good for all is
good for the one. Question of shared or relationship between the society and the
individual within society.

- Expansion of freedom principle: the more we allow people to express themselves

and be free, the more we will have freedom ourselves.
The expansion of freedom principle, the diversity principle and the human dignity
principle are somewhat related to one another, but the notion here is that the
freedom of expression and allowing everyone to have equal dignity to respect people
in their diversity are all essential aspects of a nation, which will grow in a positive
way. The expansion of freedom principle is a recognition that the country was not
born free, it was born into slave, there were people who were born into slavery, killing
of native Americans. But, by recognising these problems and criticising ourselves
from the past, we can make a more perfect Union. According to the nurturing parent
model, rather than looking back and saying let's make America great again, which
would be the strict father model, the expansion of freedom principle is one which
says we come from a troubled past, let's understand her troubled past to make a
better future and expand the freedoms of everyone.

- Human dignity principle: provide greater dignity to everyone.

- Diversity principle: accept and appreciate people's diversity, don't criticise people on
the basis of their diversity.
These are categories that are stereotypical. The importance for us is not necessarily voting
for Lakoff, voting for one or the other.The importance is to see that you can have models of
this sort that allow you to read certain many categories and also language within a culture.
The important thing is to see if this makes sense when we're looking at someone's speech or
we're looking at a film or looking at someone's behaviour, to what extent did these
categories work within a particular culture.

One of the things the differences between American culture and Italian culture is the
difference between the roots of the culture. American culture being born from a calvinistic
protestantism. The settlers of America, before it's the United States, above puritans,
protestants. These are people who do not practice religious freedom themselves, these were
separatists, fundamentalists who come over and much of their own ideology. America is
founded on something which is very severe, because it eliminates the whole notion of
knowing or even thinking that you could know whether you've been saved or not. Calvin's
vision of God is not that of a good, nice, loving god. God who is totally pissed off with man.
The Reformation it's a late coming church and it's much more of a fundamentalist type of
vision, it is against the corrupt, it's founded on and against the corruption of Roman the
Roman Catholic Church. Protestant work ethic it's that through hard work through sweat and
commitment you can cleanse your soul by cleansing your body. The protestant work ethic is
individualistic and it's hard work commitment.
It's clear that from the Italian point of view, the difference between the conservatives and the
progressive vision falls much more on the side of the progressives, because Catholic culture
is forgiving, it's a confessional culture.

Salvini's political point of view is much closer to the strict father model, with respect to
someone who might be on the left in Italy.

One of the important things that Lakoff says is that there is no middle in American politics.
There are moderates, people who are politically moderate, but there is no etiology of the
moderate. A moderate conservative has some progressive positions on issues, which vary
from person to person. Moderates have both political and moral worldviews, but mostly are
in contradiction with each other.
Lakoff asks how they can reside in the same brain, in the same person, at the same time. He
says that both are characterised in the brain by neurocircuitry, they are linked by a common
place circuit and it's called mutual inhibition: when one is turned on, the other is turned off,
when one is strengthened, the other is weakened.
What turns them on and off? Language that fits that worldview activates that worldview,
strengthening it, while turning off the other worldview and weakening the other: the more
Trump's views are discussed in the media, the more, according to Lakoff, they are activated
and the stronger they get. Both in the minds of hardcore conservatives and in the minds of
moderate progressives. What's interesting and what Lakoff said, this happens even when
you're attacking Trump's views. The reason is that negating a frame activates the frame. It
doesn't matter if you're promoting Trump or attacking Trump, if you're talking about Trump
and using his language you're helping trump.

Idea of bi-conceptual: a bi-conceptual is a person who potentially has a point of view, which
would be typical of conservatives and another point of view, which would be typical of
progressives. For example: someone who is pro-life, against abortion, but also very worried
about the environment. To being anti-abortion would be a conservative point of view, while
pro environment would be a progressive point of view. The way you can convince someone
who has that type of bi-conceptual position is by reinforcing the worldview that you're
interested in supporting. By reinforcing that worldview: for example, if you are progressive,
you talk to that person about the importance of the environment and then, once you get them
to identify you around the question of the environment, then maybe you can go on and talk
about some position that they have that you're not in favour of, like liberalisation of guns,
which would not be a progressive at all. Bi-conceptualism: is this idea that people within their
worldview would have positions which are not exclusively one or the other but sometimes a
bit one and the other, politically speaking.

Differences in reasoning
Lakoff says that conservatives' way of thinking is general in one of direct causation: you
have a problem, it must be a cause. Every problem has a cause and therefore we have to
look at the relationship between cause and effect. Example: if there's a problem of a crime,
we have to find a solution to crime and that solution is going to put the criminals away: build
more gels, increase sentencing for criminals, make criminals pay more for committing crime
or for example making sure that people pay with their lives for certain crime: the death
penalty. The conservative view is that you solve problems to direct action. If there's a
problem let's not talk about it infinitely, let's try and find a solution. This is a very pragmatic
spirit.
Progressives have more understanding of systemic causation, recognizing that many
problems arrived from the system, so must be dealt with via systemic causation. Systemic
Causation has four possible versions:
1) interacting direct causes (or chains of direct causes);
2) feedback loops;
3) probabilistic causes;
4) all the above together;

For instance, a systemic causation in global warming might explain why global warming over
the Pacific can produce huge snow storms in Washington DC. So you have masses of highly
energized water molecules evaporate over the Pacific, blow to the northeast and over the
North Pole and come down in winter over the east coast in parts of the midwest, as masses
of snow.
The systemic causation people would say that things that appear contradictory, like having
snow even though you believe in global warming, can be explained by complicated causal
effects.
For direct causation what's easier to understand is what is probably most true. So, if they
see snow in front of the white house in the spring, as Trump did, they say look this is an
obvious sign that global warming doesn't exist. If global warming existed there wouldn't be
snow in such a sub southern part of the United States in the spring.
It's clear that direct causation is easier to understand, and to be represented in the
grammars of all languages around the world. Systemic cause is more complex and is not
represented in the grammar of any language: it has to be learnt and this is one of the
reasons why the progressives will tend to be the better educated people, where's the
conservatives will probably be the less educated people, because the conservative cause-
effect type of approach is one that is commonsensical, it's evident or self-evident. The
systemic causal position is not necessary like that.

In the strict father model, the father expects the child or spouse to respond directly to an
order and that refusal should be punished. In the strict father model, actions speak louder
than words. Might be a good way to characterize the conservative vision: the ideas that, after
a while, talk is useless. Actions need to be taken. Since the progressive model is more
collective in principle, it requires more discussion. The strict father model is able to impart
orders, which to be followed in a logical direct causation: the solution appears evident.
Systemic causation, on the other hand, appears as more complex, in order to intervene.
With the nurturing family model as a guide, things get discussed and debated.

Trump's policy proposals: we can see that they are framed in terms of direct causation. For
example in his presidency he built a wall to stop the immigrants. All the immigrants, who
have entered illegally, just deport them, don't complicate the issue by looking at it as a
systemic problem. If you look at the systemic problem, you have to see that you have 11
million immigrants at the moment in the United States, who are not strictly speaking legal,
but who are working to boost the economy. They are a useful part of the economy on the
one hand, and on the other hand they are not legal. Or let's say you have immigrants whose
children are not regularized and therefore there are illegal, but maybe their parents are legal,
how do you deal with that? Let's take gun violence, for Trump the cure for gun violence is to
have a gun ready to directly shoot, getting a direct cause-and-effect.
Whereas, the progressives would say we have to start a kerbing back on allowing guns to be
used by people, so they would start saying under what conditions should people be allowed
to have guns, what regulations do you need to have on guns, what type of guns… . All of a
sudden it becomes much more complicated.
To conservatives, there is a cause and effect. While in a systemic situation systemic
reasoning, progressives would say this is not going to solve the problem because we have
an economy which is itself interconnected. Systemically it's not going to work, because not
only are parts made in other countries, but the the people are who are working on there may
be foreigners. The problem for the progressive is a much more complicated problem.

Persuasive mechanisms used by Trump

- Repetition= a repetition is never just a repetition, because language is not a code,
words are nearly linked to the circus that determine their meaning. The more word is
heard, the more the circuit is activated and the stronger gets, the easier it is to fire
that circuit again. Trump would repeat something like win-win-win we're going to win.
In people's mind they associate winning with trump.
- Framing= think of one of Trump's most famous expressions from the 2016 campaign:
crooked Hillary, make America great again or America first. Framing Hillary as
purposely knowingly committing crimes for her own benefit: crooked means she's a
crook, she's a thief. Repeating makes many people unconsciously think of her that
way, even though she was found to have been honest and legal by thorough, the
frame worked, because they just kept on repeating it. There is a common metaphor
that immorality is illegality, and acting against strict father morality, which is the only
kind of morality recognised by the conservative. That makes Hilary immoral, the
metaphor makes her actions immoral and hence she is a crock.
- Well-known examples= when a well publicized disaster happens, the coverage
activates the framing of that disaster over and over, strengthen it and increasing the
probability that the framing will occur easily with high probability. Repeating examples
of shootings by Muslims, african-americans and Latinos raises fears that it could
happen to you in your community, despite being a very small actual probability. So if
you start talking about illegal immigrants, entering from Mexico or from Arab
countries and characterizing members, potential rapists, drug traffickers, terrorists...
you create fear. Fear tends to activate desire for a stronger strict father.
- Grammar= one of Trump's phrases was radical Islamic terrorists. Radical puts
Muslims on a linear scale and terrorists imposes of frame on that scale, suggesting
that terrorism is built into the religion itself. So the Grammar suggest that there is
something about Islam that has terrorism inherently in it. If that were the case, radical
would be oxymoronic. Terrorists by definition are radical. Imagine calling any white
conservative government in the United States a radical Republican terrorist, it doesn't
make any sense, because Republican interests are antithetical. As Trump said to
Tony Schwartz, the ghost writer, who wrote the art of the deal for him, I call it truthful
hyperbole, it's an Innocent form of exaggeration and so very effective form of
promotion;
- Conventional metaphoric thought= conventional metaphoric thought is inherent in our
largely unconscious thought. Such normal modes of metaphorical thinking, better not
noticed as such. Consider brexit, which used the metaphor of entering and leaving
the EU: the whole brexit campaign was centred around the idea where we entered,
now we can leave. There's a universal metaphor that states: are locations in space,
you can enter a state, be deep in some state and come out of that state. So if you
enter a cafe and then leave the cafe, you'll be in the same location as before you
entered. But obviously that need not be true of states of being. That, however, was
the metaphor used with brexit Britain: believing that. after leaving the EU, things
would be as they were before they entered the EU. They were wrong of course,
things changed radically, while they were in the EU. That same metaphor was being
used by Trump when he was saying make America great again, make America safe
again and so on. As if there was some past ideal state that we could go back to, just
by having Trump as president.
Lesson 8 – 25/03

Post-truth
Post-truth books: arguing the explanation of the crisis of democracy that we find ourselves in; it’s a
superficial and wrong explanation. The rise of the far right and the conspiracy theories, the definition of
post-truth is that politics has become dominated by emotions and passion, people on the far-right wing
(Rush Limbaugh): this people will literally say that they're not interested in what they see because they are
guided by the passion of their followers. The liberal media in America are represented by New York times,
The Washington Post, CNN, etc… and they describe this crisis of democracy as a post-truth. Actually it is
superficial, it is much too recent, this is something new: we need to understand much more history that
laid up to that.

Hyper reality: media culture which consists of images, discourses, many forms of rhetoric, images and
discourse can be understood as rhetoric, which is the manipulation of perceptual appearance. Perceptual
appearances are rhetoric. Platone himself was a connoisseur of rhetoric (he was a sophist).

Liberal media don’t know anything about Postmodernism, they live and understand democracy and
contemporary society as modernism. Modernism is the foundation of our western European and North
America democratic society that began with American and French revolution, so what underpins
modernism is the Enlightenment (illuminismo) which was brought about by political thinkers who were
focusing on rationality and scientific knowledge: democracy is working through rationality. In doing so, the
public's fear was defeated by the principles of Enlightenment, because people present their position
rationally, they have dialogues, they respect each other, and they debate. As a matter of fact, the two
fundamental achievements reached by western society (modernism) were democracy and science,
through which people were able to go beyond superstition and religious beliefs.
Straightening the public fear brings back the truth, communication, rationality, facts, it is not taking count
of postmodernism: the media just after the II World War and the arise of consumer society, through the
electronic culture. Postmodernism means that there is a dry of post-truth: its development has replaced
communication: rhetoric foresees a very visual culture: television, film, advertising, images. The use of
visual images brings the discourse to create appearances and not truth.

What we need is a theory of rhetoric because we need to understand what the post modernism media
theories did: one postmodernism's thinker is with no doubt Umberto Eco (travels in hyper reality).
Postmodern thinkers went deeply into the questions of what the processing of rhetoric in the media
culture of images and discourse are.
He actually attacks the postmodern thinkers, which are based on the French theories of Enlightenment, He
is making them responsible for the rise of Donald Trump, it confuses the diagnosis of postmodernism with
the people who are the symptoms of postmodernism. Beyond Postmodernism stays Relativism, according
to which there is no truth at all, and anyone can say anything (debate about climate change and global
warming for example) most scientists are into this discourse of post truth, there is scepticism about this
climate change, how do scientist defend themselves from people who accused them of telling false?
Scientist just ask people to believe them We need to understand why the far-right climate change talk in
terms of relativism.

Chapter 6: accusation is wrong, postmodernisms don’t say that there is no truth they say truth is a process
and that’s what Platon said: how does Socrates seek through questions and dialogues? The inquiry and
deepening of understanding. Why do CNN, New York Times and other liberal media insist in post truth
instead of going deeper? The media technology of a photograph serves a purpose to communicate, the
postmodernist view of a photograph is that it institutes its own autonomous reality that is a hyper reality,
which is more powerful than the original. They cling to this simplistic idea of post-truth, instead of looking
deeper into this expression.
The media are part of postmodernism: it’s about money and capitalism, which is based on the idea that
every area of our lives is an area where you can make money from (pure capitalism idea of the right wing
America). Democracy can’t become an area where people make money from. Media are responsible for
turning politics into a business in order to make money; some say CNN helped Donald Trump to win in 2016
indeed. Politics since a long time has descended in the yellow press, which means that the media, even the
liberal media, have started to put sensationalism, voyeurism, emphasis on the present moment on the
front page, without focusing on history, contexts, past, it almost seems like only the present moment
counts, because whatever is sensational pushes everything else aside. CNN and old media transformed
democracy into a money making machine. In this analysis media are responsible for the arise of Trump's far
right, conspiracy theories and so for the threat of democracy. The reason is that the director thinks
capitalism and democracy are in a conflict, therefore capitalism is a damage to democracy. After the
massive spread of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, public spheres disappeared and social networks leaded to
a return of the public sphere, but not in a physical form, in a simulated form, that is the hyper reality form).
Before Silicon Valley took on the monopoly of social media, social media were meant to give people the
opportunity to live social life through virtual communities. Nowadays social life and virtual communities are
not even the aim of social media. The business model takes over the strengthening of democracy.

In the purpose of making more and more profits from social media, within them were introduced
algorithms that of course lead to surveillance of people’s data, then this data is sold to advertise
companies. Through this process, we get personalized advertising, and the reason is that they know our
browser history, they know our tastes and so give us personal advertising, in order to push us to buy more,
to spend more money, and make someone else’s profits much bigger. This is super dangerous for us.
Politics and democracy are becoming another form of consumerism. The crisis of democracy brings out the
rise of the far right wing, and related to that, we assist to wide spreaded conspiracy theories, homophobia,
xenophobia, and so on.
This kind of advertising is called Mass Advertising: within the public’s field, the free market is a public fear
buffer that decides what they want us to buy. There’s a direct binding between the cellar and the buyer
when you get personalized advertising. It decreases your opportunity to experience something new, so you
are held into a repetition, you are held down in a repetition of information you have already seen, and
pheraphs brought. Basically, you see and buy what they want you to. The advertising algorithm, it’s trying
to control the future. It’s about knowing the future before it happens: trying to shape the future the way
they want it to be. The only possibility you have is the possibility that they show you, that they decide you
to see. This brings to a complete lack of dialogue in the public’s fear.

crucial point: Philip K. Dick (director of Blade Runner) is a thinker of postmodernism.

On one hand, in present times, truth is not facts it’s inquiry, instead Socratic dialogs which are based on
real democracy, that is built on questions and answers, and so it’s based on a constructive dialogue, what
we have today is a society that is based on statistics: it’s the logic of the referendum where the answer is
already built into the questions, the only choice is between yes and no, you can’t really make questions,
they already gave you theirs.
On the other hand, nowadays scientists invoke science against the post-truthers and conspiracy theories,
which are built by sceptic people, so basically science invoke science in order to defend itself from the post
truthers. The problem is that the scientist themselves long ago abandoned modernism science and became
themselves postmodernists, by that Shapiro means:
1. Science became Technoscience of money-making application. Science is no longer a model of pure
scientists who are working on technologies. Also, here, the answer is built into the questions:
money are making capitalist technological applications: in fact, now we have genetic engineering,
technologies like smartphones and so on, and of course Technoscience where the application is the
driving force.
2. Science became science-fiction. Ex: Star Trek presents the dream of time travel; this dream
influences the physics to say that time travel is possible: teleportation. Equally, Science fiction said,
“let’s have cell phones” “let’s have talking interfaces through computers” and we do have this.
 3. Exotic theories (Hawking etc… or the one consultant to interstellar) the last one I nominated was a
physics professor, in the US there’s this shared belief that when a physician is hired by Hollywood
and provides the scientific support behind the scenes is considered big). It’s like science fiction
became real science itself.
4. Liberal media evokes democratic values of modernism; the only need is to defend democratic
models of modernism against post truth models to make it against them. It’s been a long time since
liberal media abandoned modernism democracy. They don’t even practice democratic values
themselves, they serve postmodernism media rhetoric too, and this can be verified through
watching a front-page newspaper, which has become a triumph of sensationalism and voyeurism,
at the expense of trustworthy and verified facts.

Don’t separate the news media from the entertainment media.

The great achievement of Donald Trump is that he completed the transformation of politics into
entrainment: so he created the so defined infotainment. The fact is that as long as you’re in the frame you
are reinforcing it, talking constantly about Trump is equivalent to publicize him, to give credit to him,
basically, even traditionally liberal media helped Donald reinforcing his figure, because they spectacularized
him in any way (sensationalism over reliable facts).
Facts and objectivity are the only means we have to go back to reality and to Truth.

Reality in itself is in a crisis, if we look at virtual and augmented reality, the virtual reality during the
pandemic has become our new reality, people use virtual spaces instead of physical spaces, this already
started before with the domination of media culture, and it has increased during the pandemic. Long ago
lots of liberal criticized digitalization and they used to say that this was not only an escape but also a
betrayal of reality, but actually this is a consequence of our concept of reality: we got used to thinking
about a distorted, not-real reality. At this point we believe that the image of someone is as good as the real
person, and this comes from westerns technoscience. No one has the objective truth, everyone is
immersed into his own existential situations, even scientists are founded by economy and institutions.
The most important thing for individuals is to understand their personal approach to knowledge in order to
pursue true knowledge, we must hear points and experiences of other people's discourses’. It’s
fundamental not to insist only on what we believe in, because it’s not certain that our personal truth
corresponds to the universal truth.
 Summary of Alan Shapiro’s intervention
What did Shapiro mean with “memory is or was eliminated by Twitter”? What is the nature of
Twitter? The nature of Twitter is to allow people to communicate instantly, communicate their
thoughts instantly. It's based on an extreme economy of language, with a maximum of 125
characters, and therefore the language itself is synthetic. The whole idea of twitter is that
people then respond to you and so on and so forth. The whole purpose of Twitter is to get
your thought out now and to get other people to comment on your thoughts. There's no
history in the sense that it's not something that you probably can recover, old tweets, but it's
not something that anyone ever does. The thing makes a splash at the moment it gets
commented and you go onto the next thing and the next thing... there's no verification of
what's being said, there's no attempt to enter into anything like a dialectic. Anyone who has
my tweet account they probably people were followers or interested in my thinking and very
often that people who take my position. I think when he says that the problem of the
historicity at tweet is that it's a form of communication which makes its claim to fame on
being immediate and as fastest possible.
Concept of hyperreality: the idea of hypermodernism or hyperreality is the fact that what the
latter part of the 20th century and 21st century is bringing us different ways of experiencing
what we call reality, we have virtual forms of reality. We're able in these societies to explore
who we are through various forms of fantasy or sensations created in different forms of
spacetime. Alan Sahpiro's basically saying it's over the last 50 years 60-years science fiction
has actually given us the idea and led to the ways in which our fantasy has been developed,
and soon as a fantasy develops in a certain way, science follows fantasy so they speak. The
idea here is that if the modernist idea of reality is that there is only one reality and we all
know what it is, we all see experience, in it has the same factuality, in a postmodern vision
we cannot longer talk about a simple single reality.
When I said it the beginning of the course, coming from a completely different point of view,
is similar to what Alan is saying about postmodernism: through language and our
understanding of language, we can understand that there never was simply a soul reality,
that whenever we have any sort of event, people register the event subjectively, they
understand what happened in ways that are anywhere from slightly different to very different,
depending on the nature of the event. Therefore, to talk in the first place about reality, is
already to engage in a type of wishful thinking. We take our version of reality for the truth
and we assume that everyone else has understood the same thing. We know this can't be
the case, because we're constantly discussing. We're always attending through language to
understand what the reality is. So, society established for convenience’s sake a convenient
method, which has a strong ideology, that however we all know that reality is, it is self-
evident, it's obvious... even though it seems to me to be the case, it is anything but obvious.
The idea is that looking at the problem from the way Shapiro says, it seems easier to
understand why there isn't a simple reality, because there are various forms of reality.
Our vision of a unified single reality is largely construction of our society, of our social
thought. Professor Shapiro basic thesis is that, although the two books that we've read are
largely accurate in the symptoms of today's society, they see something about what is going
wrong in today's society, the phenomenology of what's going wrong, they are completely
misguided or misled in what the cause of this might be, they see the cause is simply the
abandonment of facts, of reality, of truth. Shapiro is using this idea of hypermodern as
opposed to postmodern. What is the nature of facts, of objectivity, of reality.
Some of the points that the two books raised. Shapiro: these books are the products of a
certain type of liberal thinking, coming from a certain ideological position which he doesn't
feel that he is part of, and so on the one hand he can accept some of the things, on the other
hand he cannot accept other things. The post-truth book by McEntire, which is the one that
was being referred to by Alan Shapiro, is that facts are endangered in today's political arena.
Post truth or McEntire is founded on notions of false equivalence. Basically, the idea is that if
truth doesn't exist, then it follows that all things are equal under the Sun: you have your
opinion, I have mine. For someone like McEntire, the function of having the truth, knowing
the truth, is essential, because if you can't, then everything becomes relative, and if
everything becomes relative we go into this age that he's calling the post fact era. Then he
asks whether post-truth isn’t simply synonymous with propaganda. He goes “Aren’t
alternative facts just other ways of saying falsehoods, lies?” For example, during the Trump
administration even his press secretary said well Trump is just giving you alternative facts.
The author sees that what is striking new is not just that truth is being challenged, but that it
is being challenged as a mechanism for a certain political dominance. The Oxford dictionary
definition of post-truth is: relating to or denoting circumstances, in which objective facts are
less influential in shaping public opinion then appeals to emotion and personal belief.
As the book explains, post-truth does it mean we are past to truth, but rather that it's post-
truth in the sense that truth is now irrelevant, it doesn't mean anything anymore. It has no
real place in that culture.
A good example McEntire uses is that he says it didn't start with Donald Trump: look at
George W Bush Juniors justification for entering into war with Iraq, after the September 11th
attacks. Bush and his government insisted upon the fact that Saddam Hussein had close ties
to Al-Qaeda, that it had arms of mass destruction, that we could expect an imminent attack
from Saddam Hussein, those things that the government was espousing “felt true”. They
made sense to our feelings as Americans, because they were the immediate aftermath of an
attack. The attack on the World Trade Center was very hard felt that what one would have
been told was true, it must be true. So people believed what his administration was saying,
because it was convenient, because it laid the blame on a tyrant, on a single figure,
someone who could be eliminated. Remember what Lakoff said: simple cause-and-effect.
Even though none of what was said proved to be true, the very interesting thing is that even
today most Americans still believe Bush did well and a good percentage of them believe that
actually what he said was true. In other words, to use absolutely no shred of evidence or
proof that any of those things was true, most of it was completely illogical from the start.

Objective truth has been deconstructed over the last century. Facts don't exist outside of a
narrative, in which they create a truth, which is necessarily subjective to a certain extent. But
once you do away with objective truth, you leave yourself open to forms of relativism, which
flatten all distinctions. What was largely a theoretical critique from the left, has been co-opted
by right-wing political operatives.

McEntire is interested in the ways truth is being subverted and he designates the ways the
truth has been subverted. There are three way:
1. One way the truth is what he calls a falsehood. When we say things which are
untrue without meaning to do so. It's never a lie because the mistake is unintentional.
I say something which I think is true but which in effect is not true.
2. The second level of truth being subverted is what he calls willful ignorance, when
we don't know if something is true, but we say that anyway. In other words, why
 bother to take the time to find out whether our information is correct. Here I presume
it must be true so I'll tell her to you as though it is true. rather than checking my
sources.
3. The third level is what he calls lying, when we tell a falsehood with intent to deceive.
The third level, to McEntire, crosses a line, is in a different category, because it
involves attempting to deceive another person, even though we know what we are
saying is untrue. When our intent is to manipulate someone into believing something
that we know to be untrue, there we have graduated from near interpretation of facts
into falsification.

Harry Frankfurt himself philosopher makes the case that when one is bullshiting, one's not
necessarily lying but instead may just be demonstrating an indifference toward what is true.
But for all intensive purposes what McEntyre is worried about is the third level, what's called
lying. He talks about when people, in politics, when people spill the truth. To spin the truth is
too narrating in a way that makes it positive for you. When you have a clear intent to
influence others opinions and you side with very partial truths, which you know will be taken
as more general.

I take one fact, and I take another fact completely disassociated with the 1st, and I put them
together to draw a conclusion. I take two things, which are in any way necessarily related,
but, by giving them in sequence, I present them as true. Just putting them together in this
way, by spinning them in this way, it creates an inference.

Post-truth also exists in the more vigilant, when self-deception and self-delusion are
involved, where someone actually believes an untruth. The person who is telling the lie,
however he is firmly convinced that it is true, he isn't just a liar who is deceiving you. It's
someone who is telling something that has no credible foundation as a truth and that person
actually believes that it's true. Post truth is that so much acclaim the truth does not exist, as
that facts are subordinate to our political point of view. The actual definition focuses on what
post truth is the idea that feelings sometimes matter more than facts. This is the position that
McEntire basically has. The problem with what he's doing is he sees the whole problem in
the fact that we've criticized what a fact is, what truth is, what objectivity is.

The other text The Death of Truth by Kakutani. Kakutani starts his book with a quotation
from a very famous philosopher German philosopher: Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of
Totalitarianism from 1951. She says the ideal subject of totalitarian rule it's not the convinced
Nazi or the convinced communist, but people from whome the distinction between fact and
fiction, the reality of experience, and distinction between true and false, the standards of
thought no longer exist. The book starts by looking at the different ways in which things are
talked about, the different terminology that's been used nowadays: fake news, post-truth
facts, alternative facts, fake science... which is to say a narrative manufactured by climate
change deniers, or maybe anti-vaxxers or you could have fake history promoted by
Holocaust deniers or revisionists, or white supremacists.
The problems for Kakutami that America is facing today are these:
- the merging of news and politics with entertainment and infotainment;
- the toxic polarization that's overtaken American politics;
- the growing populous contempt for expertise, anyone calls themselves an expert;
Kakutami states “polarization has grown so extreme that voters in red State America and
blue State America have a hard time even agreeing on the same facts. This has been going
on since a solar system of right-wing news sites, orbiting around Fox News in brightheart,
consolidating its gravitational hold over the Republican base and it's been exponential
accelerated by social media, which connects users with like-minded members and supplies
them with customised news feeds that reinforce their preconceptions, allowing them to live in
ever windowless silos”, Silo has no windows, so if you're in your little silo you're not
communicating with anything or anyone outside.
The last quote is once again a way that liberal Americans have of understanding the
problem. Alan Shapiro said the problems are far deeper than what these people are saying.
This is not simply a question of Fox News, in brightheart news, who are generating force and
fake news or facts or alternative facts etc, it has something more to do with the nature of our
societies today and the relationship between what he called a certain capitalist ethos and
high technology. The problem: a number of competing mechanisms, which are reinforcing
what's been called the post fact or posts truth. New technologies, in the form of computer
applications, or the numerous social media platforms, which are exponentially accelerating
the amount of information any individual can receive, while at the same time, often
concealing the real source of that information. From Russian troll factories, entire little towns
in Russia, where people are being paid to make believe they are Italians, Americans,
Germans… . There is a complicated system so that they enter into dialogue as Americans,
giving their opinion, but they're actually there for troll, in other words to do certain things and
one of the things that classically the foreign trolls try to do is they're trying to bring the
system down, the Democratic system down, so they're exacerbating the extremes. So you
have people who work in the troll farm to sort of disorder, inflame people who are on the
extreme right, showing that they are victims of this. Then the other half of the people in the
troll factory are trying to inflame people whose views are already on the on the left, trying to
say that the people on the right are taking away their democracy, they're killing people and
stuff….and so what happens is that you no longer get dialogue. Therefore, the trolls have
done their job. These a foreign troll factories are particularly active in periods leading up to
high states events, like elections. The Russians were very active in both brexit and in the
American elections of 2016 and 2020 and even after. The volume of information allows
people to cherry-pick the information that comes to you. To cherry-pick information because
you can't possibly go through all the information that's coming into your computer. To cherry-
pick means picking things out. On the web, material that is sensational rises to the top, along
with posts that cynically appeal to the reptilian part of our brains, to the primitive emotions,
like fear and hate and anger. By chance, Trump kept on saying they've stolen your election,
they've stolen your democracy: this type of playing on people's fears and anger obviously
accelerates this type of thing. Kakutami says in the era of nervous distraction and
information overload, attention is the most precious commodity on the internet. In an
impassioned essay, Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, argued that the
Russians manipulation of Facebook, Twitter and Google and other platforms to try to shift
the outcomes of the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum, was just the tip of a huge
iceberg. Unless fundamental changes were made, he warned, those platforms were going to
be manipulated again and again and the level of political discourse or ready in the gutter was
going to get even worse. The problems were inherent, McNamee argued, in the algorithms
used by platforms like Facebook, to maximise user engagement. The more time members
spend on a platform, the more ads a company sells, and the more profits it maximizes.
Maximize engagement is by sucking up in analysing your data, using it to predict what will
cause you to react more strongly and then giving you more of that. In other words, analysing
your tastes, interests analysing and giving you personalised publicity, as opposed to
generalized publicity. This not only creates the filter bubbles, that seal people off in pardison
silos, but also favours simplistic provocative messages. Conspiracy theories easily go viral
on social media and so do dumbed down inflammatory political messages. Such populist
messages historians tested, tend to gain attraction during times of economic uncertainty.

In Shapiro’s opinion, this is happening in mainstream news, in why certain news gets
circulated. The emphasis for what becomes news and how that news is reported, largely
regards whether or not the event will be the more worthy, by the largest number the number
of potential viewers or listeners. Even social media CNN is in competition with Fox News,
NBC, CBS, ABC... they want to put in front of viewers news that's going to strike them, be
spectacular, get people to talk, get people to stay tuned to that station. What happens is
more and more the new stations are becoming infotainment, the news is getting filtered
through famous people, entertainers etc and also the people who are listening to the news
are getting more politically identifiable. In other words, Fox News caters exclusively to the
Trump type of voters. CNN caters exclusively to the Liberal voters. Therefore, people aren't
listening any longer to what other people say, the news is becoming info news. It's more
sensationalistic, more spectacular, therefore there is much less analysis happening, and
there is no dialogue or dialectic any longer.

Advertising in the social media platforms for political purposes, not only to vote for a certain
candidate. The point in these types of themes is that, talking about misogyny, racism, anti-
globalization... everytime you're online for whatever reason I am sorting out what you look at,
what you're interested in… I know what your buying history has been ok I can even look on
your Facebook and get some some generic information about. At that point, I say she's this
type of person. I'm going to filter political advertising for her. Over sudden, you see coming
across “this person was killed yesterday by an immigrant”, and then all the sudden we take
that as truth. The idea here is that this type of identification of who we are, in our interests,
desires, political views and giving us exaggerated forms of what we already believe.
Alan was trying to say that not only was that type of thing dangerous because it invades
your privacy, but since the motivation for doing certain things is either for political gain or it is
for economic gain, this is a promiscuous situation. Remember: he uses the word
pornographic, that we become wires in our own, lives... but it's all this a promiscuity, which is
to say that we were both interested in what everyone else is doing, and also everyone is
already within our own personal sphere. The relationship between private space and in
public space is very fuzzy. Part of the whole problem is that you can only have what we call
the public sphere. The public sphere it's the basis of our democracy, and the basis of our
democracy that there are certain principles and ideas that we all hold through, that we all
agree on. As long as you have what has been called the public sphere, people agreeing that
there are certain principles, ideas and values that we all share we're ok, because then within
a democracy you debate, discuss, dialogue, you disagree, but you stay within that sphera of
questions or problems. When you no longer have a public sphere you believe, I see you as
the enemy and you see me as the enemy. There's very little way that we could get anything
done and as soon as something happens what am I going to do is that I'm going to try to kill
you or at least suppress you. This is why, for example, for me the idea that Donald Trump
after the election saying that the election had been stolen was illegitimate, a direct
contradiction of the question of a public sphere. They are the representatives of the public
sphere, Trump is the highest representative of the public sphere, he is still in power and he's
saying that his power has been usurped by some unnamable evil and that because it has
been usurped, the people who support him have every right to take back the country. This
could have started the Civil War. Alan at a certain point was saying that he agrees with
European interpretation of free speech more than American interpretation of free speech,
which is to say there have to be certain limits to what someone can say, if what someone is
saying is potentially violent and will put other people in danger, then that person should be
censored.
In the USA people have the right to say what they want. BUT, if you're the president in the
United States, perhaps you should not have the right to say anything you want to say,
because you have a very specific role as president and you're going to be interpreted in the
same way as president.

Brexit: it's quite clear now that the campaign to leave the European Union was in a large
extent spearheaded both by the Russians, Cambridge analytica, and alternative facts
promising the English that if they left the EU they would have millions and millions of dollars.
But basically no one, not even the people who sponsored the first referendum for brexit,
thought brexit could ever pass. It was in the campaign for brexit social media and through
the internet, that over sudden English consensus around leaving the European Union was
consolidated. Britain now finds herself outside of the European Union, having to face
enormous economic, social, political and military problems.

Difference between what the two readings are saying the problem is and what I think
professor Shapiro and I would say is that, it isn't the criticism of objectivity and the fact that is
the problem. Objectivity and facts have to be criticized, because as Shapiro said yesterday,
it's the process that counts, the discussion, not the empirical data meaning of themselves.
There is no such thing as a fact outside of a narrative, that facts are always put into a story,
that story is what we believe is the truth. The problem is that our societies have worked
towards a reduction of what the notion of facts are, eliminating the facts from the context.
Effect is nothing if it's not put into a complex context, if it's not put into some sort of history or
sociological or political or economic analysis.
The idea is that if you don't put facts into context, it doesn't mean anything whatsoever. It
could be great or not. The point here is that what we have to work towards is not a
simplification of facts, of empiricism. We have to work towards insisting upon the complexity
of a problem, dialoguing, putting the fact into context, so that we work towards not objectivity
but a reason and logic subjectivity. For someone like Shapiro, the problem isn't that
theorists, philosophers have criticized the objectivity of facts, it is that we have reduced the
idea that fact is and we have taken a very fast idea of objectivity, so that we think that either
something is objective or it's perfectly relative. Well no it's not, either just objective or
perfectly relative, it's a much more complicated thing. The problem is that you don't have to
just give me your opinion, you have to back your opinion up in some way, you have to
demonstrate your opinion, you have to argue your opinion so that you convince me that what
you're saying makes sense.
 Twilight of Democracy
The author is Anne Applebaum. The book starts in Poland and she asks about what
happened over the last 20-years in Poland, then from Poland she moved to Hungary, and
then goes to Great Britain (covering whole brexit), and then she talks about the United
States. She is looking at the phenomena of the Twilight of democracy, of the crisis of
democracy from a more global perspective, even though our interest is somewhat more
concentrated on America and in particular on the epic of America from just before Trump.
She's also not simply interested in describing the problems facing the United States or the
other Western countries that she deals with, but she's looking for more deep-seated causes.
The other thing we should know about the book is that as opposed to the interests of some
of the other books that we've been looking at, she admits that she knows more about the
opinion makers, more about the politicians, and opinion leaders. Therefore, she deals with
the elites, because these are the people that she knows. Since the people that she really
knows are people who came from the Republican party in the United States, the
conservative, the torie party in Great Britain, she gives us a better picture of what it is that
these people have been going through.

Her concentration in the book is ultimately with the extreme right and how radical change
takes place among right-wing politicians and journalists over the past two decades. She
sees a good part of Donald Trump's early campaign rhetoric as how to combine arguments
of the old Marxist left along with the Christian rights, despair about the future of American
democracy. Initially she situated Trump, at least his rhetoric, as one that takes a bit from
both extremes, not simply from the right. Trump is able in 2016 very much to seduce a good
part of the working class, and she sees this as a result of the fact that he is able to galvanise
through a bit of a leftist rhetoric and that only right-wing rhetoric.
Trump's inaugural address in 2016, which was written by team of his advisers, for
Applebaum contains therefore both left and right strands of what she calls anti-americanism:
it included left wing disgust for the establishment, which had protected itself but not the
citizens of our country (Trump’s speech), or their victories have not been your victories, their
triumphs have not been your triumphs and while they celebrated in our nation's capital there
was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. In these words by Trump, in
his inaugural address from 2016, according to Applebaum a real sort of anti elite manifesto,
the government is the elite, the government is the establishment, they are not interested in
you, the common man. This is part of Trump's populism. His inaugural address also
reflected the evangelical despair about the moral state of the Union. Here Applebaum quotes
Trump again “the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed
their country of so much unrealized potential”. What Applebaum seems to be saying in the
book is that Trump embraced a form of argument, typical of certain far left and far-right
groups in society, or at least used the typical claims that these groups are known to make.
For example, American institutions are fraudulent. American behavior is evil. The language
of the American project “equality, opportunity, justice” is nothing but empty slogans. This
form of, what she calls, moral equivalence= the belief that democracy is no different at heart
from autocracy, is a familiar argument, it's an argument that is very often used, in
Applebaum’s opinion, by authoritarians.
Idea of moral equivalence seems to reverberate relativism, moral relativism. Applebaum
talks about a moral equivalence, which is to say that these words, like quality, opportunity,
justice, are empty. They are signifiers, everyone uses them. In other words, they have no
value. So all opinions are equal to a certain extent and she says that this is typical of
authoritarians. There is no moral high ground any longer, everyone is on the same level. The
authors affirms: Trump’s victory in 2016 was the victory of exactly this form of moral
equivalence. Instead of representing “The Shining city on the Hill” (a famous quote from
Ronald Reagan, who's talking about one of the very early puritans, who sailed the Arabella,
and said in the eyes of the entire world are upon us), we are no different from the killers of
Putin's Russia. Instead of a nation that leads “the Citizens of democratic societies” we are
“America first”. Instead of seeing ourselves at the heart of a great international alliance for
good, we are indifferent to the fate of other nations, including other nations that share our
values. “America has no vital interest in choosing between warring factions, who's animosity
goes back centuries in Eastern Europe. Their conflicts are not worth American lives”. This is
what Trump has proven, beneath the surface of American consensus, the belief in our
founding fathers and the faith in our ideals belies another America, Trump's America, one
that she's no important distinction between democracy and dictatorship. This America feels
no attachment to other democracies, this America is not exceptional.
She is referring to the fact that Trump's foreign policy was to be friendlier to Russia, then it
was to the Nation Alliances or the European Union. He blasted leaders in the European
Union or the NATO alliance, and would never criticise Putin and Russia. When everything is
relative, when there is no moral high ground, these are the people who, in Trump's opinion,
get things done. According to Applebaum, the people Trump supports are in positions of real
power, because they didn't have to worry about checks and balances in Congress, they
didn't have to worry about the judicial branch of government, because they simply control the
traditional branch of government, and Congress is a puppet in those countries.

It is not very difficult for Applebaum to condemn Trump, but she's a bit more surprised at the
Republican party, she says: it's strange, it's surprising, it's shocking that the political party
that most ostentatiously used symbols of optimism would abandoned American idealism,
would embrace a rhetoric of despair. She sees this as a sea change (cambiamento
epocale), for the Republican party. She says: any number of today's right-wing protagonists,
there is an almost apocalyptic pessimism. Most right-wing talking heads in the United States
say things like America is doomed, Europe is doomed, Western civilization is doomed,
immigration, political correctness, the establishment, the left, the Democrats are all
responsible for the end of civilization as they know it. What she sees so incredible is that in
such a short period of time, from 2002 to the year 2020, you should have almost the
complete collapse of traditional values, incarnated in what were the mainstay of the
Republican or the centre-right parties.
She cites as the ways these people and their avatars have been able to come to power or at
least influence public opinion hawks back on many of the things that we've been speaking
about with respect to the Post truth era. She says: democracy itself has always been loud
and raucous. Democracy is debating things, raising your voice to the two debate things. But
when the rules of democracy are followed, it eventually creates consensus. For her, the
debate nowadays does not create consensus, instead it inspires in some people the desire
to forcibly silence the rest of the people. This new information world is providing as well a
new set of tools and tactics that another generation of what Applebaum calls clerks, basically
the élite, the people who are organising the mass media, used to reach people, who want
simple language, powerful symbols, clear identities. Simple causes and effects, nationalism,
strong sense of identity. She says: there is no need, nowadays, for former street movement,
in order to appeal to people with an authoritarian predisposition. I'm sorry, you can construct
one in an office building, sitting in front of a computer, you can text messages, engage the
response. You can set up targeted advertising campaigns, you can build groups of fans on
WhatsApp or Telegram, you can cherry-pick the themes of the past that suit the present and
tailor them to particular audiences. You can invent memes, create videos, conjure-up
slogans, designed to appeal precisely to the fear and anger caused by this massive
international wave of cacophony. You can even start the cacophony and create the chaos
yourself, knowing full well that some people will be frightened by it.
Here she is going back to many of the very same things that we are saw in the books by
Kakutani and McIntyre, which is to say that for Applebaum, the desire to radically change the
society towards autocracy in a totalitarian way in her opinion, has maybe one caused, but it's
been made much easier by the new technologies and by the new ways that people are
communicating. She spends a certain part of her book talking about the way people in and
around politics, publicity and even a foreign troll forms are attempting to manipulate the
population.
The idea of democracy in her opinion is not based on an idea of moral equivalence, it is
based on the fact that there is a better way to deal with other people, to deal with
government etc. These are the principles upon which, in Applebaum’s opinion, America is
based: the constitution, checks and balances, free and fair dialogue. She would say that
America was founded on these principles and then up to a certain point, the Republican
party carried out these principles. They were absolutely not a party of moral equivalency.
She says it's not by chance that during the Cold War both Democrats and Republicans by
and large had very similar points of view, with respect to the relationship between American
government and the American system of democracy, as opposed to that of the Soviet Union.
The problem she sees is that over the last 10 or 20 years we have begun to hear a criticism
of some of the founding principles of American democracy. No one is criticizing the founding
fathers, but basically everyone, for example people who are persuaded by Donald Trump
are criticizing politicians to the core, or criticising government. In other words, everything
here is corrupt, everyone is corrupt, the government just take some money and doesn't give
anything to us, you can't believe any anyone, I don't trust the political, I don't trust the elites
anymore, whether these elites be University professors, who just each political correctness,
scientists, who want to convince us that there are the strange invisible things happening like
climate global warming or viruses. This type of distrust, of pessimism has been creating in
the United States a type of moral equivalence: if there's no system, if there's no way of being
better than anyone else, well then I just do whatever I want, because what I think is better for
the people anyway. So Applebaum is very vociferously against this moral equivalence and
she sees it as coming from a recent pessimism. For example, she looks so Christian right,
so-called tea party. By the way, she herself abandoned the Republican party in 2012, when
she heard of Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin was McCain's vice presidential running mate and
Sarah Palin was a precursor to Trump. The very religious right in the United States loved
Sarah Palin, because she was for all the right things and Applebaum saw there, in Sarah
Palin, and the fact that even someone like McCain, who's was basically a good guy, would
choose her, as him being blackmailed by a certain part of the Republican party. She looks
back on it as the beginning of the decline of the Republican party and that's when she leaves
the Republican party to become independent. Applebaum is criticising what's happening in
the United States, but not in the same way that the Liberal left would criticising or even the
radical left would criticize it. She's criticising from a centre right position. She talks about
moral equivalence rather than relativism, she hasn't talked about facts and objectivity, but
she talks about a loss of certain values and a temptation towards autocracy, towards
totalitarianism.
 Dying of Whiteness and Strangers in Their Own Land
Dying of Whiteness and Strangers in Their Own Land. Boh the authors approach a paradox
in America. Both of these people are trying to narrate a phenomenon, which they both say,
until quite recently caught analysts and experts completely by surprise. The phenomena
regards the way a good percentage of whites, living in the United States, above all generally
poor and working class, whites living in rural parts of the country have begun to constitute
themselves as an identity group and they have begun to react to what they feel are troubling
things taking place in the country. Most of these people are armed Trump supporters, even
though their social and economic backgrounds are quite different from each other. The focus
of these readings is to offer the occasion to enter a bit more into the mindset of some of
these people, to understand how they think and feel, how they constitute their identities.
Both of these offers spent years living among these people, as they did their research. What
we are reading in these two books are more testimonials of how some of these people
express themselves and describe their feelings. These are less theoretical studies of their
political and social behaviour, they are very interested in narrating how the problems are
being laid out. Both of the authors are not hiding in any way what their own political beliefs
are, but they don't try to come up with a conclusion at the end of their books as to what the
causes really are. They state the thing as paradoxes and they want us to reflect a bit on
some of these paradoxical situations. Both books have similar aims, both hold two similar
underline thesis, both books document a strong backlash among these whites against the
government. A backlash is when you have a very strong reaction to something. They have a
backlash against the government, globalization, minorities or simply the multicultural turned
in American society. In both cases, the authors are interested in understanding why so many
of these people are adopting attitudes which appear contradictory, self-defeating. Both of
these texts are text sociology or what we might call cultural anthropology. We're looking at a
similar problem from different points of view, different perspectives, from the perspective of a
different discipline.

Dying of Whiteness
Dying of Whiteness, by Jonathan Metzl, attempts to explain the seeming contradictions that
he observed with increasing frequency from 2013 to 2019. A very recent account of what
was changing in the society that he was looking at. He would ask the people that he met
about the urgent and contested political issues facing them. Issues like healthcare, gun
possession, taxes, education, the scope of government. He wanted to understand how
people balanced anti-government or let's a pro-gun attitudes while living their lives under
conditions of poor healthcare. Although he does admit that some of the people he spoke to
had surprisingly complex and nuanced ways of explaining their views, most of the people
evidence support for a set of political positions that directly harmed their own health and
wellbeing or the health and wellbeing of their families. In other words, they were using
beliefs, which were in direct contrast with what would have been favorable for them, for their
health. He describes more concretely, he offers us a number of stories. He gives us
background: who these people are, what they were doing, what their likes and dislikes are
and what their problems are.
The story of Trevor: 41 years old, a former taxi driver from Tennessee. Trevor was
uninsured, no health insurance. Trevor had to give up driving his taxi, which was his only
livelihood, he was a taxi driver for 20-years, because of his deteriorating health. When Metzl
meets Trevor, Trevor is living in low-income housing outside Nashville, Tennessee. He is
yellow and jaundiced, he desperately needed a liver transplant. He can hardly walk. What
sounds Metzl, as he gets too talking to Trevor, is that Trevor categorically refuses not only to
do what it would take to care for his health, but is actually politically against supporting
anything that might change the situation and allow him to save his own life. Nashville,
Tennessee is right near the border with Kentucky. Kentucky is a state which does have
public healthcare, so Metzl says to Trevor: why don't you just go and find yourself a place go
and live in Kentucky and you have free healthcare, then you can get the kidney transplant
that you so desperately need or you can get dialysis or whatever it is that you need. Or:
Trevor why aren't you supporting in Tennessee the democratic party, from example, which
would be in favour of bringing Obamacare? In other words, some semblance of guaranteed
insurance or health care for everyone in the state. Metzl recounts: even on death's doorstep
Trevor wasn't angry, in fact, he staunchly supported the stands promoted by his elected
officials. Trevor says: ain't no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it, he told
me, I would rather die. When I asked him why he felt this way even if he faced severe
illness, he explained: we don't need anymore government in our lives and in any case no
way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens (welfare queens are people
who accept money from the government). What is Trevor dying of? The answer is toxins,
he's literally dying of his inability to filter toxins of the blood. His deteriorating condition
however is also being caused by the toxic effects of Dogma. So the toxins aren’t just
physiological toxins, but the toxins that are killing Trevor is actually a toxin due to his
ideology, his dogma.

Metzl explains what dogma is: dogma told Trevor, the governmental assistance in any form
was evil and not to be trusted. Even when the assistance came in the form of federal
contracts with private health insurance or pharmaceutical companies or from expanded
communal safety nets. Dogma that, as he made abundantly clear, aline the beliefs about a
racial hierarchy that overtly an implicitly aim to keep white Americans hovering above
Mexicans, about welfare queens and non-white others. Dogma suggested to Trevor that
minority groups received lavish benefits from the state, even though he himself lived and
died on a low income budget, with state assistance. Trevor therefore voice a little willingness
to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on
the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.

Metzl is trying to get across just how far Trevor’s beliefs took him in the way he read the final
part of his life. There was no need for Trevor to die, he could have been cured, he could
have been able to live. He was willing to sacrifice his life for what he thought was an
important cause, real values. But, ultimately these values were against certain things and on
the other hand they were worth an affirmation of something about himself, because he didn't
give him to, but say some of the things he could have benefited from. When he had a
fundamental distrust of the state. He didn't want to be associated with those people who
accept money from the state, whether this money be in the form of welfare or in the form of
guaranteeing that he could at least go to a private insurance or pharmaceutical company
and get the type of care or drugs that he needed. Metzl hypothesis is that if he were to
accept any of these things, if he were to be in favour of any of these things, he would be no
different, no better than all the other people in the country who accept these things. By
keeping himself away from what he could do for himself, he's able to maintain in his mind the
moral high ground. He kills himself, he dies of his toxic beliefs. He didn't want to put himself
in the same position, socio-economic hierarchy, of the people who accept the help are. He
could remain pure. He had to not compromise his values.
What Metzl was trying to say here, this is so incredible that he would be willing to die, which
is totally illogical. This is an indicator of how much extreme certain people in the American
heartland are willing to go today to maintain its position. This is why it's so dangerous in the
country at the moment. One of the basic principles, upon which the United States is born, is
protestant work ethic. A certain type of moral value system, which comes from a certain type
of individualism. The importance of these examples is really to look at the paradox, so that
you get indication that there's a mistake between what would seem to be a rational logical
solution and what someone is opting for, even though it would benefit that very person.
What is very important is that much of what we're saying, of this so-called right-wing
backlash in the United States is a reflection upon what happened in 2008, when Obama got
elected president. Obama was President from 2008 to 2016 and for many people this was
the last straw, the country had gone too far. If the United States can elect an african-
american president, then the United States has lost its dignity. Much of what we are seeing
after Obama is a way of backlash of the other part of the country.
 Strangers in Their Own Land
In Strangers in Their Own Land Arlie Russell starts by presenting what she calls the great
paradox, which is that the United States is presently extremely divided, in political terms,
between the Republicans and Democrats and she sees it as a division which had not been
seen for many decades. Hardly enough, the red States, those governed by the Republicans,
are much poorer than those governed by the Democrats. The problems of these red States
are numerous. She states a number of problems that these Republican red States have:
teen mothers, more divorces, worse health, more obesity, more deaths, more low birth
weight babies, lower school enrollment, greater industrial pollution. On the average, in the
States people die 5 years earlier than they do in the States governed by Democrats. The
paradox, for her, is that with problems such as these, we might think that these States and
that the people in the states, would be eager to receive federal aid, would we want help. She
says that although some help from the government, the local populations are not happy
about it and often put their faith in the free market, they put their face in large corporations.
Even though precisely these corporations or the free market that are responsible for much of
the pollution of the air and the ground. She starts a book as well by presenting stories of
people: how they lived and what they remember about what life was like when they were
growing up.
The story of Lee: Lee worked for years for a petrochemical plant in Louisiana. He describes
accidents that would happen at the plant, some of these accidents with grave consequences
for his fellow workers. In other words, accidents where people died. He begins to talk about
his own misfortune in his place of work, because he talks about when and how he got
contaminated by these substances. He accounts that, at a certain point, his boss came to
him and asked him to dump wastes into the bayou at night, when no one can see what he
was doing. Lee was aware that the substance he was letting out was not good and he knew
enough to stay clear of the fumes, as the liquid poured out. He knew he was doing the
company's dirty work, but he never told anyone because he identified with the company and
also didn't want to get into trouble. At a certain point, Lee began to grow ill, because he had
been exposed to the chemicals in this waste. The company doctor insisted he stay home on
medical leave, when he did come back he was summoned by a company commission and
he was told that they were firing him, they were getting rid of him. The way he told the story,
they didn't want to pay his medical expenses so they said they will let him go for
absenteeism. Absentee because told by the doctor to stay away from work until he got
better. But then, the people who are on the plans said he hasn't been at work so they fired
him. Basically, after 15 years of working for the company, they kicked him out. As the years
passed, things start to change in the community: the drinking water is no longer good to
drink, people are cautioned not to go into the waters in the bayou and at a certain point the
state government tells everybody that the shrimp and fish have been contaminated and that
no one should eat local fish more than twice a month. 7 years after his being fired, at a town
meeting Lee finds the courage to stand up and tell everybody what he had been doing when
he was working at the plant. Although his gesture did nothing to help him, at least it allowed
the fishermen to take the company to court and to get an out of court settlement, What is
interesting in all of this, is the way Lee perceives what has happened to him and what has
happened to the people of his community. Although he bears a real grudge with the
company managers for having lied and let him go, he's not upset with the idea of the
petrochemical company down there or other companies like his. He's a staunch conservative
and a supporter of the religious right. He doesn't really blame either his party, the
Republican party, or the company's doing the pollution. As much as he is incensed with the
Federal Government, because they take taxes from people like himself. Once again, if you're
outside of the context of what Lee is living through, appears to be a total contradiction. How
can he still support a political party and a relationship to the companies when he sees first-
hand not only what the consequences are, but he is actually a victim, both in terms of his
health and in terms of his livelihood. This is a once again another aspect of this curious
paradox that both of the books are talking about.

Last story of Metzl’s book: a woman, called Becca Campbell, died of a gunshot wound to the
head, fired by her own hand, her own gun. The tragedy takes place in the days of the
protests, the rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, near St Louis, after a white police officer shot and
killed an unarmed african-american teenager. She and her boyfriend, both white, were
presumably driving toward Ferguson that night. At a certain moment, she takes the gun that
she had purchased just the few days before and she starts waving it around and saying
things like ready for Ferguson. In the general triumphant joking of the moment whoever was
driving the car, didn't see the car in front of them and hit the car in front. Becca’s reaction
was to close her hand, which let off the bullet, which killed her. For Metzl, it's far less
important to understand what Becca was really up to that evening and far more important
than to look at the more general implications of this tragedy. Basically, a young woman is
going to take the firearm that she has bought and go down to Ferguson to do something,
whereas, the mainstream media are, above all, interested in spectacular, realising the
absurd end the woman had. Metzl’s abstract from the specific incident, gets us to reflect on
the many competing factors which could have contributed to her death. He cites even factors
which are external to the specific incident itself, he talks about the length of time it took for
the ambulance to arrive, to the very logic of owning a gun in the first place.

The entire structure of how the local and state government serves or doesn't serve its
citizens, in Metzl’s opinion, needs to be analysed. As well as the reasons why people feel
they have to protect themselves.
Protect themselves from who and for what reasons? These are the type of stories that these
two authors bring into play, some of what they see happening in this part of the United
States. This is Trump territory, this is where the radicalised Republican Party has set its
roots. Way to frame the works by the authors: to put somebody's stories into perspective and
into contest.

Quote of an American writer, novelist: James Baldwin. It says: “An identity is questioned only
when it is menaced (threaten), as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin
to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the
stranger’s presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger then to yourself.”
Analysis: identity here is obviously not steadfast, not ironclad or objective. Identity is rather a
psychological internalized sense of attachment: one has a sense of belonging in a group that
provides a way individuals come to see themselves, in which they constitute and participate
in their political and social world. But, what exactly did Baldwin mean with this quote? One
example he might have had in mind was the situation for white living in the United States at
the time of the abolition of slavery. All blacks suddenly won the right to be considered
citizens. All of a sudden, strangers, the slaves, could live side by side with someone else as
equal. The period immediately after the Civil War, called the reconstruction period, was
actually a very reactionary period, because many of the promises made to the African
Americans were actually taken back, both by the government, to appease the white
population, and both by white of United States, who were worried that black in some way
would diminish their dominion. We can see the relationship to Baldwin's quote: Baldwin talks
about that identity as a question, that something changes in one's identity when people feel
menaced.
Another example: 2008, it might have seemed to some people that the election of Barack
Obama as president of the United States symbolized the end of racism, the emancipation of
a nation born in slavery that it's always been divided by race. But, as your readings illustrate,
the election of Obama was double-faced: on the one hand it did represent a significant
change in people's attitudes and was greeted by many as the triumph of multicultural
America, so on the one hand it was certainly a victory, it was certainly significant and it's
certainly moved in the direction of recognising that the country had changed. On the other
hand, however, it also engendered a backlash amongst a part of the society, as of course
the election of Donald Trump 8 years later attest to.
If we think back to the logic of the quote, what is perhaps most interesting is that Obama's
election and his confirmation, along with the number of other factors, actually shaped and
consolidated these people's identity as white. Precisely because of their collective
perception that their status and privilege was being endangered. Obama's election was a
sign that this society was changing, towards a more accepting society of multiculturalism.
But, while he's in office, the fact that he makes it office, the fact that the United States is
being represented by an african-american is something that, in a part of the white population
in the United States, stimulates a type of identity in them as whites.

White Identity Politics

White Identity Politics, the author Ashley Georgina makes an interesting distinction between
what she calls group identity and group consciousness. The outer group identity regards the
characteristics which makes other groups or categories of people different from how I
perceive or identify myself. Inner group identity would then be the set of characteristics or
qualities I perceive I have in common with a group or category of people, who are like me or
similar to me. Outer or inner group consciousness, on the other hand, regards the perception
of one’s group identity under threat of some sort. The author states: “Threat can politicise a
group identity, following that threat might be instrumental in the promotion of a concept
called group consciousness. A sense of group attachment, defined by the belief that group
members should work together to improve the position of their group. If dominant group
members feel that their group status is in jeopardy, one consequence may be the
development and activation of not in your group identity, but a group consciousness as well.
In group consciousness is in group identification politicised by a set of ideological beliefs,
about that group's social standing. As well as that collected action is the best means by
which the group can improve its status and realise it's interest.”
Examples about the difference between group identity and group consciousness about
university students. Georgina herself highlights the difference between the general, what she
calls the default condition of a college student. The default condition is a student, who
identifies as someone in college. But, at the same time, in terms of group Identity now, as
university students they would see little need to organise collectively with other students to
protest their treatment, because it's just the condition you're in university. But by and large,
you have got what you signed up for. This is what she would call your group identity as a
student. But, if all of the sudden a change in policy might encourage all of you to want
collectively, to address your concerns as a group. You might feel threatened by the decision
on the part of the university to do something like that and all the sudden you get together to
collectively protest that thing. Georgina says: ”Insured a social identity, can develop into a
sense of consciousness, when a group feels sufficiently friend or particularly concerned
about their groups position within a hierarchy.” Consciousness has often been applied to
understanding the political behaviour of subordinate groups. But the architects of the
concept of group consciousness argue that for high status groups, group consciousness is to
be aimed at justifying in maintaining a group's advantage.

In Italy, time ago catholicism was unquestioned, it was an assumption, it was a default
category. This is what the author calls an identity group, you identify these people alike as
you, assuming that they're catholic. Over the last 15 years a good part of Italy's population in
group religious but also ethnic or racial identity, has become what the author calls in group
consciousness. There is no doubt that a very large part of Salvini and the Lega’s success
comes precisely from the shift from a perception of ingroup identity towards in-group
consciousness. Over sudden, we are feeling threatened. Many italian feel menaced by the
entrance of these people and have reacted by erecting barriers, resulting often in outward
signs of even prejudice or hostility, violence towards these out-groups.
This in group consciousness has engendered repercussions who would probably not have
been targeted just a few years ago. This is all part of what happens when you get a shift
from this type of a group identity to this type of group consciousness.

Relationship between light identity and white consciousness in the United States, the
dynamic is even more evident. Until recently in the United States, the claim that whites
possessed and intergroup racial identity wasn't even discussed by scholars. The study of
identity was historically one-sided, focused on the minority identities. Identity issues were
either directed outward at minorities or inwardly scented more round religious distinctions.
The very label white underwent significant change over the last century. 100 years ago
Eastern as well as southern Europeans would generally not have been considered white.
Italian immigrants coming in the 1880s were referred to very often as blacks. This lack of
fixed is itself revealing, because it demonstrates how categories, which are now taking itself
evidence, can change entirely in another period, while still endangering a sense of self
evidence. We take white as being somehow rooted, catered in some sort of self evidence, of
science evidence. Historically, what's interesting is that the idea of what white was, who
white was, changed enormously from one culture to another and from one century to
another. To the author, white is a way people, who consider themselves white, interact and
engage socially and politically, where there is a white consciousness consisting of group
identity alone with a specific set of political beliefs about one's group. It requires an
individual's that not only feel attached to their group, but they also believe their group
experiences some type of deprivation and should work collectively within or outside the
political system to address the group's grievances. What she's calling white consciousness
is a type of mobilised political identity. She reconsiders the standard belief of race relations
in United States. Racist is now central in American politics and that the hierarchical
arrangement of racial groups is key to understanding the present political situation in
America. In this sense, white racial solidarity influences flights worldview and guides their
political attitudes and behaviours. Many analysts have attributed much of the enthusiasm for
Donald Trump around populist pledges and slogans like make America great again or
America first, to his ability to capitalise on the disillusionment with globalization of the white
working class. These analysts say that many people have seen their jobs shipped overseas
or these jobs have been displaced by immigrants and their anger about this disenfranchised
position has made them susceptible to political appeals by those who are espousing,
whether it's more protectionist policies or anti-immigration policies, or even simply racist
policies. However, Georgina finds that the economic disenfranchisement is only part of the
story and it's not even the major part of the story. It is far more widespread than the white
working class. She says: “A much wider swap of whites view their racial group as
dispossessed, persecuted and threatened by America's changing racial dynamics. The
politics of white identity is that holy or even primarily rooted in economic disenfranchisement.
It is far broader and more pervasive”.

Difference between identity and consciousness: you are conscious of your identity when in
one way or another, you feel threatened. When your position in a society or your position
and institution may be under attack or you perceive it as possibly being under attack. The
difference between identity and consciousness is the difference between being largely
invisible and having to become visible or feeling that you have to become visible. What is
Georgina saying certain whites in America today have woken up.
Every culture is bound to manifest ignorance, because that doesn't take into consideration, it
concentrates its identity as against some other stranger. It's a really important point: what
are the ways in which you identify differences, what are the ways in which you attempt to
understand your specific difference and what are the ways in which you are threatened in
your differences.
 White Identity Politics
Book by Jardina. Until very recently in the United States the idea of being white is a type of
the default condition: if you were white in the United States you weren't aware of the white.
You might have been aware of the fact that there were blacks or Asians, but you thought of
yourself is just being American. There is a position of a hegemony. The position of
hegemony, by which whites have until recently felt themselves firmly in control in the United
States, means that they have been able to cast and maintain the identity of the nation as
their own. Quote by Mills: “The fish does not see the water and whites do not see the racial
nature of a white polity, because it is natural to them the element in which they move.”
This is significantly different from the african-americans, who according to Du Bois, a famous
African American ryder and thinker, they've suffered suffered double consciousness: the
internal conflict or sense of tunis, experienced by those who must reconcile their own
oppressed racial identity with their American identity. If you think of an african-american, on
the one hand they may want to identify as Americans, on the other hand they are constantly
reminded, by the way they're treated, that they're not just American. They are blacks and
and this distinction, discrimination, racism makes it such that, according to Du Bois, the
blacks have a double consciousness and they have to always trying to reconcile the two
together. In the book White Identity Politics, the idea is that the hierarchical arrangement of
racial and ethnic groups fundamentally structures the way Americans understand their own
group, their identification with that group and their group in relation to others. These group
orientations subsequently organising frame the way individuals view the political and social
world. White Americans benefit tremendously from their position at the top of the hierarchy,
their group on average receives greater material benefits, social esteem and political
accommodation status. The white tend to accept this arrangement as normal, as the default
category. When these cherish privileges are challenged, many whites react defensively,
condemning and resisting changes to the racial status quo. This combination of existing
hierarchy of domination with transparency enables whiteness to be cast, but not named, as
the larger society, the cultural mainstream. The experience of being white, compared to
racial and ethnic minorities, means the whites are less likely to suffer prejudices,
discrimination or disadvantages due to their race. Furthermore, groups that are dominant in
societies often experienced the normalisation of their group identities. White Americans
reside in a cultural environment, where their group is considered mainstream, normal,
dominant. Thus, to be white American has generally meant not to have to think about it.
Accordingly, existing literature has often characterised whiteness as invisible, as hidden, as
unmarked. White have the luxury of not thinking about the racial group and its collective
interests, when they're status at the top of the racial hierarchy is secure. Under these
circumstances, white identity plays only a minimal role in informing whites political attitudes
and evolutions. When whites feel secure they are likely to see that the extent that white
racial attitudes inform their political preferences is almost exclusively via individual
prejudices. Most likely in the form of racial resentment.
All of a sudden in the United States, around the year 2008, when Barack Obama was
elected president, certain things began to happen amongst a certain part of the white
population. A good portion of the population has begun to rethink its identity as white. What
happens when whites are unable to take their racial identity for granted? The claim is that
dominant group identities can become salient and politically meaningful when the conditions
that facilitate their in this study are disturbed. When the group believes that it's status is
sincerely challenged. The insertion of a dominant group identity is reactive, it's an effort to
defend the groups position within a stratified subsystem.
Over the past two decades threats to the racial status quo have come in many forms:
massive waves of immigrants. These waves of immigrants have changed the demographic
composition of the nation. The United States is a country of immigrants, where the white
base of the country, the protestant whites from England, Germany, Holland etc, are
proportionally smaller and smaller. Other whites like southern European or Irish are
increasing in the percentages in the population. On the one hand, there is the mass of
immigrants, changing the demographic composition of the Nation. America's political, social
and economic institutions are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, because more
people of colour are gaining access in power. Not only racially but sexually as well. Most
symbolically America elected Barack Obama in 2008. Then the nation has also become
more integrated globally, many American jobs have moved overseas. Each of these factors
has challenged white dominance status, threatening the security of their position on the top
of the Nations racial hierarchy. One of the key ways this type of ingroup consciousness is
boosted is through outgroup recrimination. Symbolic racism, because once upon a time in
the United States you had laws, you had old-fashioned racism, which were founded on the
belief that, for example, blacks were biologically and innately inferior. Now it is replaced by a
different type of prejudice, which is anti-black coupled with the belief that blacks do not
subscribe to traditional American values. In other words, the forms of racism now are ones
where you distance yourself, because that other person isn't like me. It's interesting to see
how Metzl's description in his book is similar to what we're talking about here, between
ingroup and outgroup identity in consciousness. The in-group is based on a refusal to accept
anything which is perceived as benefiting the outgroup. The very notion of whiteness is
shape here by policies to defend Whiteways of Life, and reject anything which is construed
as potentially giving an advantage to these out-groups. Rather than physically or verbally
abusing the other, people are actually willing to put their lives on the line, in support of their
political beliefs. The policy supported by these poor whites, which work to their own
detriment, often bring large advantages to much wealthier whites and to corporate America.
The working class white is working to benefit the very wealthy white, not themselves. In
effect, what they do works to their detriment, they're getting poorer and poorer because of
the decisions they are making politically, socially and economically.
What is important though is to look at a major shift in attitudes within the country over the
last 20-years, which is also an explanation of how it's possible that 70 million people still
voted for Donald Trump after 4 years of his presidency: 4 years and when he effectively did
nothing but rhetoric. There have to be reasons for this. Many of these reasons have to do
with the way certain people identify with certain values.

Interview to a very famous actor: Liam Neeson.

This shows that racism can manifest itself in many ways, without people being aware,
conscious of it.
He has no idea whatsoever who the person could have been, he doesn't even ask her
description of the person. He's just out looking for revenge against any black person,
because she had been raped by a black person. The idea of if he would have done the same
thing with a white, and it's inconceivable that he would have gone out with a weapon to kill
just any old white person. Even just a very fact that you can tell the story in the way he tells
it, regardless of the fact that he's confessing, shows already. Question of what is invisible
and what is visible. Something is invisible a white person raping, of course white people rape
women all the time, but he would not have had the same type of reaction. It would have
made no sense that reaction, because white is associated with the society in general. He
might have gotten the description of this guy and he might have gone looking for the guy but
he would not be looking for a white person who provoked it.

Steps which allow you to make a generalization. We would tend to think that we are all
human beings, we all have a certain type of spirit, which makes this one different from the
other. Usually, in countries like ours, in an epic like ours, we tend to see that we are all
people, but we are all different in a similar way. When you make a generalization from an
individual to a characteristic not part of the personality of the individual or even the
knowledge of the individual, but you abstract one characteristic you're doing something
which obviously is no longer humanistic. It's no longer seeing as a general common
denominator our humanity, the human beings that we are. You are saying that one category
of people is different from other categories of people. That characteristic is more important
than everything else. Therefore, I can discriminate against anyone with that quality.
The basis of racism is taking a quality that you see as being important and you extend to all
the people that manifest this quality.

Therefore any person is not seen as an individual who has a conscience and desires, but he
is put into the category. Therefore I am justified in behaving the way I want. This is the heart
of essentialism in identity. This is more than stereotypes: we all stereotype, but when your
identification becomes one where you dismiss all of the other categories for just one and
you're not willing to put it into question, there is a problem. This is not called stereotype,
because humans need to stereotype, in order to make conjectures about cultures.
We always engaged in some form of stereotypes. Here there is more than just stereotyping.
What is very interesting about this interview is that he's offered us a confession, an apology,
it's something he did in the past. Through what he says and how he says it, he's offering a
pretty good idea of how he still identifies position in a number of ways. When he comes back
and his girlfriend tells him that she has been raped while he was away, he is enraged. Even
knowing the way he tells the story proposedly leaves out any trace of emotion or feeling he
or even she might have shown at the time. He reveals a deep seeded racism, because, in
looking for revenge, he has no second thoughts about identifying any black man equivalent
of that specific man who raped his girlfriend. This type of crude essentialism, he consciously
knows he's not going to find the same guy, he doesn't even know what the guy looks like. He
never even thinks of involving his girlfriend in the search. On another level, it doesn't even
matter. It is the category black he is after: “they took some dear to me, I will take something
dear to them”. It causes an extreme reduction: the person becomes a pure symbol. This is
what you see in all situations of war and genocide. Another interesting aspect of his identity
is how it's expresses or doesn't express his position vis a vi his girlfriend, he simply says that
she had an incredible way of dealing with what happened: “she handle the situation in the
most extraordinary way”, leading us to believe that she in some way have had made peace
with what had happened to her. He didn't. The key here is that he neither consulted her
before making his decision, nor tells her what he's doing. In another word, he is making
revenge for her supposedly, where she never asked for revenge. There is, therefore, a clear
strain of paternalism, protectionism. She was his responsible, he wasn't there, he feels
guilty. Following the strict father model, here he's authorised, as the head of this imaginary
family, to get revenge. He does it for her, but without consulting her. He therefore feels he
knows what is best for her. He fights her battles for her. His gesture is certainly driven by the
desire to get even, as a way to relieve his sense of guilt for not having been there.
His identity position is very much a traditional male position. We have two forms of isms:
racism and sexualism. Finally, there is the part of the video at the end where he confesses
and apologizes. He says he realised, after about a week, what he was doing was crazy.

He understands the need for revenge produces new violence. His realisation of having done
something crazy and wrong stems from the fact that it's counterproductive. Revenge and
killing just leads to more revenge and killing, He is unwillingly, unconsciously or consciously,
reveals that he identifies as white, male, Irish and Catholic. What he did was disturbing to
him as well. However, listening to this process offers us a good way of getting beyond what
the individual in question thinks, he is or is not, to come to terms with the tension in
someone's thoughts and actions when they are emotionally charged. The point is
emotionally charged. It is a rhetoric engaged in emotion, it wants to get you emotionally
charged. The more emotionally charged you are, the less you're interested in facts. Identity
positions are common to all of us, whether we are aware of them or not. The question
however that we want to pose, is how we express our identity and what we don't consider as
part of our various identity positions. What are the consequences of not identifying. In his
confession he thinks he's gone beyond the incident of racism that was caused by having
gone crazy over the idea of the rape of his girlfriend.
Analysis of the professor: Nelson’s real confession here is that he is identifying himself as
still racist, sexist, regardless of what he says: he negates through denial “I am not racist, I
am ashamed of the position I had”. It's very interesting, because Nelson is a very likeable
character in films, who is being very honest with us, very sincere, very soft-spoken. He is
telling us, without knowing it, about his shocking positions both with respect to the black and
with respect to women.
 Lone Star
Few words about the origin of the name itself: lone star what does it mean? Today, Lonestar
symbolises the state of Texas, which is known as the lone Star state. But the idea of the lone
star was originally to declare it as an independent territory. In the early 19th century the US
government set up a boundary with what was then called New Spain because that territory
belonged to Spain. Anxious for new land, many settlers, who were in the United States,
refused to recognise the agreement and the border. In 1821, with the Mexican War of
Independence, which included the territory of Mexico, the land became part of Mexico. It
moved from Spanish to Mexican hands. Given that the population was so low, the Mexican
government liberalised immigration policies to permit immigrants from outside Mexico in
Spain to settle in that area. They had actually, under the Mexican immigration system, large
tracts of land allotted to impresarios, who recruited settlers from the United States, from
Europe and from the Mexican interior to go and inhabit that territory. From about 1825, the
population of Texas began growing rapidly and between 1825 and 1835, the population had
gone up twelvefold. Many immigrants went there, disobeyed Mexican laws, so it was part of
Mexican territory, but they disobeyed Mexican laws because Mexico was an outline territory
and it didn't really have the forces usually to control what was happening. One of the ways,
in which many the settlers disobeyed Mexican law, was by keeping slaves. The Mexican
government had prohibited slavery, where in the United States slavery was permitted until
the Civil War. At a certain point the mexican government decides that it's going to go home
prohibit immigration from United States, even though illegal immigration from the United
States continues right through the 1830s. At a certain point, the Mexican general Antonio
Lopez led an army to end revolts of the settlers in Texas. The settlers moved into a fortified
area, which is called the Alamo. Lopez forces for 13 days to defend the Alamo, and this
becomes known as the battle of the Alamo. All of the settlers were killed in the battle. When
news of the battle of the Alamo and the killing of all the people in the battle of the Alamo gets
out, the Americans, under the command of a known person, go after Lopez and the Mexican
forces. They capture Santana and they declare Texas a Republic, declaring it a separate
entity, independent, it is not a part of the United States and it's not part of Mexico, but
eventually they petition and in 1845 the United States Congress admitted Texas to the
United States.
Lone star tells the story of how the history of the Alamo in Texas is being understood, how
people even today are identifying with what Texaz is on the basis of what Texas was.

The main characters: three generations of a mexican-american family. We have a mother,

was born in Mexico and she's now the proud owner of an important restaurant in the town of
Frontera. She's also a council woman in the town of Frontera. Her daughter's name is Pilar,
she was born in the United States and she is a history teacher at town High School. Pilar
has two children. We also have three generations of an african-americans family. We have
Otis, who is the owner of the bar for african americans. We have his son Delmore, who is the
army colonel, he is the head officer at the army base, and we Delmore’s son Chet. We
learned from the story of these two families' backgrounds they are not actually what they
appear to be, because we find out during the story that Mercedes had a secret relationship
with Buddy. Pilar is a historian and she explains that the african-american family originated
from the intermarriage of runaway african-american slaves with seminole Indians, who were
a tribe swho were forced to move into the areas the swamps of Florida and there that they
encountered the runaway african-american slaves and they intermarried. There are also
three generations of sheriffs that we meet: Charlie Wade, the evil sheriff, Buddy Beads and
Sam Beads, who is sort of the protagonist in the story. The narration of the story revolves
around San largely. There are other characters such as Hollis, who is the mayor, and
Barney, Sam's ex-wife.
The passage of generations in the story allow us to reflect on the relation and importance of
history to the present, and from the perspective offered in the film it's important to note that
The director, Sayles, uses flashbacks to accentuate the non-linearity, the non-strict
chronology of history. The flashbacks are also done in such a way that if the viewer is
uncareful, you may have a hard time understanding what's happening.

Lone star poses in a sort of interesting, fascinating way the problem of identity. We're
looking at why people identify so strongly in one way or another. This film poses the problem
of identity in a Texas border town, through the narratives of the families. Symbolically, it
wants to problematize every simple reading of this relationship between history and truth.
And one way it does this is by showing us that our understanding of history is always the
result of narratives and their interpretation. Going back to the work we did at the beginning of
the course, what is a fact, what is true, what is the relationship between language and true.
Sayles use of the murder mystery skeleton, along with the sheriff's badge, allowing it
metaphorically to bring up the past and tell the history of Frontera. The idea of the history is
interesting, because when we have a history, we have a story. The question is: “Is he telling
the history of Frontera or his story of Frontera?
Frontera is the name of the town, it's a town where we are told 19 out of 20 people have
Mexican descent, the rest of the people in either angles or blacks. The town's power
structure, however, rests at least for the moment in the hands of the white minority. But
we're also informed that in the next elections, for the first time, the Mexican majority will
assume it's place in the city's government as they already have in the businesses, schools
and churches. Question of white hegemony. The white are still in power even though they're
only a very small part, about 3% of the population, but this hegemony has been challenged
for a number of reasons and the angles sense the change and the threat it brings to their
view of things.
Scene at the high school, the parent-teacher association: there's a contention between
the white Anglo-Americans and Mexican-Americans around how their history should be
understood and taught. It is interesting the whole question about the battle of the Alamo and
the fight. For the anglos the massacre of the Alamo was a call for revenge, when Sam
Houston routes Santana's army and captures Santanna. Texas became a Republic and then
eventually would become a state. So for the anglos, it's a glorious moment in which the
territory of Texas was liberated from the Mexicans and made part of the United States. Their
idea of history starts in the glorious moment in which the Anglos finally took over and began
to run Texas and then get Texas to become a state of the United States. The mexican-
american, were also settled and lived in the territory of Texas at the time, didn't see the thing
in the same way, they didn't see the fact the Texas became part of the United States as a
necessary positive thing, but in any case they didn't see the Anglo dominance. They have a
very different view of history. Although, everyone agrees that there is and must be a
message in reason behind the writing, telling the history, like it or not we have to rely on
some form of facts, before we can draw conclusions about the past, the problem still exists
that a fact can be interpreted in many different ways, by is many different people. If we take
this example of Texas, is it a land created out of the courage and independence of a people
as, they were moving West, or is it a land created from thieving people, whose greed for
slavery archered n the brutal conquest of the land that did not belong to them, which is more
the story believed by the Anglo-Americans. For the people of Frontera, each working from
his or her own present and sense of the past, it can be both neither and much more.
The history teacher is leading a fight to offer the town's children what she calls a more
complete picture of the history of Texas and of the Frontera community. While some believe
the history should be told from the point of view of the winners, as the Anglo man says that,
others want everyone to remember the motives behind their victory, which is reported at a
certain point by the father, because wanted slavery to continue. Pilar seeks the consensus,
she's fighting for a view, which holds nothing back that represents the picture by depicting
the complexity of the historical situation. But that is not to say that Pilar is valorising a
specific version of history, rather by understanding relativism, involving history’s
understanding. In other words, the way that the present affects the past, Pilar stands in
opposition to the old history, which tries to assert a single truth. While you can know for
certain what the true history is, you can still have an impression of it that involves your
present. The townsfolk are fighting over Frontera’s history not because of what it says about
the past, but because of what it says about their present. The teacher of the children is trying
to speak to all of them by showing how all their stories are true. Her historical approach still
points toward a true, it is not an absolute truth.

Sam is the sheriff: the idea of a sheriff is interesting and important and it can be read by a
certain number of different ways: the sheriff is the person who should embody the law and
what is the law of the land, justice, truth... Through the three generations Sam is that all of
those appear to be very honest: his father, Charlie Wade, who was definitely totally corrupt.
The question is: what is the role of the Sheriff in maintaining law and order? The type of
order that the sheriff wants to maintain is of course an order which keeps the anglos
dominant and makes me Mexican-Americans and black-Americans subservient.

Sam search: the setting of the film is a murder mystery. Sam’s search reveals the same
tension in truth in history and perhaps even more complex manners. At first glance, as
sheriff, he is seeking to uncover the truth in a town mystery: who shot the sheriff. But in the
process he wants to resolve something about his own personal history, the history behind
the legend that is his father. Sam is suspicious of the way in which Buddy may have come to
power in Rio County, for Sam, even the compounded evils of Charlie Wade are no excuse
for his father to have shot and killed him. And in Sam’s idea, Buddy was probably the person
who killed Charlie. Discovering such a truth about Buddy would only affect further the
negative picture Sam already has of his father. Sam is trying to understand the history
behind the skeleton, because it speaks to the here and now. What he doesn't see, but is that
Sam already thinks he knows who his father was and whether his father killed Charlie or not,
he knows is guilty of being an uncaring authoritarian father. It is that very truth which
motivates and conditions Sam’s search.
Scene where the town’s notables want to celebrate Buddy as a hero, by erecting a
monument of him: a bronze statue, solid and permanent as the old idea of history. A
symbol which for years and years in the future will come and commemorate the so-called
truth. This monument is a larger-than-life reminder of who Buddy Deen really was, of how
well he served his town and how much he was loved. In other words, erecting the statue
about someone, is a way of having everyone, who still living, remember who that person was
and remember why that person was a great person and what Sayles is doing is questioning
how we come across and develop our truths, how we interpret history and how history enters
our present. Simply because it's the present that is decided to pick out something from the
past, what we think Buddy was as a sheriff. The statue is made to stand for historical truth,
living on in the present. And yet, in the previous scene, Sayles offers us a dialogue between
a reporter and the mayor, in which the reporter tells us that Buddy was instrumental in
allowing the building of a dam, which buried the town of Perdido, a town which had been
around for over 100 years. We also learn that Buddy, as well as Hollis, bought lakefront
property, thanks to the dam. The interlacing of stories Buddy is a town hero and Buddy is a
potentially corrupt, gets superimposed on only one historical account that will remain in
bronze for the town to see.
The statue: Buddy has his arm around a young Mexican boy. The idea is that there's a type
of communion and cooperation and friendship between the two. We have a commemoration
which is going to symbolise the pinnacle of law and order in the name of Buddy Bead’s
relationship that he had with the Mexican. Unwittingly the commemoration, however, is that
of the father, as law, to the potentially lawless child. It is interesting how the images speak
way beyond what one would think. Commemorating him as his friendly, magnanimous sheriff
but if we look at this from a different direction is also clearly a relationship between the white
the Anglo sheriff and the mexican-american, who he's had his hand around his arm around.
It's interesting that Sam is attempting to investigate his father, because he thinks that the
father may have killed Charlie Wade, but the investigation about Buddy also reveals a lot
about Sam himself. He's doing it because he wants to understand something about himself.

The African American family: we have Chet, Delmor, and Otis Payne. In a film like this
everything is a symbol or can be read as a symbol, even the surname of this family, Payne,
it's pronounced pain, the family that has indoor pain, the family symbolic of the african-
american called pain. Even think of the name of the town: Frontera, which means bored in
Spanish.
Scene when Otis Payne accompanies his grandson through the Black seminole Museum.
Otis, called Big O, is perhaps the most respected member of the black community in
Frontera, he's also a dilettante historian, spending a screen time uncovering and preserving
the forgotten history of his people, through the collection in his Museum. His Museum tells
the story of former slaves in seminole Indians living in the swampy lands of Florida. It tells of
their joining, their struggles, migration, survivals and of their participation in a battle in a
place called Texas. The museum tells in pictures and artifacts the history which continues to
live on in the present, through all this. Chet's interests and identification with his grandfather
is centred around understanding the truth of Otis’s relation to Dalmore, Chet’s father.
Delmore blames Otis for having abandoned him and his mother when he was just a boy, for
having renade on his role as father. Dalmore responds to this as being ever present,
overbearing to bring up his son Chet just like him and ensures Chet follows in his footsteps.
For Chet this means neglecting his identity. But he wants to be an artist and not a military.
Delmore’s life is structured around discipline, in the army they call him a real hard case, a
spit and polish man. We see Delmore reacting against the absence and abandonment of his
father, by being an overbearing strict father himself. Chet is anxiously trying to figure out his
own identity by reacting strongly to his father's wishes for him and by getting closer to his
grandfather.

Scenes of Chet’s reactions: first reaction is in a history lesson, where Pilar is talking about
the Independence of Texas from Mexico and then of it becoming part of the United States.
His interest is marginal: Chet is drawing a figure that moves as rapidly as he rapidly flipped
the pages of a history textbook. The history of Texas is distant for Chet, it doesn't speak to
him. It's just the story of everyone killing everyone else. The second history lesson you
received from his grandfather, when he goes to visit him in the Black Seminole Museum, he
finds it thrilling and he is surprised to learn that he is part of seminole indians. He is
surprised to hear that his ancestors, who had been persecuted, first as African slaves and
then as seminole Indians, had actually returned to the United States, joined the US army and
helped the government run other Indian tribes in the West. This paradox of cultural identity is
brought home on a personal level when Otis cautions the young boy that his father Delmore
is a living example that blood only means what you let it. From this family history we get a
glance at how cells train generational, geographic, racial, ethnic and class orders, how they
can both be decisive and porous, steadfast and transformative.

Chet thinks that identity should be one thing and then, once again, as Otis is telling the story
of what happened. The whole thing here that Otis and Sayles is that people aren't either one
thing or another, they are the most likely both one thing and another, whether that's in terms
of their identity, past, background or even they're not simply good or bad, their story, their
history isn't simply one of being victims or being executioner. Delmore’s whole character is
based on the fact that Otis abandoned the family when Delmore was just a child and moved
down the Block and started seeing one of his mother's best friends. Delmore never forgive
Otis. Delmore’s discipline is a product of his father’s behaviour. Otis has his own story to
why he left the family. Generational thing in terms of oppositions and differences, very
similar to the relationship between Mercedes and Pilar.

Lone Star is a film that teaches that history is something to be understood, whether or not
the end result is what we want to hear. In the end, however, we are free to choose whether
not we will live by that history. The truth, like the present, is malleable.
 Reading and discussion of Lonestar

Scene of the bar: shows the position of a character that John Sayles is clearly not in favour
of. It is the position of someone who wants to see America as it used to be, wants to go back
in time, when the Anglo Texans dominated the situation, where there were lines allowing
people to understand what you could and what you couldn't do. In this scene, Sam goes in
and he's talking to the bartender.

The bartender starts by saying he is as liberal as the next guy, and Sam says if the next guy
is a redneck. Rednecks are very white Americans who live in the south, who will never even
get a tan, because they want to stay as whitest as possible and what happened is that the
colour of their shirts rub up against their neck, giving them a redneck. He's a very
conservative right wing American in general. The bartender then talks about the difference
between living in a cold climate and living in a hot climate, but why? He is doing so, because
what he wants to tell us is that, when you live in a tropical or semi tropical climate, you really
don't have to work to get by, because the fish jump out of the water, the fruit are already on
the trees. If you live in a cold climate, you have to plan ahead, because if you do not plan
ahead, the winter is going to be brutal. He is saying that those countries that have built the
civilization are the countries that are more northerly, not the countries that are more to the
South. The reference here is the difference between the United States and Mexico. The
paradox of this, which Sam expresses in that last sentence was a good thing you were born
down here then is that in effect, Texas has the exact same climate as Mexico on the other
side of the border. But his particular philosophy continues on with the metaphor: most people
don't want the salt and sugar in the same jar. The bartender’s idea is that rigid lines of
demarcation are necessary, he wants a rigid line of demarcation, the difference between this
and that, salt and sugar: they don't go together and have to be kept separate. He obviously
has the idea of who is in command. He does not mean that every single mexican-american
has to be deported, but certainly there has to be an order. He's phrasing Sam’s father
because he was called the referee, he knew how to keep things separate. Now he turns its
attention to the couple that's in the bar. He says: the day that guy died, they broke the
mould. If you notice the relationship of the interracial couple, we're told the two of them are
both in the army, they are both officials and they both of the same rank, the same level. She
is black and he's white, he wants to marry her and he is willing to retire from the army, to let
her get on with her career and in order to be with her. Not only are they a mixed racial
couple, which of course for the bartender is exactly what should not be happening, but the
way they talk together and decide things is much more inline with the nurturing family model.
Whereas the bartender is clearly in favour of a strict father model, the couple is much more
favourite nurturing family model. If anything, she is more authoritarian than he is, so they
stand in contrast to the bartender who doesn't want anything fuzzy borders, civilisations,
couples. When he says se habla American Goddammit, he means that the white founded
this country and should rule it. He is voicing a similar view to the Anglo parents, who want
the Alamo remembered as the slaughter of innocent brave anglos at the hands of a ruthless
Mexican general. They too want a clear night about right and wrong, hero and villain and
they also want to make it clear that America is ours.
The man in the couple starts by presenting his girlfriend to Sam as a tenant, giving her
military rank, but then he realises that he can say to the sheriff what her real name is. This
already shows you that he knows that Sam is a very different type of sheriff, a sheriff who
won't mind in interracial couple, sitting together at a bar and and and talking with each other.
In this film there is constantly the question of how to take and understand what a border is,
what borders are signs of demarcation of a difference. This is essential to understanding
what the political and social message of this film is about, whether the film is sustaining a
position of fuzzy borders, and therefore a multicultural America, a multicultural society, or
whether it wants to go back to a time where the dominant ideology was really the strip
border, the demarcation line.
Scene where Sam crosses the border to speak to Montoya: a person who might have
been witness to the death of a mexican-american many years ago. Basically, a death of this
guy at the hands of Charlie Wade. Montoya, called the king of the tires. This scene is very
important because in this whole part Sayles shows he is largely against the idea that there
are geopolitical borders. Just to see portrays the Mexicans, who come up across the border,
as honest and hard-working, in comparison to Charlie Wade, who is eager to exploit them
and put them in their place. So he does with the case that borders themselves are merely
political, and therefore the porous, changeable, not eternal. The wonderful dialogue where
Montoya draws a line in the sand with the Coca-Cola bottle, nonetheless, he Asks Sam to
cross the line and he says: do you think the birds flying north or south see that line? Do you
think that snakes see the line? That is a man-made line. The line is made by men to
maintain power and to control other people. So, this idea of exploiting power, they don't have
inner self justification. It is quite clear that Sayles and the film is against that idea.

Scene where Sam goes back to his ex-wife: her name is Bunny, she is the perfect
stereotypical example of the Anglo-Texan. Sam's ex-wife Bonnie is not a major character in
the film, she's basically off-the-wall, but she is a perfect example of what the movie wishes to
expose. When Sam visits her, we see a woman who is the epitome of the Anglo-Texan: she
loves football, all of their favourite teams are of the texan persuasion, she is dressed in her
football jerseys and surrounded by football memorabilia. She's fanatic, white and mentally
unglued, as she absorbs endless hours of games and scouting reports. She lives the present
by recalling statistics and by surrounding herself with images of the great symbol Texas:
football. If we call statistics and memorabilia facts of a certain history, in other words the
history of Great Texas football, which is the arch symbol of Texas, what the truth of this
history is for her. It seems that Sayles is saying that this obsession with statistics and
memorabilia is just there to incessantly repeat the truth of her identity, which is a
pathological identity. The pathology being to need is a pure blood anglo-texan at all costs, in
an agent which is no longer tenable. It's a myth, lodged in her memory of the past, which she
desperately needs to make the present again. It's only in moments where her unconscious
seems to speak. Sayles portrays her as living beyond her history, even though the Texan
she represents has largely disappeared or been marginalized, it lives in her fanatic
masquerade, because it allows her to disavow her own past. If history is subjective, if the
facts can be contextualised in thousands of different ways, then the idea of a simple, single
history is nothing but mith. Not accidentally however, Sam's trip to visit his wife results in his
obtaining the very objective information that reveals the truth about Pilar. The letter, photos
and documents he finds in the garage allow him to understand that Mercedes, Pilar’s mother
and Buddy, his father, were very much in love with each other, but since in the culture of the
time they couldn't come out in the open and live their relation normally (Buddy was still
married and they were ethnically different), the two adults couldn't tell either Peelar or Sam
no allow their juvenile romance to continue. Sam was warned not to talk about the past,
because he might learn things he didn't want to know. Now he knows why. The issues raised
by the film take all the sudden a very personal turn. Where once we could be happy with the
manner in which truth and objectivity have been replaced by interpretation and relativism in
history, like with the Alamo, our comfort level is quite different when history concerns
something as certain and seemingly unchangeable as genetics.
As Sam probes deeper into the mystery before him, he finally learns who shot Charlie Wade
in the final flashback of the film, we see Hollis shooting his superior, he did it to defend his
now longtime friend Otis Payne. Hollis witnessed the shooting of Eladio Cruz, who was
Mercedes husband, and he wasn't going to let one more murder happened at the hands of
Charlie. The truth in this case is indisputable: Buddy did not shoot Charlie Wade, Hollis did.
What Sam believed all along turns up not to be true, at this point Sam shys away from
exposing the truth. Hollis is the current mayor mayor of Frontera, in all likelihood you will be
my last white mayor the town will have for quite a while. He's also about to retire and live out
the rest of his years at peace. Sam decides never let the truth out. Sam understands tha
history affects the living, not the dead. We get a chance to view how the film understands
history: it's not a thing of the past, but a created reality of the present. Just as the flashbacks
in the film occur with a fade away or break in the action, so to the past is tied to the present
in the most intimate of ways. Sam doesn't feel the need to assure that the truth of who shot
Charlie Wade is known, because that history can still affect the living. To let people continue
to think that it was his father is fine, as he says Buddy is a Goddamn legend, he can handle
it.
Final scene: the final scene of the movie shows Peelar and Sam discussing what Sam has
discovered about the relationship. Both decide that their knowledge of their blood
relationship (half brother, half-sister) doesn't change what they feel for each other and have
decided to continue the relationship and forget the Alamo. They are making a choice which
seems to be saying to forget history, but is it? The Alamo is the signifier which in the United
States has come to stand for heroism in the face of death. One which was used to galvanise
support has been recalled is a rallying cry numerous times ever since. In these occasions,
Remember the Alamo becomes a slogan and a battle cry, to solidify identity, supposedly in
the name of a truth. But we've seen that remembering the Alamo is committing to memory
aspects of but one narrative, a narrative of a tragic but heroic battle between good guys and
bad guys with good guys all choosing to die for the cause of freedom. In the official history of
the Alamo, the battle is a shrine to anti Mexican sentiment. The ultimate triumph of the moral
character of white over brown. That narrative, to be effective, as little regard for the
complexity of the situation, which led up to the fight, and since there was little to known
direct documentation of what went on behind the walls of the Alamo, during the fighting, it's
an event which has given way to hundreds of renditions and stories, novels... each with its
own way of reading.
The last words of the film forget the Alamo, is in opposition to the slogan Remember the
Alamo, with all of the second-order signifiers about American identity that has engendered
over the years. So forget the idea behind Remember the Alamo of a certain truth, honesty,
freedom, goodness… . From this point of view, the Alamo is not to be taken as a mythical
watershed, but rather as one complex historical event. For Sayles, forgetting the Alamo is
not forgetting history: in order to move beyond, it argues, we must first know what it is. In
order to forget the Alamo, you first have to know it. Second, by using seemingly objectives
events, such as the shooting of Charlie Wade, and the kingship of Peelar in Sam to
communicate an idea of the relativity of history in truth, Sayles doesn't leave us in a world of
uncertain knowledge, he rather attempts to throw his weight against a world of borders.
Lonestar teaches that there is no separation between the past and the present. The so-
called border, which exists between them, is in our minds. To the past only exists in the
present. Furthermore, there is no border between the objective and interpretive facts of the
past. Both only have power in the present, insofar as we choose to utilise them for our own
historical imagination. History is something that can and should unite people. The Citizens of
Frontera Texas are united by their common histories, their common landscape. Even though
they may understand it differently, they are bound together through their present situation. A
fragment of the past continuing into the present. For Sayles, the director, our criteria for
reading through the truth of the past should be based on our hopes for the future. The final
scene of Lonestar finds Peelar and Sam sitting in front of a blank screen with their decision
made; they've accepted the past and yet chosen to go beyond it. The life they will try to
create with each other is providence. They are home in the wild unexplored and
undetermined future. Sayles does seem to be saying that history is not a prison, even the
truth to the past can be overcome by creating in the present a new and future-oriented
reality. We should definitely utilise the past as we look toward the future, but if we always
choose to live by the past then we will never progress beyond its limitations. What remains
to be seen is to what extent we agree with Sayles to be here.

What does Lone Star have to say about the nature of borders and the ethnic or racial divide
in the United States? If you follow the development of the film from the beginning, you know
this polarized divisions slowly begin to seed and how Sayles uses certain characters to voice
these more hardline positions only to provide a contrast with the real point is trying to make.
Point which is offered to us through the eyes of Sam, the protagonist. We should say that
Sayles is trying to sell us Sam's vision of things. Sayles offers several such thresholds of the
film where we see a character move from a potentially closeboard position to an opening of
the mind, in a transformational experience. One of these moments occurs when colonel
Delmore Payne opens himself enough literally to cross the threshold of his estranged fathers
house. He goes to visit his father. Crossing that threshold offers him the opportunity to see
something that has always been there, but then he has been too caught off to see: that his
father adores him, he is proud of him, and he has been saving every news clipping of his
son's career. That moment the colonel realises that he has been operating since his
childhood under the fact that his father didn't care about him. Which is an old narrative said
to him by his first and jealous mother. At that point he starts easing up on the soldiers under
his command.

Lone STar is a film, which to a certain extent, uses the form of the murder mystery to
construct a narrative, which will take us in a certain direction and that direction has to do with
the political, social, cultural point of view that Saylles wants us to see. That position is one
which weighs in heavily for the United States as a multicultural society. We have to get some
aspects of the past, we know the past, but then we have to go beyond the past and we have
to work towards a future, where we embrace the difference. He weighs in with Sam, who
isn't going to run for sheriff again to not be part of a situation where he has the lie to
preserve the status quo ante.
 Gran Torino
FIlm by Clint Eastwood. Gran Torino's a film about American present, past and future. It also
very much regards Clint Eastwood's personal vision of the country. Walt, the protagonist in
the film, is Clint Eastwood and he's also the person who sings the song, the leitmotif in the
end. Clint Eastwood is a well-known face in American film, he is known for “spaghetti-
Western”. His face is associated with a certain type of film. In part we can analyse the film as
spectators reading a film, but we are also dealing with a very known protagonist in American
culture. The film can be read as a sequel of the Western and if you read it as a sequel of the
Western, that's a very interesting way to read the film, because westerns are very specific
types of films. American westerns always have the same development and they always have
the same outcome. The type of cult figure in the United States: the Western tells the
American people something about their origins, but not in the sense of real origins, but in a
sense of a myth of their origins and they desperately want to have origins as every other
country has. America has origins from everywhere and therefore they don't have the same
type of glorious unified or past. Gran Torino offers us a vision of America today, as a
multicultural, multi-ethnic reality, with all of the problems and prospects this entail. Lone star
and Gran Torino are both centred around and seen through the eyes of the male
protagonist: Sam in Lonestar and Walt from Gran Torino. Both tell the story of change, the
changing landscape of the United States. It's interesting how gran Torino starts and ends,
both with a funeral. The very beginning is the funeral and just about at the end of the film we
have a funeral. The first is Walt’s wife who has just died and the second its Walt himself. Yet,
the film is not simply a return of the seasons, an eternal return. The beginning offers an
alternative scenario: as we're having Walt's wife's funeral, we see that neighborhoods are
engaged in a ceremony, because someone is giving birth to a child. We have death and
birth. It's obviously symbolic that the death is in the decadement of the white household and
the birth is in the new immigrant, asian household.
The opening scene: we have an antithetical parallelism. Look at the image of the two
houses: Walt's house is very well cared for, their house is run down, the garden isn't well at
all. And yet, the real decadence is part of his society and not part of their society: they are a
sharing community, where there seems to be a considerable amount of love and affection.
They are also celebrating a birth. Clint Eastwood is the main character and narrative logicly,
he provides the plot for the stories and development. We see things through his eyes and
yet, since his character changes so much over the course of the film, the audience is not
really being led to identify with Walt, when we first see him. The vision we have initially of
him is that of a very bitter man, perhaps because of what his life has become, but a
stubborn, racist individual. Who is alone and wants to be alone and doesn't care very much
about anyone. Yet, he is the main character, and what we see, what we learn about the story
largely revolves around him. So how can we characterize what we see about him?

Analysis of Walt in terms of the past, the present and the future. Eastwood presents us with
two realities, one is from Wals’s past, and the other from Walt’s present. Unfortunately for
Walt, there is very little contiguity or dialogue between past and present.

Walt’s past
Essentially three ways to read Walt’s past: a nostalgic past, an estranged or alienated past
and a painful or remorseful past. The nostalgic past regards Walt’s thoughts about his
deceased wife and a few friends, and all the acquaintances he has in the neighbourhood:
the Italian American barber, the Irish construction... but he seems to be close to them only to
the extent they share a common culture, the same language. They understand each other,
when speaking. They function more to conjure up the past memories, of times they once
had, than to give Walt respite or participate in his present.

Nostalgic past
The bar scene: they are basically do racist jokes. They are buddies: they have been
speaking for 50 years now, but none of them come to his house, he never goes to any of
their houses, they don't socialise, they don't do anything. He has a nostalgic past that once
was, but there's nothing about that past that comes into the present. The symbol of that type
of past is the Gran Torino: the car exists in the present, but he never rides it. It's a reminder
of the past, of the old memories. It's a symbol.

Estranged past
It regards the relationship he has with his family: even though he has raised his children,
they don't know how to communicate to each other and the son’s children (the
grandchildren) are the living example of this total overness. What we saw in the opening
minutes of the film give us a simple occasion to witness the abyss between Walt and the rest
of his family. The kids never spontaneously tried to help out, they were timidly asking him if
they wanted help and he yelled at them basically. But they're not really interested in helping
him, they don't really feel any empathy for him. They probably never communicated much in
their family and the grandchildren are the perfect examples, because they're just interested
in what they can get out of him.
Remorseful past
His war experience in Korea, what he did. He has nightmares, it is a past that does not let
him sleep at night. He cannot do anything to place it. In the film Walt is Polish and he is
Catholic, even though Walt himself doesn't really believe in organised religion, he really has
no time or patience for the priest of the Catholic church. But Clint Eastwood is protestant and
the last monologue of Walt clearly showed something about the way a certain type of
protestantism thinks. There's no concession for the type of thing that Walt did in his mind.
There is no salvation for Walt: he killed the 17-year old, who just wanted to surrender and
shot him in the face. That is it, he is marked for life. There's no going back, there's no
concession, there's nothing. We are not dealing with a Catholic culture, we're dealing with an
eminently Protestant of catholic and non-catholic culture.

Walt’s present
Present is complicated, because over the course of the film Walt’s world view will be
completely upset and finally it's going to be turned on its head. From the meeting with Sue
and Tao, and then to the next door people. The proximity to his next-door neighbours and to
the community in general get seen exclusively as a fastidious and unjustifiable
encroachment on his space, his property, which is always talking about, from a certain
moment Walt begins a self-transformation, which will take him so far as to embrace the
Hmong family as his own, at the end. The few signs in the first part of the film that Walt’s
racism towards the community is beginning to ease up are basically all due to Sue and the
way she has of talking back to him or talking to him man to man.
Scene in the pickup truck: he saved her from the three afro-americans on the street,
where she makes fun of his ignorance of the Hmong. It is the first real discussion we see him
having with just about anyone. The first significant sign of a more general change of attitude
is when Sue invites Walt over the party they're having in their house. And it's simultaneously
his birthday and since he realises that he has nothing to eat or drink, he decides to follow her
next door. Notice what Sue’s position is. Her position is that of go-between, translator, she's
an intercultural mediator, an interpreter.She makes him see that those things Walt thinks are
bizarre habits of these people, are actually very straightforward and not in all the practices of
strange or barbarian people. They are actually to be commended.
Scene of Walt’s birthday: it is a perfect example of the way that the family doesn't connect
and communicate. Everything they wanted to give him on his birthday would make his life
simpler, easy, he wouldn't have to work, he wouldn't have to do anything. And in the
meantime obviously the thing that they don't say is that he would leave the house and then
they could get the money from the house. There is a huge lack in their understanding of who
he is and what his values are.
Scene when Sue invites Walt to the party: the house, the celebration, everyone's together
enjoying themselves as a community. Walt moves from a position of being very distrustful to
actually one where he's enjoying himself. Also, Sue acts as a cultural interpreter and
mediator: she explains these things to him. She has to explain what that means within that
culture and therefore once she's able to give him an interpretive key to the culture, he begins
to see some of the very positive aspects of the culture. And Sue is the woman who speaks
his language, because she is the assimilated mum girl. She takes him down to the
basement, where he's able to see Tao, and of course this is a moment into the film where he
is found that Tao was trying to steal his car, but Tao hasn't yet tried to make amends for
trying to steal the car. He is upset with Tao, but his relationship with Sue let him appreciate
Tao to a certain point and so you can see that he does insult Tao all the time, because he is
not man enough, strong enough to do what Walt thinks he should do. Walt thinks he should
go out with Yua. He thinks he should go out with Yua, because she clearly likes him but Tao
does not understand it.
This goes back to the question of the strict father model, the traditional model: as father he
approves Yua and he wants to tell his son this is the direction he should go in. Number of
ways in which Clint Eastwood embodied the strict father. Walt’s really changing attitude
when he realises that Tao is really dedicated to the tasks Walt set out for him during the
week. He has to work for him for having tried to steal his Gran Torino. Walt witnesses that he
holds of value which is totally absent from Walt’s own family, and that is disappearing in
American Society in general. It's what we could call the protestant work ethic. This concept
was fundamental for the early settlers to America and in time became one of the more
generalized leitmotifs of American Society. In a few words, it's the idea that hard work and
dedication to one's calling, one's occupation, not only clean the body through hard work, but
in the process is cleansing your soul. Watching Tao working hard for work’s sake, in the
pouring rain, attempting to uproot the tree stump, which is very symbolic, lets him see that
Tao is like him. The camera moves back and forth at that point between Walt, standing in the
covered, and Tao struggling to dig up the tree trunk, you'll see just how the identification of
Walt with Tao in that moment is. Also, by the way a cameo of one of the most iconic western
films called Shane, where the two men in the film identify with each other by uprooting this
trees stum, the same is not the case for Walt’s own family: it is enough to look at them to see
what has become of America. For Walt, but also Clint Eastwood the director, Americans
have lost their original values. The protestant work ethic has become a commodified
maniathic. People now work exclusively as a means to further end, buying the things they
want but do not need, rather than seeking spiritual comfort in hard work itself. Profit is the
only motive people now have, for doing what they do. This is unacceptable for Walt. His son
has no sense of what it means to actually make a car. Walt did not buy his Gran Torino, he
actually put it together. His son does not understand the America made in America, nor does
he understand the purpose of work. Walt is in continuity with the car, part of him is in the car
and the car is him. This critique emphasizes his grandchildren. They are completely
immersed in a commodity world. They just want to get things from him. This allows us to
glimpse why Walt develops a closer family time. As the story progresses, we see the
community act is one extended family: every time Walt makes a good deed for the family
next door, tens of people from the community bringing gifts home: for example cooked food.
Things that they've made. This sense of community no longer exists in Walt’s America. The
shaman understands more about Walt and his life after just a brief look at him, than anyone
in his family. The mum may be poor and they have some strange habits, but they are
generally good, sincere with solid traditional family values. This is exactly what Walt sees in
himself.
Last scene where we see Tao with Yua: even Walt knows little of Tao, he attempts to
advise and help him. He interprets Tao’s problems of having a low opinion of himself, of
being shy and tells him what to do. So from that point of view, he's an example of the strict
father: he advises Tao, wants Tao to do certain things in a certain way and he lets him know
that's the way he should go.
Scene where Walt identifies with Tao: the apotheosis of Walt’s transformation, in the
present, for someone who feels alive and who fits into his new surroundings, takes place at
the barbecue, the picnic that he holds in his backyard with Tao, Sue, their mother and Yua.
For brief moments the film leads us to believe that Walt may actually have found a new life,
a new reason to live, and that the storyline might end in the way everyone would hope.
But, in the next scene we see that the gang will never stop, will never let Sue and Tao be at
peace. They are like a cancer in their community.
Final scenes of the story: are the manifestation of how Walt sees himself. He feels
responsible for having escalated the tension between the Momh gang and Tao and Sue,
remember Sue gets raped and he can not forgive himself for that.
The twist is how is going to fix the problem of the Gang, and that's going to come in the form
of self sacrifice. No one is expecting someone like Walt was going to sacrifice. We are all
thinking he is going out and getting them, because Walt knows how to kill. The priest is
petrified at the fact that there's going to be violence and then he's gonna kill someone. He
wants Walt not to go, he wants the police to stay there. Here there is the christ-like
symbolism of Walt getting killed. What happens if a christ-like self-sacrifice. He doesn't do so
out of a last minute conversion to Catholicism, if you remember when he goes to confess he
really doesn't say anything of significance about himself, his life, he sins. He just goes
because his wife would have wanted him to go. The reason why he elicits and seduces the
Mongh gang into killing him is because he wants the Mong community to see them do this,
so that the Mongh community can finally integrate into American Society. The Mongh
community is on its own, it doesn't trust the laws, the institutions, the guide American
Society. He's a friend of the Mongh, he saved them before, if he sacrifices himself to the
community, and if you notice that he waits for the whole community to watch what is about to
take place, they will stop the fear. And they will be witnesses, they will testify to what the
gang did in killing him.
Final two scenes after Walt’s death: are very symbolically revealing and they have to do
with who Walt gives his prized possessions to and what it means. There is a Christ
symbology.
The end is an actual substitution of his blood relation, his family in blood, and he substitutes
the Tao’s family as the real soul of his inherited, of the only objects in his possession that still
mean something for him: his Gran Torino and his dog. They are parts of him that still exist,
even though he's dead. He apparently gives nothing to his real family. This is a very
recurrent role in American culture, that it's by wedding certain principles that you'll be coming
American, Not by your blood, where you were born… This could easily be in a Western: it
would be the hero riding his horse into the sunset. Here we have Tao riding the car into the
sunset with the hero's dog.

How we can situate Gran Torino with respect to the United States cultural probes and
the perspectives that we have this for seeing. If in Lonestar the basic opposition
expressed was that between a future looking vision of a multicultural America and back
vision of a return to America dominated by white Anglo European, with a director John
Sayles being heavily in favour of a critical self reflection of America's past, so as to move in
the direction of the multicultural future, in Gran Torino the essential choice seems to be
between a present day consumer-oriented decadent, a consumer-oriented America, based
on a money ethic as opposed to a more spiritually charge America, based on the protestant
work ethic. Here there is another type of value. Interestingly enough though it seems that
Clint Eastwood’s vision in this film is both backward oriented and forward oriented. It is back
oriented in the sense that he would agree with Trump’s “make America great again”.
However, he would not be in favour of Trump keeping the immigrants out, making America
white again. He wants a multicultural America, because he realises, through the film, in the
end, that those are the people who really embodied the true American spirit, which comes
from a desire to work the land, to get ahead, to have a relationship with other people. Things
which present-day America has lost. Political part: we know Clint Eastwood is a republican,
what Eastwood is not, he is not a Trumpian Republican. He is Republican because he wants
individual liberties, because he has the strict father model. But he is not a Republican in the
sense that he wants to close America off to some presumed race or colour. He is absolutely
for a multicultural America, as long as people are law-abiding and genuinely good, hard-
working citizens.