Frightened People

It sounds strange to say, but when people like Frank Luntz get nervous, I get calm. For people who don’t know Frank Luntz, he’s a character right out of the pages of Orwell. His specialty — testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate — has helped conservatives use words that trigger emotions, not thought, to stir public opinion and produce votes.

Along with Karl Rove and his predecessor Lee Atwater, another Orwellian character, Luntz has been critical to the success of conservative politics in America. He is the ventriloquist behind most of the dummies: famous for coining the phrase “death tax” to vilify proposed inheritance taxes on the wealthy; the softer term “climate change” replacing the more alarming “global warming” and transforming the already baggage-laden “oil drilling” into the safer, more vague “energy exploration.” Luntz’s clients include the Republican Party, the Tories in the UK and Australia’s conservatives.

So here’s the deal. Luntz is scared. Last week, in a speech before the Republican Governors Association, Luntz said bluntly that he’s not just scared of the Occupy Movement, but that he’s “frightened to death” of it, because the movement is “having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.” He urged the governors to stay on message:

Don’t Mention Capitalism. Luntz said that his polling research found that “The public … still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”

Empathize With The 99 Percent Protesters. Luntz instructed attendees to tell protesters that they “get it.” “First off, here are three words for you all: ‘I get it.’ … ‘I get that you’re… I get that you’ve seen inequality. I get that you want to fix the system.”

Don’t Say Bonus. Luntz told Republicans to re-frame the concept of the bonus payment — which bailed-out Wall Street doles out to its employees during holidays — as “pay for performance” instead.

Don’t Mention The Middle Class Because Americans Don’t Trust Republicans To Defend It. “They cannot win if the fight is on hardworking taxpayers,” Luntz instructed the audience. “We can say we defend the ‘middle class’ and the public will say, I’m not sure about that. But say defending ‘hardworking taxpayers’ and Republicans have the advantage.”

Don’t Talk About Taxing The Rich. Luntz reminded Republicans that Americans actually do want to tax the rich, so he recommended they instead say that the government “takes from the rich.”

Luntz represents what we’ve come to know as the divisive politics promulgated as religion these last 20 years — mostly for the advantage of the 1%. To watch Luntz — who once told panelists on Bill Maher’s show that Democrats and progressives should bow before their Republican overlords and not “be so strident” — admit to being frightened by a “bunch of dirty hippies” is more than amazing. It’s fucking hilarious.

So is the current plight of another frightened person, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Walker is currently facing a recall effort whose petition drive has generated close to half of the half-million signatures needed to get it on the ballot, all in the first two weeks of the recall campaign. Walker, it seems, has had enough of public outcry over his administration and effective immediately is charging the people of Wisconsin a fee for protesting. I’m sensing that governor Walker just does not want to face those mean, scary nurses, teachers and firefighters express their displeasure at the way he’s shafting them out of their right to exercise free speech and to organize and petition for the sake of their livelihood, and in the meanwhile, disregarding the Constitution while doing it.

Today, I found myself wanting to take apart and reconstruct what Chris Rock once said in reference to the Tea Party Movement, that “Kids always act up the most before they go to sleep. And when I see the Tea Party and all this stuff, it actually feels like racism’s almost over. Because this is the last — this is the act up before the sleep. They’re going crazy. They’re insane. You want to get rid of them — and the next thing you know, they’re f—-ing knocked out. And that’s what’s going on in the country right now.” But this time it’s different. This is not last year’s afternoon Tea Party. The Occupy Movement is not to be compared with the Tea Party. This is the morning of a long battle ahead. No one is ranting because they are tired and want to go to sleep. People are tired of the crap handed out as government because they’re wide awake.

It doesn’t matter how old the kids of the Occupy Movement are — they are the adults. The impact of the Occupy Movement has so moved the national dialogue — a dialogue once the purview of people like Luntz — that the Los Angeles city council voted unanimously to support a constitutional amendment that would overturn Citizen’s United. That’s the SCOTUS ruling granting personhood to corporations, and that money is not the same as free speech. There’s a new bill proposed by Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida called “The OCCUPIED (The Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy) Amendment”, or H.J. Resolution 90, which specifically will amend the ruling of Citizen’s United, so that corporations will not be considered people and thus would not have free speech rights protected by the Constitution, and will prevent corporations from spending unlimited corporate dollars in our elections. A petition is being circulated in the blogosphere to support this new amendment. Check it out.

These small moves will not take down overnight what’s taken years to build. Washington and politics in general needs to be cleared of lobbysists and special interest like the Augean stables needed a river to clean out gargantuan piles of mythic horse shit. But it’s a start.

I’m not sure where we’re going, how hard or how crazy it’s going to get in the next few years as Uranus dances with Pluto. I know we’re all going to be involved in the fight from some corner, to counter those afraid of where we’re going yet still so in love with where they’ve been. I know there’s even some of us here who may not know what to do or say quite yet, or how to get involved, or whether to be involved at all. But we’re all on the same river raft, looking at white waters ahead. Yes, it is a nervous passage. Yet I just keep remembering the faces of those kids, bearing up against pepper spray, rubber bullets and policemen in riot gear these past few months. There is no fear in their faces. There is no fear.