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Persuasion
When Rhetorical Guns Turn Into Real Ones
When Rhetorical Guns Turn Into Real Ones
Posted February 3, 2011
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, Douglas Adams once wrote. Except for bad news. And if you need a second opinion, just ask Sarah Palin.
The New Year hasn't got off to the best of starts for Palin and Tea Party Republicans. The tea's gone cold, and the milk's turned sour. And if you think it's bad for Palin, just spare a thought for congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and the families of the six people who were with her outside that Safeway supermarket in suburban Tucson on the morning of January 8. One of them a federal judge, another a nine-year-old girl: their lives cut short by a fatal, fanatical burst from a 9mm Glock pistol.
"I don't see the connection," said John Ellinwood, a spokesman for Jesse Kelly, the Tea Party Republican and former sergeant in the US Marine Corps. Ms Giffords narrowly defeated Kelly in her campaign for re-election in Arizona's 8th district in November of last year. Just for the record, that's the same Jesse Kelly who publicized one of his fundraising events, held on June 12, 2010, as follows:
"Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automated M-16 with Jesse Kelly."
And who, just in case voters hadn't got the message, posted pictures of himself on his website in full military get-up complete with, you guessed it, a fully automated M-16.
But when referring to Jared Loughner, Ellinwood shook his head. "I don't know this person," he said. "We cannot find any records that he was associated with the campaign in any way. I just don't see the connection."
Jared Loughner is the twenty-two-year-old former dog-walker and erstwhile political commentator (if you're into gun-toting nihilists with a penchant for posting barely literate, impenetrably confused tablet-of-stone-style homilies on YouTube) who, if you were anywhere near that parking lot in Tucson on the morning of January 8, turned up at the wrong place at the wrong time. Crackling with conspiracies, Loughner's malapropisms appear in small, white blocks against a big, black background, suggesting a mind in thrall to the power of the printed word:
"...I can't trust the current government because of the ratifications: The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar..."
That the callow scribe fails to appear in person in any of his own videos does nothing to disabuse us of such a notion. To Loughner, one feels, language is a faceless code: a disembodied logos on a grainy cosmic loop, coming at us from on high as if from an oracular cloud. It is pregnant with meaning and teeming with possibilities: a burning match to a turbulent gasoline brain.
Of course, it would be ludicrous to suggest that the ad placed last March by Sarah Palin's political action committee - the one with the cross-hairs over the 20 vulnerable Democratic seats, and the legend: "We've diagnosed the problem...Help us prescribe the solution" was intended as anything more than a baroque, if somewhat incendiary, metaphor. Who, in their right mind, could possibly have mistaken it as a literal call to arms?
But Gabrielle Giffords struck a portentous note of caution when, not long after the ad came out, she was asked about it on TV:
"Sarah Palin has the cross-hairs of a gunsight over our district," she demurred. "And when people do that, they've got to realise there are consequences to that action."
There were. And, while no one is saying: "I told you so" those consequences were tragically foreseeable.
In 1999, Victor Ottati, a psychologist at Loyola University published a paper entitled: The Effect of Metaphor on Processing Style in a Persuasion Task: A Motivational Resonance Model. The study, on the face of it, examined the benefits of graduate theses requirements - but was, in reality, all about figures of speech. Ottati took a bunch of messages with built-in sports metaphors (e.g. ‘If college students want to play ball with the best, they shouldn't miss out on this opportunity') and compared them with a bunch of neutral messages (e.g. ‘If college students want to work with the best, they shouldn't miss out on this opportunity'). Which of these two message types, Ottati wanted to know, would turn out the more persuasive?
The results were unequivocal. Analysis revealed that the messages containing the sports metaphors were not only processed more carefully, they also, subsequent to evaluation, exerted the greater influence.
But - and here's where it gets interesting - only for the students who were sports fans. For those who weren't interested in sport, the metaphor had the opposite effect: attenuating interest in the issue of theses requirements and considerably reducing persuasion.
Let's ask the question again: Who, in their right mind, could possibly have mistaken those cross-hairs as a literal call to arms? Answer: No one. In their right mind. But, as the results of the study show, that's not really the point. What's important here is that there are plenty of folks in the United States right now as disturbed and disaffected as the schizoid political climate they inhabit.
And that, Mr Ellinwood, is the connection. The one between Jared Loughner, a 9mm Glock pistol, a fully automated M-16 assault rifle, and a Safeway parking lot in Tucson. If you didn't know Loughner before, you sure do now. And there are plenty more where he came from out there, holed up in darkened bedrooms with tin-foil wraps and half-eaten bowls of Cheerios perched precariously on top of the hard drive: blogging, and tweeting, and scratching round the Internet for "signs."
"The most successful politician," Theodore Roosevelt once said, "is he who says what the people are thinking most often in the loudest voice."
Depending, that is, on who those people are.
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