FRAMESHOP:FRAMESHOP: THE 'LISTENING IN' FRAME

Republicans Lash Out In NSA Scandal, Dems Should Reframe Not React

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Understanding how a metaphors can define and control political debate is often the most difficult aspect of framing to grasp.  As luck would have it, Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman has just recently provided an excellent example of how Republicans try to use metaphors to control debate--metaphors that trap us in certain ways of thinking about an issue--making absolutely clear why we need to be on our guard for metaphors at all times if we want to control the debate, instead of allowing the debate control us.

Consider the following as a text book example of how a metaphor can control a debate without our evening knowing it. 

In a statement yesterday quoted by The Chicago Tribune, Mehlman attacked critics of the White House NSA domestic spying program with the following statement:

"Do Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean really think that when NSA is listening in on terrorists planning attacks on America, they should hang up when those terrorists call their sleeper cells in the United States?"

(read the full article here)

That seems pretty straightforward, right?   But...wait just a second!  There is a metaphor at work, here, and it is dictating the terms of this debate.  But what is it, exactly?  And how is it working?

The Metaphor vs. The Expressions It Gives Us
To find the metaphor in Ken Mehlman's statement, we need to start by understanding some basic ideas about how metaphors work--what they are, and how to find them in the words we read or hear in debate.

A metaphor is not something that we actually say or use in conversation or debate, but is an abstract idea that helps us understand and explain abstract concepts.  As such, metaphors always follow a very basic formula whereby something abstract is defined in terms of something concrete.  This formula can be written like this:

[abstract concept] is [concrete thing]

Now, this is very important to understand.  When we are looking for metaphors in political debate, we are not saying that people are talking about, for example, "cars" as if they were "buses" or "apples" as if they were "bananas."  Metaphors that structure political debate always start with a big, abstract, hard to define concept like "democracy" or "freedom" or "unity" and express that concept in terms of something very concrete, such as "a box" or "a group of people" or "a road."   

OK, this seems clear enough.  But where is the metaphor in Ken Mehlman's statement.  If you are like me,  you are saying to yourself:  I don't see anything that looks like "[abstract concept] is [concrete thing]" in that quote from The Chicago Tribune--So there is no metaphor, right?

Not exactly.  The metaphor in Mehlman's sentence is:

[surveillance] is [listening to a phone call]

This means that our abstract concept is "surveillance" and the concrete thing that defines it is the act of picking up a telephone receiver and "listening to a phone call."  This metaphor, however, is not literally in Mehlman's statement--and this is the tricky part. 

When we talk to each other--in political debate or normal conversation--we do not use metaphors literally, but we invoke them using phrases that follow the logic of the metaphor.

For example, if we were talking about starting a family, I might say:  "Our family has deep roots in this community."  The phrase "deep roots" is an expression that invokes a very common way that Americans understand and talk about families, which can be written out like this:

[a family] is [a tree]

We all know what is meant when someone says "our family has deep roots in this community," even if we may never say the phrase "a family is a tree" out loud.  And if someone came up to us and said "Hey, our family is like a tree," well...we might get a little nervous and think that person was unstable.  That is because metaphors give us the broad logic that frames a discussion or debate, and metaphors are never literally spoken, but are instead invoked by phrases that come from them.

So, among the other phrases we could use to invoke the metaphor "[a family] is a [a tree]" include expressions like "branches of the family."  And I'm sure we can all think of many more.  We use these expressions to explain this abstract idea of a family to people when we are talking, and this metaphor in turn allows people to understand what we mean.

But what if we wanted to talk about spousal abuse going on inside a family?  The "tree" metaphor would not help us, and would in fact make it more difficult to talk about the problems of violence and danger that defined this particular family.  To address this problem, we would have to use a different metaphor:

[a family] is [a prison cell]

We may not believe a family is a prison cell, per se, but to talk to a friend about a problem of spousal abuse, this "prison cell" metaphor would allow us to use expressions like "trapped inside" and "break out."  In this case, the "tree" metaphor would obscure the topic of spousal abuse, while the "prison cell" metaphor would help us to explain what was really happening.

Let's take a second look at Ken Mehlman's statement from The Chicago Tribute, but this time let's look for phrases that invoke the metaphor "[surveillance] is [listening to phone call]":

"Do Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean really think that when NSA is listening in on terrorists planning attacks on America, they should hang up when those terrorists call their sleeper cells in the United States?"

(read the full article here)

Ahah!!  Now we can see that in this one sentence, Mehlman is really drawing on this metaphor of "surveillance" as "listening to a phone call."  He uses the phrases "listening in on" and "hang up" to paint this image in our minds of an NSA employee sitting at a desk with a 1950s-style, big plastic phone, quietly picking up the receiver to supposedly "listen in" on a terrorist talking on the phone.  If we think about it, these two phrases bring to mind a vivid and familiar world of Hollywood spy movies, where groups of men in white shirts and black-framed glasses, sit in dark rooms listening to enemy spies talk on the telephone.  In my favorite spy movies, the American agent is often sitting inside a van that looks like a regular delivery truck from the outside, but on the inside: its filled with all kinds of flashing lights and gadgets, and the good guy--the American surveillance agent--has great big earphones that he uses to "listen in" on the phone calls of the enemy agents plotting with each other.

Yes, indeed.  The "surveillance" is "listening to a phone call" metaphor allows Mehlman to frame his attack through a very familiar logic that all Americans understand based on movies, novels and decades of TV series.

There's only one problem:  'surveillance' in the NSA domestic spying scandal is not 'listening to phone calls.'

Mehlman's metaphor is not actually explaining anything!  Instead, the logic he invokes of hard working surveillance agents sitting in dark rooms and listening to phone calls--all this does is obscure what is actually going on President Bush's illegal NSA spy program.

Think of it this way:  If we actually knew where the terrorists were--if we knew who the telephone numbers of the terrorists and knew who they were talking to on the telephone--then why would we be sitting around "listening in" on their phone calls?  Would it not make more sense to swoop in and arrest them?

Of course it would make more sense to arrest them.

In fact, what is really happening in the NSA program has nothing to do with this retro 1950s idea of "listening in" on other people's phone calls.  Surveillance in the 21st Century is a game of electronic cat and mouse.  We no longer live in a world where a phone calls consists of two people talking into coffee cans, connected by a long piece of twine.  In today's world, a phone call is pulses of light that ends up stored in a computer as millions of numerical sequences--zero, one, zero, one...as far as the eye can see. 

Moreover, the very problem that the Bush Administration faces vis-à-vis its fight against terrorists--the problem is that the do not know how to find these people.  They do not know because they do not have the intelligence structure and networks in place to find people who, for example, speak Arabic and live in countries that were completely foreign.

To the Bush administration, before they could actually stop the terrorists, they needed to figure out where they were in the first place.  After 9/11, the challenge President Bush faced was not to "listen in" on a few phone calls to prevent the next terrorist attack.  Their challenge was like the challenge faced by a fisherman, standing at the edge of an endless dark ocean, wondering how he could prevent yet another attack by sharks.  The Bush administration had no idea where the sharks were, and no idea how to find them.  And so, driven by fear that they would be blamed if another attack occurred, they decided to just cast their nets as wide as possible, catch any and all fish that happened to be in the ocean, and hope and pray to God that they pulled up the sharks along with all the rest of the catch.

To suggest that they know exactly where those sharks are, and are just "listening in" as those sharks talk to each other on the phone--well...everybody knows this is not true.  If the Bush administration had any idea where the terrorists were and who they were talking to, why on earth would they be sending more Americans to die in the so-called "central front" in the war on terror.  Knowing where the terrorists were would mean that the Bush national security team could just arrest them all and end this war on terror once and for all.  Which is clearly not happening.

To Reframe, Start With a New Metaphor

To reframe the NSA debate, in other words, we should not respond to Mehlman's accusation by defending Pelosi and Dean, but start by using an entirely new metaphor to define surveillance:

[domestic spying] is [fishing]

This new metaphor actually allows us to speak to  the weaknesses and dangers of the Bush administration policy, and it provides us with the broad logic  to generate a whole new list of possible phrases that we can use to reframe the debate.

Here are some phrases that follow the logic of the "domestic spying is fishing" metaphor:

blindly casting his net

an illegal fishing expedition

innocent people tangled in illegal searches

threw whatever they found into a bucket

What the new metaphor allows us to do is reframe the debate by invoking a new, broad logic based on the metaphor of 'domestic spying' is 'fishing.' 

So, one last time, let's take a look at Ken Mehlman's statement, and follow it this time with a retort that will reframe the debate using a new metaphor, rather than just react to his accusation:

MEHLMAN:  "Do Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean really think that when NSA is listening in on terrorists planning attacks on America, they should hang up when those terrorists call their sleeper cells in the United States?"

POTENTIAL DEMOCRATIC RESPONSES: "Here's the real problem: President Bush broke the law to lead the biggest, illegal fishing expedition in history."

"As a result, the private lives of countless Americans have been caught in illegal searches, leaving the Constitution gutted and America even more vulnerable to attacks."

"Not only did President Bush violate the rights of every American with his domestic spying fishing expedition, but by blindly casting his net in random directions, the President has not brought us any closer to securing the country from attack."

"Despite what President Bush may say about his illegal trolling for information about terrorist attacks, whatever was out there is still out there and it is still dangerous.  Meanwhile, the President defends his right to keep blindly dropping his line at the expense of our national security."

That is just a start, but it demonstrates how we can shift the frame by changing the metaphor.  Ken Mehlman may sound tough when he stands up on national TV and accuses the Democratic leadership of being a threat to national security.  But if we listen for the metaphor in his speech, and use our own ideas to reframe the discussion--we can begin to see that Mehlman is a shark with no teeth.

And that allows us to talk to the American people about the real danger that faces our nation: a commander and chief who thinks that he can protect the American people with secret and illegal fishing expeditions.  What we need instead, is a smart and fast approach to national security, an approach that neither wastes resources nor breaks the law.

©  2006 Jeffrey Feldman