I confer with a very knowledgable guru who knows a lot of stuff. His name is Thom Bumbouncer.
I asked Mr. Bumbouncer about Dog Whistlers and what gives with them. Then I found it hard to get him to be careful with too much to ponder.
Ya see Arthur, a dog whistle when a shyster uses coded or suggestive language when he’s telling his listeners to “read between the lines” without saying “read between the lines” out loud. Shysters talk in what they think sounds like normal (whatever the hell that is) but the real game is to fire up a gang of doofuses without attracting negative attention.
Ya see, the shysters try to use buzz words that sound like OK stuff. “Family values” comes to mind cause it brings in the Waltons and god-talk without the blabberer having to go on and on whining about evil-doers and immorality. Them things tend to remind us of church garble where we sit and fall asleep cause we’ve heard it all before.
So let’s talk about something else besides family values. Oh! How about “states’ rights?” In the 1980’s Tricky Dick Nixon had what he called a Southern Strategy for dog whistling.
One Republican strategist named Atwater put it this way:
You start out in 1954 by saying, the “N” word openly and repeating it all the time. By 1968, you can’t say that word cause it hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes. And all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N” “N” “N” all the time.
Wikipedia
So what did we hear closer to our time. Why Ronnie Reagan telling stories about “Cadillac-driving ‘welfare queens‘ and ‘strapping young bucks’ buying T-bone steaks with food stamps” while he was campaigning.
That’s where the stampede is the plan. Pushe middle-class white Americans to vote against their own well-being. Punish undeserving minorities who are the real enemy. Get behind the shysters who promise to curb illegal immigration and crack down on crime but who advocate policies that favor the extremely rich. You know, slashing taxes for top income brackets, giving corporations more regulatory control over industry and financial markets, union busting, cutting pensions for future public employees, reducing funding for public schools, and retrenching the social welfare state.
Listen to the Dog Whistles and flounder in quicksand. The first Bush got re-elected partly because he suggested he might nominate Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe vs. You-Know-Who.
Seems like that’s when the stampede turned into a real stampede. Obama had to deal with an assortment of read-between-the-lines references to his racial background and then what dovetailed into a whine about his elitist education, like he was too smart for the likes of the stampeded.
That brings us to the most recent former guy, the king of blowhardiness. His ultimate dog whistle was the loser line: Make America Great Again. T’was a call to remember some vague Anglo-Saxon past and white supremacy.
Which brings as to them who use it and how they might practice “plausible deniability.”
Guy named Mark Liberman, a linguist says that it’s commonplace for “speech and writing to convey messages that will only be picked up on by part of the audience.
Seems like a dog whistle won’t work if you ain’t ready and willing to have some sort of plausible deniability.
rugerac.com 