Friday, March 14, 2008

Mind Games All Around

I find it very ironic and quite amusing in a way how we all have played mind games in tandem with corresponding semantical arguments here in the blogsophere and in our daily lives; all particularly regarding the merits of our own candidate for President. When bad news breaks about the candidate we support, we spin it our way, and if bad news breaks about the candidate we support, we spin it our way as well. The same goes for when good news breaks for our candidate versus good news for the candidate we oppose.

An addendum to my post of yesterday.

With an African-American man and white woman on the ticket at the same, we on the left are having to confront some very serious and very important ingrained assumptions that reveal about as much about who we are individually as who we are as a party.

Race does matter.

Gender does matter.

New ideas versus old ideas do matter.

Generations think in different ways.

This has really come down to one big drama storm, which we play as much a role as the media, the candidates themselves, or their surrogates. So I included that video in the hopes you will understand that this ought to go well beyond mind games if we want to see our party win in November.

The karpman drama triangle, which was the hint I provided, summarizes what many diaries, comments, and threads have veered off into. This kind of passive-aggressive behavior might have served a purpose at one time, but non-defensive statements that do not further inflame us and put out the fire might be a better option.

Kind of ironic when one candidate is accused of triangulation when we are all doing it in our own way, just with a slight different spin.

This also goes hand in hand with another concept. Transactional Analysis, particularly in how it divides the role of the individual into three states: parent, adult, and child.

2 comments:

Dr. Zaius said...

Transactional Analysis can be used to screw up a converstaion as well. I have bad memories of my parents reading some damned TA book and then harping about how wonderful it was. I still say that the answer lies in the rich, creamy goodness of Happy Underpants! ;o)

By the way, you have been tagged again. (My sincerest apologies.)

Suzi Riot said...

I've decided to not post about Clinton or Obama until we have a nominee. I feel that I have said anything I wanted to say about both Democratic candidates and I would rather focus on the dangerous and disastrous crap coming at us from the Republicans.

That being said, I think you are absolutely right that liberals have had to face some things that we haven't wanted to discuss openly and that's not a bad thing. Aside from a few, I just still don't think we're having a real, honest discussion.