Just before we left for Disneyland yesterday, my daughter-in-law slightly hurt her foot. By the time we were in and walking around she was limping. After some prevarication we finally rented a wheel chair for her.
This may seem extreme. Why not just go home and come back another day? One problem is that Walt’s little surreal piece of Americana is expensive. It’s about $100 per person to get in. Cynthia, my daughter-in-law, had managed to get a couple of complimentary tickets but we still dropped $400 just to walk in the door.
And the wheel chair seemed to alleviate Cynthia’s predicament temporarily. And of course Disneyland has provisions to allow parties visiting with a wheelchair person to not have to stand in line, so it actually allowed us to do more stuff. I admit I was concerned when at the end of the long day we had to drop off the rented wheelchair and Cynthia alternately hopped and hitched a ride on David’s back for the long line to get on the bus to go back to the parking lot.
Hopefully today she will have a doctor look at her ankle.
In spite of this we managed to do an awful lot of Disneyland.
“It’s a small world after all”
Pirates of the Carribean
Star Tours
Haunted Mansion
The Little Mermaid
Peter Pan
Storybook Land
Mickey’s House
Redwood Creek Challenge
and ended it with the huge Fireworks at night complete with a live person dressed up as Tinkerbell and flying around in the explosions.
It was a long day for everyone.
I did manage to read a bit in this book yesterday:
I am finding Lakoff’s analysis surprisingly helpful and informative.
It particularly applies to my own understanding when it critiques the futility of trying to understand contemporary stuff solely with reason.
most of us have inherited a theory of mind dating back at least to the Enlightenment, namely, that reason is conscious, literal, logical, unemotional, disembodied, universal, and functions to serve our interests. This theory of human reason has been shown to be false in every particular, but it persists.Lakoff, George (2008). The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics (p. 3). Penguin. Kindle Edition.
” [M]ost of us have inherited a theory of mind dating back at least to the Enlightenment… that reason is conscious, literal, logical, unemotional, disembodied, universal, and functions to serve our interests. This theory of human reason has been shown to be false in every particular, but it persists. ” Lakoff, George (2008). The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics (p. 3). Penguin. Kindle Edition.
Nifty. Kindle for PC automatically puts the attribution when you copy and paste from one of its books.
Instead, Lakoff says reason by itself is not enough to understand contemporary U.S. culture. Emotion is also needed.
People with brain damage that makes them incapable of experiencing emotion or detecting it in others simply cannot function rationally. They cannot feel what decisions will make them—or anyone else—happy or unhappy, satisfied or anxious.
The big surprise for me is that Lakoff’s politics resemble my own. Since the Republican party adopted his ideas of “framing,” I thought that he was probably in service of the right wing agenda.
But quite the contrary. Using knowledge of how the brain and its emotional intelligence influences public rhetoric, Lakoff comments that
“.. [R]adical conservatives seek and have already begun to introduce: an authoritarian hierarchy based on vast concentrations and control of wealth; order based on fear, intimidation, and obedience; a broken government; no balance of power; priorities shifted from the public sector to the corporate and military sectors; responsibility shifted from society to the individual; control of elections through control of who votes and how the votes are counted; control of ideas through the media; and patriarchal family values projected upon religion, politics, and the market.”
He also cautions about reductive use of labels
“Please do not confuse labels with modes of thought. People who call themselves “conservatives” may use progressive modes of thought in certain issue areas. Conversely, people who call themselves “liberals” may think in a conservative mode in certain issue areas. Similarly, do not confuse party identifications with modes of thought. I am interested in pointing out modes of thought and their consequences, not in putting people in boxes by party affiliation.”
I’m quite enjoying this book. It’s helping me think about some things that I’ve been wondering a bit about for quite some time.