Proactive response to living room elephants: big game hunters? (original) (raw)

Climate Change and the Elephant in the Living Room (Part #13)

The political implications of the challenge of living room elephants in the USA have been variously explored. As a cognitive scientist, George Lakoff (Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: the essential guide for progressives, 2004) argues that much of the success of the Republican Party could be attributed to a persistent ability to control the language of key issues and thus position itself in favorable terms to voters. He outlines in detail the traditional American values that progressives hold, but are often unable to articulate. Columnist Ryan Sager (The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party, 2006) uses the metaphor to discuss the conflict for control of that party.

The metaphor has been differently used by Paul Bailey (Think of an Elephant: combining science and spirituality for a better life, 2007) to show that individual perception has its own potency, namely that individual consciousness has its own charge, and such awareness has its own power of connection. In this sense observation actually does have its own power, its own energetic influence.

An extraordinary use of the elephant metaphor in the USA has been in Operation Yellow Elephant -- effectively the identification of an elephant in the living room of the Republican Party. This is designed to provoke college student members of that party into doing more to tell the world about their patriotic work in promoting its agenda, especially with respect to the war in Iraq and against those who oppose it. It notably encouraged those students, seemingly suffering from a reluctance to put their beliefs into practice, to immediately volunteer for military service and fight courageously in the war for which they had so courageously lobbied -- especially given the infantry manpower shortage. The metaphor plays on the use of the elephant as a symbol of the Republican Party and the hard realities (noted above) with respect to "seeing the elephant" -- and perhaps with the early mythology of the California Gold Rush.

An even more complex play on metaphor is highlighted by responses to the study of Paul Courtright (Ganesha: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings, 1985) which argues, after applying Freudian exegesis to the mythology of the Hindu elephant deity Ganesha, that his trunk represents a "limp phallus" -- delightfully exemplifying the experience of one of the "7 blind men". This resulted in considerable controversy in the USA, as variously noted (Rajiv Malhotra, Limp Scholarship and Demonology, 2003; Vidya B Gupta, A Middle Ground in the Ganesha Controversy, 2004), to which the compilation by Krishnan Ramaswamy, et al.(Invading the Sacred: an analysis of Hinduism studies in America, 2007) has provided an extensive response. Curiously, however, the elephant is also the central symbol of the US Republican Party, itself highly dependent on the Christian fundamentalist constituency -- active both in orchestrating the campaign against Hinduism in the USA, against any constraints on the reproductive freedom of the erect phallus, and in support of deforestation (Paul Rauber, Elephant Graveyard: how the Republican Party is handling environmental issues, 1996). It would appear that the elephant does indeed function as a symbol for a complex and poorly recognized nexus of systemic processes in both East and West, rendered even more curious by its association in both cases with wealth.