Anna Nicole On The Brain Analysis

Short Essay Response

In the first chapter of the book, “The Political Mind”, titled “Anna Nicole on the brain” George Lakeoff starts the book by talking about Anna Nicole Smith. The chapter starts by stating that if one understands Anna Nicole Smith then they will understand politics. He then continues by diving into the life then death of Anna Nicole Smith. In the text he defines terms that the reader will need and gives a brief psychology lesson by talking about the complex narratives of anyone’s life. The author states a few of the narratives that tied into to Anna Nicole Smith like, Rage-to-Riches or Pull-Yourself-up-by-Your-Bootstraps. The text states that every human being lives a narrative, and the reason people loved, and mourned Anna

The importance of this very simple yet complicated statement is fundamental to understand politics. What I mean by this statement is that every human being that has ever lived has had a narrative. A narrative is defined as a story, and they are broken into frames or scripts. Each frame has its own role. For example, in a human’s life there is the birth, the childhood, the teenage years, the adulthood, retirement, and then death. Within each of these frames a story occurs and there is a sequence to it. In each frame for every human the same story occurs, but in different ways. By understanding this we can understand what the narrator is trying to portray by using Anna Nicole Smith as an example. The death of Anna Nicole Smith brought mourning and idolization towards her which is hard to understand, but by understanding cultural narrative, one starts to realize why people mourned and idolized her. The reason behind this is the fact that many people saw themselves in her. They saw her as a desperate woman who had to do what she hade to,

After this it starts talking about how the American jobs are being shipped thousands of miles away and how it really doesn’t have to be like that. Right off the back the republicans start of by applying the concept of cultural narratives. How? By showing different Americans working hard, then stating that they are losing their jobs. What this does is it makes the people who lost their jobs see themselves in the image of the people in the ad. And as the ad progresses, it states that it doesn’t need to be that way. That Americans can have their jobs back if and only if they vote Trump as their president. When people start relating or seeing their narrative in the ad, they automatically sympathies with the ad, hence, trump being our president. And this is what Lakeoff talks about in the first chapter of his book. That people where mourning and idolizing Anna Nicole Smith since they could see themselves in her. They could relate to the struggles and hardships that she endured so they sympathies with her. Same with the republican ad campaign, you could see that the narrative is added to every ad, and the rhetoric concept of pathos is in it as well. Because of this narrative people voted for Trump and adored