Sprocket 5: Change we Can…
One knows one lives living in weird times, then changes becomes a desirable political mantra. Change is traditionally what societies fear. On progresses, one evolves, one goes to the next level, the next step, or on carries on as one was, rather than change. To change implies than one I leaping about like a blue arsed fly, flipping between this world and that, changing. Change is complete and by and large directionless. To live then in a society that allows for it, or even political welcomes it, is to live in a society that really feels or I being made to feel that it has gone astray: That is needs to change direction or change its collective mind. That it needs a real palpable different And yet as so often, with such an open ended word there are so many ‘real differences’, hidden within these words. I can easily account for at least six.
Firstly there is that simplest of changes, the one advocated by Tony Blair a decade and a half ago, or Cameron and Clegg how. Change so I
Merely decapitation. We have got tires with the awful lot that is governing us, let us have a change. Et us sacrifice them, and have a new lot it. To run connive with this prejudice (as Cameron and his mentor Bair did), all a political leader needs to do is say the word fresh a lot, and then subtly agree with pretty much of what the government is doing anyway They therefore pose as the fresh face’, which does not real change anything at all. They are the change we seek, and we need not ask any more. In effect and this is very true for Cameron), the change thereby becomes not about policy or debate or direction it merely becomes a matter of changing faces or changing guard. To change political is therefore to keep everything, but to have a different lot enact it.
However (as still hopefully) Cameron will find out this last move is a very dangerous one. To pose as the change, and then not actually have policies that satisfy a craving for difference, I in the short term politically a very easy strategy, and one that fits in with the crasser elements of the media. And yet it allows people to focus upon a person, a face, a presence all their fears, worries and hopes. The present of this individual ought to be enough to make a world different, and when it does not then all hell tends to break loose (this is part of the problem Obama is facing now).it is all very well allowing and encouraging people to out a desire to be different on oneself, it is quite another to be able to actually do anything about it.
Here I has to be said Cameron has one resource that Obama and Blair actually do not have. Went all is said and done, he is very public jerk. He is appease therefore incapable of actually producing the warmth and affection that Blair or Obama certainly could; This is that strangest of phenomena, a charismatic politician without any real charisma: Al that he is given is being lent to him but incredibly gentle media coverage. This means he will no come to power burdened by the hopes and dreams of people focusing in on his presence; But rather he will come to power dependent on a manufactured ‘charisma’ produced by a media that will need to be constantly placated, and may well one day turn…
Change therefore are its crudest level is meaningless. and yet beyond this mantra or play of words there are clearly two quite distinct takes upon change being bandied about. There are the Major changes, often talked about by politicians, and then there are those personal understandings of being different, that actually animate our takes upon the world and our fears about who or what we are.
Critical in the current rage for change, is the surely the complex political axis that Obama is currently trying to foisture upon his nation and the world. this axis wants t make this generation understand itself as something different. It must, the rubric runs, understand itself not merely in the here and how, but rather as a point or a place in history. When Obama uses the word change an applies it to nuclear weapons or climate or health care, he is using is as prophet uses it. He is saying to a people or a world that things in the present need not be easy, and the ‘way might be long’ but the eventually promised land is worth it. Here of cause he is able, as few president(since I suppose JFK) have been able to, to use an ‘accident; of cutler and birth to feed into the message, To looks upon Obama is to look upon a sequence of changes in the past, a series of process, and sacrifices, that led to black freedom, and emancipation. This sequence of sacrifices by both communities opened up a society, and allowed an apparently universal colour band to (partially) collapse. Obama then draws upon this history this story, and set it up a s a golden paradigm. If we can do this, if we can see this change happening he says can we see other or do others or feel others. Surely Race is not the only such path, but must really be the rule and not the exception to that rule.
The problem here is that this political trick is traditionally almost impossible to pull off, for the simplest of reasons. One opens upon a box and invites people to really make a difference, and put a lot of different things up for grabs, and render them open to change, then too many other changes becomes possible or real or credible. To say the word change is then to open up to a caps of voices and possibilities to change. It is not then the conservatism that makes the open ended appeal so difficult to carry off, but rather the radicalism that this move initially makes, that raised up a conservative back ash, that rejects all change.
This back lash comes it two forms (often combined). on the one hand, the change becomes only contained within a person. Obama he might fit the picture. In trusting his, people might trust that he has the right change on health care or political reform. That is they might ignore the bable howl of other voices, other people who also claim able to make a change. The change them becomes focused once again on the personal. It becomes a personal quest with all h political dangers that involves These dangers include not only the destruction of the presidency if the plan is not enacted, but also the risk (in Obama case slight, but in other very real) this embodiment of the change in the personal easily slips into a form of tyranny (real or not), where only one person is seen able to carry out a change, which locally ought to be open to all to make (this is Putin in Russia or Chavez in Venezuela)
The political change of the moment and a leaders clear slight is famously unstable and problematic It leads many dark places, and very few bright ones. It is no surprise them that fear of such a change springs the second type of backlash, many a conservative mistrust. Obama is loathed by the right ‘Christian; classes in America and mistrusted to a degree that was hither too reserved for the Clintons. Everything he does, and every sensible policy idea he has is pilloried, and an attempt is made to make it look odd or somehow ‘socialist’. The language of Sarah Palin and homespun small minded bigotry has thereby set itself up as a critique of Obama This is of course in itself rather political and trick. There is a lot of fairly twisted crypto-racism or something akin to it, in these moves. That is for a substantial part of America the very fact that there is a Black President is a challenge, albeit one that dare not be spoken or thought. Or perhaps better the very fact that they cannot speak this fear, and cannot say what ten years ago, what they felt, makes them feel strangely oppressed. They then carry out this oppression into the world, they look to Obama as the oppressor, he is after all the enigma that man from the ‘other side’ who got elected, and shut their racists mouths up. They then talk of winning back America for themselves as a way o expressing this checking off of their deepest prejudices.
Well may be they do. An yet behind the blither and the semi-demi-racisism there is something else. It is right or at least very tradition to be suspicious of a leader who does advocate the kind of millennia shaking change Obama wants. Leader who take themselves to be prophets (as Bush certainly did) are traditionally problematic individuals, who do need to be challenged, or at least who naturally provoke it. What I more a conservative back lash is he traditionally response to the babble of voices that spin of the desire to change. That is once there are too man voices, too many changes, then the great desire of the majority o people, is to be done with the whole thing, and stop this changing nonsense. The effect is then that change is condemned (it happened in England in the seventeenth century repeatedly, France and America in the nineteenth, Iran and the twentieth). Too many voices, too much change thereby produces just ht e opposite move namely a conservative re-entrenchments.
This last fact unpins the oddness of Obama’s position. He is the charismatic from the democratic left calling for change. The normal charismatic figure is from the right and feeds of the conservative forces, to be the suppress though limited (very limited) expression the desire to change. Napoleon there both shook up French society while actually keeping a lot if it in place; while Khomeini enacted conservative policies in the name of radical revolution and change. Obama is then very different. We stands form a left of centre democratic position, and yet still advocates a challenging change. Hence then also the oddness of the rights attack against him. In a sense it is misplaced. They treat him as if the was one of the kind the would produce, the right wing answer’ and not the left wing poser of the problem. They therefore challenge him as if the was a dictator or a man of oppression when all his instincts lies the other way around. I a sense this enigmatic status, this being apostle of the wrong thing or in the wrong way is a genuine change, which Obama present, he is in a very real sense the change which perhaps we seek. The problem is of course whether we will be able to listen to it or to be actually true to it, or whether the real politick of actually getting things done in a certain democratic political system will undermine the entire argument.
The other main species of changes mentioned at the start of this essay, concerns personal change, Everyone is caught up in their own double axis of change. We have lives and ambitions, we want a different world or a world where we our families or selves are tested differently; and look for politicians o supply that world (what else are they for). Change then as a word is an empty expression of a thousand fears, desires and greeds. As such political it has always been a rather empty vacuous and unfocused demand.
And yet, and here Obama is onto something, to this endless dissatisfaction new worry has crept. The worry that something somewhere is wrong. That is, that somewhere below the hustle and bustle something is wrong on a deep level, with society or the economy or the environment. We are gripped, at least in the fading west, with that feeling of fin de siecle, when our word, or our global dominance, our lifestyle appears somehow at an end. This feeling is then poured into desires for change and beliefs about the fate of the world We become concerned then about peak oil or environmental destruction or perhaps the economy.
The desire to change has then become expressive of an odd time where millennia style fears and worries, big pictures as it were have crept into the public vocabulary as never before, Change become the rubric, the nod I the direction of these fears I is the word that allows politicians to nod to them, without ever actually having to do much about them. One can then talk the talk of change, and challenge, one can say that world must be different, and they bog that change down in international action or minute political manoeuvring and regulations at home (which one was going to do anyway). The pen ended fear o the times, the fear of a planet that so clearly needs us so very little, becomes then translated into the mundane worlds of party politics and media point scoring.
Change becomes the at once an axis within which so much becomes possible, As democratic societies we are told we have the rights to change who and what we are, We have the power to enact legislations make a difference. And yet the very giving of that right, and with it the implied demand that we use it, devalues its power. We look for changes in the world and find, sometime s odd prophets, and even stranger real option of change, , but more often empty faces and promised, which talk the language of changing. We are thereby encouraged to confuse the on change or desire or worry about the world for the other, (mere political change), to told by those who want power that his change is enough, for us and our fears. Change thereby becomes an impossible concept or idea straddling too many different moves real and illusionary, powerful or vacuous: For if every world is change, including the ones that are exactly the same as this one, how can one make a choice/and without that ability to choose, without naming differently changes differently, how can one live is a real democracy, which surely as this difference, this ability to be different at its heart
