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THE "CHANGE!’ IMPERATIVE VERSUS THE STASIS MANDATE
It's Wednesday morning, Jan. 9, 2008, and I've been sifting
through the returns from New Hampshire. After thinking about
the winners and losers for several hours, I've reached no hard
and fast conclusions.
For all the blather about "change" in the days leading up
to the election, for all the scrabbling for the mantle of the
outsider, the one most likely to
affect a new way of doing things,
New Hampshire voters elected
the two candidates most repre
sentative of inside-the-beltway
Washington.
The most I can say about this
election, so far, is that there is
no consensus emerging. For all
the energy and "hope" Obama
represents, there is still a sub
stantial doubt as to whether he's
up to the job. For all the bump
Hillary Clinton got from inad
vertently weeping on camera,
she stills strikes me as a wooden
marionette that hopes one day,
via good deeds and fairy dust, to
become a Real Boy.
Huckabee is goofily likeable, if
ideologically suspect, and McCain
is the closest thing to a brand-
name product in this race—Ajax,
as opposed to various generic
abrasive cleansers cluttering the
dim, creepy recesses beneath the
sink. Edwards' anti-corporate rants
are appealing, but turn a populist
wrong-side out and get, five times
out of six, a fascist. As far as I
can tell, Romney's only merit is that he's the first Republican
woman to run for president. There are others—Gravel, Hunter,
Paul--but the voters largely ignored them, so I will too.
BLINDED BY OPTIMISM
There are certain contrasts—the drunken careening of the
electorate aside—that are indicative, and those contrasts have
less to do with the candidates or the contemporary political-
scene than with the fundamental American character.
Literary critic Art Berman suggests that the Anglo-American
literary establishment demonstrates a dynamic cyclical move
ment from empiricism to skepticism. We "know" and can
provide iron-clad proof—until such time as we question the
empirical foundations of our knowledge. I think American
politics works in the same way. "Change" is the mantra, but I
think it should be more readily described as "skepticism' than
"hope." The logic of using this word in this way goes like this:
"I'm not sure what Obama offers, but I'm skeptical of things
as they are. I'm not sure what I want, but it's something other
than what I know."
It's just over the hill, just beyond the election, just a hope
away... whatever it is, it's attainable, and it's our right, our
destiny to attain it. And as an American, I'm almost genetically
coded to be optimistic even when the alternatives to things-
as-they-are completely lack any definition.
Consider two literary models. At the end of The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, Huck heads for the frontier, rather than
return to that static security of domestic life in small-town
America: "But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory
ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me
and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before."
The second model is a bit more nearly contemporary. Hunter
S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ends much as it
began, with the narrator's notion of pharmacologically rein
venting himself, history be damned: "I felt like the monster
reincarnation of Horatio Alger... a Man on the Move, and just
sick enough to be totally confident."
In neither literary instance is a direction posited, a bearing
taken, a diagnosis made. The impulse is toward movement for
the sake of movement—and in the direction of away: change,
down-the-road reinvention, escape from the restrictively static,
terminally boring now.
THE GROWING PARADOX
This, however, is not to say that we, as a people, are inher
ently progressive. We're pretty consistently conservative in our
tastes. But this doesn't mean we're in favor of stasis, because
we re not.
We're not against stasis. In
fact, we covet it. Rather, we're
against complexity. We want the
familiar. We want things to stay
the same because there's com
fort in familiarity. If the familiar
becomes absolutely untenable
(see W.'s second term), only then
will we long for change... as long
as that change offers to restore
the familiar and comfortable.
As nice as it might be to head
for the frontier, it seems prefer
able to me to be able to walk
into a bar and see my favorite
bartender, into a pharmacy and
have the pharmacist call me by
my name, to have a doctor who
treated my kids from the age two
on. I locate myself by the famil
iar, and it's perfectly natural.
These are the two poles of
American politics, and it's very
cool to see the candidates' humil- !
iation, contorting themselves
as though the electoral process
were a high-stakes game of high
speed, all-naked Twister taking
place on ? burning iceberg.
The effect is taking a toll on
the candidates. There is an imperative, because of Obama's
success, to present themselves as candidates representing a
change from the status quo. On the other hand, to fend off
Obama, they have to tout their experience... that is, they have
to suggest that they're a functional part of the stasis we need,
desire, don't want to lejve.
CHANGE BECOMES STASIS
As a result, we're seeing some really weird, really paradoxi
cal behaviors.
Clinton remains seemingly inhuman because of her stiffness,
her general wonkiness, and her conviction that if she convinces
us that she’s really a man, she can become the first woman
to be elected president. We've come to expect this from her.
It's a predictable part of our political environment—and her
behavior—because, as Gloria Steinem notes in a Jan. 8 New
York Times editorial, "There is still no 'right' way to be a woman
in public power without being considered a you-know-what."
On the other hand, she sheds an on-camera tear, and her
handlers say that she's "changed." In a Jan. 9 article in the
New York Times, Patrick Healy and Michael Cooper report that
Clinton's "unguarded" moment is distinctly responsible for
New Hampshire voters reassessing her in the final hours of the
primary: "Advisers and female voters pointed to Mrs. Clinton's
emotional moment on Monday as decisive, with advisers prom
ising that voters would see more personal touches in the days
to come.
"'Women finally saw a woman—perhaps a tough woman,
but a woman with a gentle heart,' said Elaine Marquis, a
receptionist from Manchester, who had been torn between Mr.
Obama and Mrs. Clinton but was leaning her way when she
bared her feelings." Columnist David Brooks, in a column on
the same day, put it less charitably: "Crying works. I have no
data to back this up. But Hillary's human moment must have
helped. Expect Romney to cry a river of tears at the next press
conference."
Change becomes stasis. A happy accident redefines our
expectations of a familiar environment, candidate, procedure.
We want them to change so that we can get back to being the
same.
Sam Prestridge
Illinois Senator Barack Obama may have cranked up the
‘'change" train in the rhetoric of the presidential primaries, but
after the initial batch of voting, that buzzword—“change”—is
now everywhere we look. What’s it really mean, though?
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