Resonance and bad timing
Am I the only person who is chilled by the Barack Obama HOPE sticker, the only one reminded of Kelly Freas classic robot illustration?
Perhaps I am.
To add to my dis-ease, I’ve been watching the amazing, illulminating and depressing series, The World At War, a British television documentary made in 1974 using actual footage. I never realized I watched it so close to it’s original release – it must have been the first U.S. broadcast, or very close. My boyfriend Tommy and I would watch it together. Part of what’s depressing about watching this film is the sinking awareness that humans really don’t tend to learn from history. Seems to me there’s an argument against Darwinian evolution in there but I’ll avoid that rabbit-trail for the moment at least.
The series spends some time understanding the dynamics at play in Germany that lead to Hitler’s rise and his popularity; whatever Germans said after their defeat, there was certainly a joyful ‘golden time’ for them after they defeated France with so little difficulty in1940, and there’s a lot of footage of adoring crowds and the very image-conscious, media-savvy Nazis, with amazing quotes about the importance of propaganda, of controlling and manipulating the population.
It hasn’t been a good time to hear the crowds chanting “Obama!” and notice chilling similarities between the popular response and the adept manipulation of media and image; it was really not a good time to hear he wanted to speak at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin…
Populations are fickle. Crowds have a distinct ‘persona’ of their own (I say this with more than 30 years of performance experience) and it’s easy to get swept up in the energy of the moment; everyone who experienced rallies against the Viet Nam war during the late 1960s can attest to this reality.
Obama tapping into the zeitgeist, saying the words “change” and “hope” has excited a significant portion of America; Oprah stands up and asks, “Could he be– The One?” and the crowd goes wild. Never mind that he’s actually a classic Chicago machine politician and has never ‘reached across party lines’ to risk angering his Dem friends (making his promised unification of the nation impossible right there: if all compromise is on one side and all control and tap dancing on the other, the result is not ‘unification’) or that the kinds of change that he describes will result in bigger, bulkier government and less personal freedom; probably not the kind of ‘change’ that most of his fans are really hoping for.
And I have no idea how he’s going to arrange to have the planet start healing itself, as of several months ago when he so modestly accepted the nomination of the Democrat party:
“We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment—this was the time—when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.”
I wish we were smarter as a species, better at recognizing when we’re being manipulated, recognizing our own susceptibility and frailty. But as it stands, most people will associate the current administration with the current fiscal crisis and the same people will associate Obama with “change” because the mass media, especially television, persists in promoting those associations.
I really hope that we don’t have to live through an Obama administration, the inevitable sense of confusion that will follow: where are the good changes we were promised? Why has the economy tanked even more? Why isn’t government-run health care the panacea we were told it would be? Where is that promised tax break?!
I take some hope in the fact that there are fewer Obama 08 signs up in the neighborhood compared to Gore and Kerry signage in 2000 and 2004– we shall see.
Tags: obama