Will It be Change...Or Will It Be Change?

As the Democratic National Convention gets under way this week, I began to think about the direction in which our country might be taken by either candidate – John McCain or Barack Obama. As a writer, I’ve been put on the spot by my fellow writer Lyn Hawks (thank you Madam Hawks), about the direction a person of a given cultural orientation should take in one’s writing. Specifically: Should a writer’s personal experience dictate an audience or subject matter? Work with me here – there are connections between these two subjects. First a disclaimer. I’m not - or ever will be – a political prognosticator or a visionary concerning social evolution – I came to the game a bit too late for my writing to be that grand. The really good writers are historically supposed to be visionaries of a sort – not limited by practicalities or history. And writers of the gifted sort have often been able to dance through life’s landmines and present, in the form of stories, a view of where humanity is headed. This has often taken the form of presenting fantasy scenarios of the future in which the writer gives us a good idea of where not to go. I’m thinking especially of J.M. Coetzee and Cormack McCarthy. These two modern writers have given us rather unsettling snapshots of the apocalypse that might face us, should we take such-and-such a road to the future. Still, writers do give us a sense of the future, as Joseph Conrad did in Heart of Darkness, and as writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez have done in plumbing modern issues concerning thought, language, and meaning. Predictably enough, these same issues keep cropping up in modern politics. In an era in which ideology trumps food, land, even oil, when the big political enchiladas of the world – I’m thinking here of China, Russia, the U.S., and the Common Market nations - can no longer get away with imposing themselves on the rest of the world through military or economic force, there’s still this crazy thing called imperialism. Today, the power guys’ imperialism is, then, in a word, ideology. But the big problem with ideology as a form of imperialism is that people are basically conservative. Religion, politics, and economic structures all conflate to ideology. The way that comes down to us Joes and Janes Lunch-bucket leaves little room for improvisation or social evolution. In fact, the more our assumed ideologies are threatened, the more we dig in their heels. So what do we do when real, significant social, political, or economic change is necessary? Revolution has been the solution for the past couple hundred years. Think Jean Paul Marat and Vladimir Lenin, but also think Martin Luther and Milton Friedman. Ideology leaves little room for orchestrating gentle change. Right now, academics and politicians, religious leaders and writers, all think in terms of multiculturalism, of sharing ethnic values across the board, perhaps ending in some global blending that would make Woodstock Nation proud. But, as Michel Foucault made plain, we still think of such issues in terms of power: Revolution. Magnetic personalities. The human drama we assume accompanies grand, necessary change. So what we’ll likely see from Obama and McCain will continue to be the need to cast themselves as larger than life in the run-up to the elections. And of course, each one’s opponent will try his damndest to shoot holes in the other’s larger-than-life image. And the remarkable thing is, we’ll aid and abet in both the inflation of personality and the deconstruction. Why? Because, while we viscerally recognize the need for change one or the other of these men might represent (in the form of a grandiose leader/parent/savior), none of us is ever all that comfortable with change in general. And so we begin again, circling through the loop of idealistic promises, then begetting a deconstruction of those promises, which begets more of the same, but wearing a new pair of shoes. Finally some muse-inspired writer, hacking away at his or her computer, will eventually state the obvious (and here I’m making another stab at Miz Hawks’ dilemma - another way in, if you will): make reality-defining change for yourself, and don’t get too much in the way when others begin doing the same thing.