Keeping the change

Helen Keller once said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”

Yeah, she wasn’t biased. Of course many of the most beautiful things in the world can be seen. Keller’s bromide is just another example of the self-delusion encouraged by official sponsors of the language arts. That same delusion is right now being exploited for the sake of another, far more troublesome word than “beauty.” You know the one.

For a while, it was tempting to perceive Obamamania as the logical consequence of a peasant press corps accosting presidential aspirants from birth to ask little more than whether they’ve “got any change.” Not anymore. Not after Michelle Obama, speaking at UCLA, fiercely rebutted all who believe her husband’s campaign lacks substance.

“Barack Obama will require you to work,” she warned. “[Demand] you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

So far, so God. Then the exclamation point: “We have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.”

Well, my soul is certainly cracked from side to side. Elmer’s and scotch tape barely keep it intact as we speak. They’ll give out any moment, prompting me to apply some weak new adhesive, of which I’m always in pursuit. Such is life. And such-along with Chinese curses-is what makes it interesting. Anyone offering to fix your soul wants you to hand it over.

Still, she led me to reflect on Obama’s message of Change. I couldn’t help notice something familiar about the word, beyond its currency in campaign-speak and obvious appeal to incumbent-fatigue. Change has quite a record, once you take a look. Vague desire for change has preceded nearly every social catastrophe in the world. Eric Hoffer noted as much in The True Believer, his seminal study of fanaticism, whose opening section is entitled “The Desire for Change.” It includes a passage prospectively analyzing Mrs. Obama’s talk almost line-by-line:

“Not only does a mass movement depict the present as mean and miserable-it deliberately makes it so. It fashions a pattern of individual existence that is dour, hard, repressive and dull. It decries pleasures and comforts and extols the rigorous life. It views ordinary enjoyment as trivial or even discreditable, and represents the pursuit of happiness as immoral.”

Now, matching Obamaisms with maxims by Eric Hoffer can be fun-

Michelle: “We believe our pain is our own. We don’t realize that the struggles and challenges of all of us are the same.”

Hoffer: “We all have private ails. The troublemakers are those who seek public cures for their private ails.”

-but keep doing it and you’re likely to attempt asphyxiation, or worse, vote. I know most people only like Obama because he reminds them of the best day in their lives: when a black member of their high school basketball team happened to call them “homey” upon asking for the time. And I know he’s only proposed one alternative so far. Nor am I immune to its carnal appeal. Picturing “post-partisanship,” I see a talk-show set with a big, leopard-skin couch on which James Carville and Bay Buchanan suddenly stop screaming, widen their eyes, and begin to neck.

But Change is a force to be reckoned with no matter how empty its vessel. Instilling a craving for it by demeaning a free and decent here and now can only serve to keep people bitter, frustrated, and unmarriageable. For the kind of change that comes in message form-signed, sealed, delivered-is almost always a force of stagnation.

Take the Fifties. They were the real “decade of change.” They enabled the Sixties; the Sixties are with us still. And history’s full of attempts to coercively accelerate a change that’s already underway (in worker conditions, quality of life, etc.) by ultimately slowing it down. Obama’s call for universal activism is a different example of the same point-activism being one of the most inert, monotonous endeavors known to man.

In a free society, the less things change the less they stay the same. Which is why sober-minded beefs with 2008 lie in its warnings (real or imagined) of a stifling future radically different from 2008. Whether your choice of warning points to radical Islam, big brother, cultural breakdown, or a District of Columbia freshly energized by the death of “partisan paralysis,” the last thing you’d want is for everyone to pin their hopes and dreams on the community bulletin board.