This is an essay about the word "change" and how our political leaders have drained it of its meaning. It is a word that has inflamed Jeff Jarvis to infantile babbling.
"I'm sick of hearing the word 'change.' ... During the Democratic debate in New Hampshire, we heard it 90 times," Jarvis wrote in
a blog post last week. "Change, change, change. Blah, blah, blah. It's an utterly empty word. Meaningless. The worst of political rhetoric. The worst of political bullshit. Pure spin. Cynical marketing. Juvenile pandering. 'I'm change.' "No, I'm change.' 'Are not.' 'Am, too.' Nya, nya, nya."
A more dignified expert witness appears in the form of Edward R. Murrow, the CBS News legend, who supposedly died in 1965, but who I happen to know is still alive and will celebrate his 100th birthday in 2008. You see, all those cigarettes never really did him any harm.
So what would Murrow have to say about the nature of television, its influence on the coverage of politics and the formation of the citizenry, and how all political rhetoric has been distilled down to the word "change"? As it turns out, Murrow need not come off the golf course to inform us. He did the job in 1959 in an important speech at London's Guildhall.
At one point in his argument, Murrow offers this subtle point: "Simplicity communicates itself more easily than complexity in persons: and it also does when it comes to issues. And this is part of the change brought about by television." This, he concludes, is both a benefit and a curse. By simplifying a political argument, journalists open the door for more people to participate in the process of self-government. On the flip side, a complex world does not allow for simple answers, so crude forms of simplification misrepresent the world and distort practical truths.
Here's Murrow: "A society of the wise does not need television. Democracy, I suggest, cannot do its work well without it. Supposing that freedom is more important than safety, then the tyranny of the wise is only less objectionable than the tyranny of the unwise. The choice we face is between a despotism of the ruthlessly ambitious, not of the wise, and of an intelligent democracy." In other words, citizens need to develop a form of critical literacy that allows them to encounter the political words and images on the television screen and not just see them, but see through them.
Murrow might have been thinking of Thomas Jefferson's famous declaration on the relationship between journalism and self-government: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe." What happens, though, if the press is free but news consumers lack the critical vision to interpret its truths and biases?
Early in his London lecture, Murrow cites a key moment in the history of televised politics: a famous speech by Richard Nixon in 1952 in which he claims his innocence against charges of corruption by appearing with his wife, Pat, and his dog Checkers. As friendly as television was to Nixon on that occasion, it would become his nemesis during televised debates in 1960 with John Kennedy. Television "simplified" the choices by helping JFK look poised and presidential while making Tricky Dick look sweaty and conniving.
Since those formative moments, politicians and their handlers have learned how to use the media to control image and message. This form of propaganda replaces position papers with slogans, complex biographies with white picket-fence political ads, and debate with attack slogans. Complex issues such as immigration are reduced to key words and phrases like "amnesty" and "protect our borders."
In this presidential election, we are down to a single word: "Change."
As is my habit, I rushed to the nearest copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and looked up the word "change." The earliest uses in English go back to about 1300 and, on occasion, refer to political change and revolution. But the OED goes on to devote three full pages to various forms of the word and its diverse, sometimes contradictory, meanings.
Even the word's origin is complex. English borrowed it from the medieval French word "chaunge," which can be traced back to the Latin verb "cambire," meaning to barter or exchange. Spanish retains the noun "cambio" and the verb "cambiar," both meaning change. In both English and Spanish the word can refer to everything from personal conversion, to political upheaval, to those coins of low denomination in your pocket. It turns out to be the perfect word for an uncritical political culture. Any politician of any stripe can stand behind it without a requirement to specify, and without fear of contradiction.
Notice, when you hear the word "change," whether the speaker or writer is using it as a noun or a verb. As a noun, the word is an empty abstraction. You don't have to explain it, or give examples. You can simply invoke it, like "freedom" or "terrorism" or "amnesty." As an intransitive verb, "change" rarely helps: as in "I will change!" The politician who offers us the transitive, who gives us an object of the verb -- "I will change the way we wage this war" -- is at least giving us a small peg on which to hang.
Murrow's speech may very well have been influenced by an essay on political propaganda written by Aldous Huxley in 1958: "In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our western capitalist democracies -- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions."
How do the candidates' positions differ on the reform of health care in America? On the issues surrounding illegal immigration? On progress in public education? On energy independence? On multi-lateralism in foreign policy? I fear it does not matter. All that matters are those six letters: C-h-a-n-g-e. Spare me.
"I would suppose," concludes Murrow, "that the important thing for politicians and others who use television to remember is that the fact the voice and picture can be transmitted from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon the speaker greater wisdom, perception or effectiveness than was the case when his voice reached only from one end of the street to the other. This new instrument only gives wider circulation to the cry of 'Hope!' or 'Havoc!' It doesn't make either more imminent or more believable."
A half-century after Murrow spoke those words, information technologies have been revolutionized again. Alas, our candidates are still crying "Hope" or "Havoc" -- which should leave the rest of us just wanting to cry.
