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The View From Above

It is impossible to contribute to any subject, technical, business, academic, internet or otherwise without reference to the extraordinary assumption of the White House by the honourable Senator from Illinois, Barack Hussein Obama, as the newly elected President of the United States.  An extraordinary event with truly amazing consequences for not just the US but for the entire world (and even for those spending an extraordinary amount of time frantically Tweeting then collapsing “all Obama-ed out”).  The ability to galvanize a nation with a call to action and unite the divided (by class, race, region, culture, language, economic status), to stand  against a common danger is no mean feat.  It takes extraordinary qualities of leadership and personal character; something the ex Senator from Illinois does not appear to be short of.

The first 10 minutes in the seat of power.

His inaugural speech was witnessed by over 2 million individuals who were present en place and an estimated 2 billion TV spectators in real time, including this commentator. This was a social network of a different stripe, a mixed crowd of mingling ethnicities. The various technologies on display (digital and otherwise), were yesterday deployed at the service of a very old fashioned and fundamental human desire for genuine leadership, when times are tough and fear and confusion reign.  Obama’s Presidency is no less extraordinary for  the qualities of the man himself: the most progressive American President to live in the White House since Lyndon Johnson.

However, as impressive as his personal qualities and credentials may be (not to mention the simple fact that it seems to be an epoch since we’ve had anyone educated in the White House (egghead and elitist relegated to the graveyard of epitaths); all this is secondary to the fundamental change Barack Hussein Obama not only calls for, but embodies. More important than Barack Obama himself are the members of his administration, his cabinet of rivals, as well as the  regional and local authorities and half the citizens of the country who have been empowered by his mandate to step up and seize the reigns of control of a runaway nation.

Moreover, as a leader he has asked us all not just to change events but to change the nature of our communication about those events.  And in so doing, change our understanding of events.  He’s asked us to put aside the stale old partisan debate between left and right, big government vs small government, private vs public. Instead, he asks us to think with our brains instead of our slogans, in order to promote a government that works. He’s asking us to think in other categories. Instead of relying on staid artifices of power, he tells us “rather it is the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things . . . who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom”  and who will carry us through these changes.  He asks us to change the mode of our conversations  in  order to unite our divided efforts in overcoming these obstacles.  Obama has re-established the status of scientist, sceptic and religious unbeliever back to the realm of credibility that an increasingly rabid and unelected theocracy was so recently in danger of subsuming.

Change the mode of our communication.

This is what is truly extraordinary about the Obama Presidency: that he recognizes that the significant changes he believes are necessary for our survival require not only a fundamental change in our value perspectives, but  a seismic shift in how we communicate and convey the meaning of  value to each other.  I could say that Obama is the first Semantic President of the United States, but the comedy in that statement would mute the point,  which is: we are all now in a place where the ground has shifted under our feet and the meaning and definitions of what we confer with value as well as  what we understand to be meaningful needs to be re-examined.  The dialogues (and actions), based on obsolete meanings like the War on Terror, Free Market Forces, NeoConservatism and Neo Liberal Economics have all proven to be failures, and painful ones at that.

To take just one example, the conversations that assert that somehow an unregulated financial market is the moral equivalent of a democratic society have to cease so that we can examine the validity of that claim based on our own  experience of the consequences of that premise, and adjust accordingly.  We won’t be fooled again.

We must be able to grasp the history and context of our meanings before acting on popular assumptions, simply because everyone else says that its so. Obama implies in his speech that although our economy and foreign relations have been fractured by the actions of a few greedy and self interested semi-criminals, that we all share complicity in participating in the consensus that permitted them to act. A consensus that was largely based on meanings derived from rumour, fear, avarice and misinformation.

“The world has changed and we must  change with it”.  In this sense, it is the meanings that shape the world that we have lived in that have shifted and if we are truly the instigators of meaning, then it is we who posit significance by what we pay attention to.  And ultimately, it is by finding and creating new meanings, new significances, new connections and new means of communicating those connections that we can make the changes we need to make  to guarantee our survival.

And of course, yes we can.

We did once and we can again

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