Bring Your Bowie to Class Day…

I taught a political science class at a local university this past semester and recently finished the last class. Below are my closing comments to my class, which I am posting here because I mention a certain musician a few times…

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For a little more than two months now, I have had the singular privilege of sharing the lessons of my more than 30-years in government and politics with the people who will be in charge of the world that I will die in. I have had this privilege before they, which is to say before you, fully appreciate the implications of what that means.

It is my hope that if you take anything from this class it is that your relationship with the world is more interactive than is comfortable to fully accept. There are aspects of reality that exist outside your control, but you have the potential to influence the world around you in ways that those of us who understand the truth of it hope those of you who don’t never realize.

We have been taking this class on practical politics at a time of swift and seismic change in the world around us. The individuals, many of whom are not so different than you, who are affecting these changes would rather you not know that.

Or know them.

Or know how.

This class was meant to be the first step into the wider world of how.
But I want to reiterate something that came up last week. People who look more like me than you are making decisions right now about every aspect of your life and mine.

What we eat and breath.

Our schools, our cities, our neighbors.

How much we pay for anything we want or need.

How safe we are from disease, extreme weather, war or crime.

What we watch, listen to and read.

Whether we read.

Sex and drugs.

The rules of behavior.

I can’t think of anything at all that is not heavily influenced by politics and government. And especially politics.

And these people, most of whom look more like me than you, we don’t want to give up the power to make those decisions.

We don’t want you to know your own potential.

We want you to be distracted by an electronic buzz that never leaves your brain, except perhaps when it is replaced by a chemical buzz.

It’s an idea as old as Rome—bread and circuses.

2000 years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal wrote, “Long ago, ever since the days when the people no longer sold their votes, they have lost interest in politics and public affairs. Once they bestowed military commands, high office, everything; now they only long for two things: bread and circuses.

Bread and circuses, food and entertainment was, then the mindless distractions that all-powerful emperors would toss in the direction of their public, so that the people never fully appreciated their own potential, but also never realized how oppressed they truly were.

You know I write a blog about David Bowie. 50 years ago he released an album partially based on George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. In it, Bowie depicted a world of despair, but unlike Orwell’s novel, it was not a world under authoritarian rule. Bowie, like Juvenal realized that power is in the hands of the people to give up.

Overwhelmed by the seeming despair of their world, the album ends with the masses chanting, “we want you Big Brother.”

Letting someone else make the decisions for us is a tempting prospect. Because, as I said in our very first class, failure is real. Accepting civic responsibility means accepting responsibility for the outcome of our actions.

And that is scary.

But look around and ask yourself, if not me, who? If not now, when?

Those who are working hard to move your electronic distractions from your hands to your brains don’t want you to worry about that.

The ideological mentors to the Vice President of the United States are overtly anti-democratic. They favor a kind of dictatorship in which people don’t have to worry themselves about messy, boring old politics. Their tech-bro corporate overlords will take care of everything for them and you.

It’s an idea that sounds very much like the motivation of a comic book villain. In fact, I heard it expressed just this past weekend by the villain in a comic book movie, and by the evil Emperor of Star Wars a generation earlier.

And you know what that means, almost instinctively because it is part of a story as old as time. And if that sounds familiar, then on some level you absorbed a concept from this class. The idea of a story architype, which is one of the tools you will take from this class into the world.

It’s a tool you can use to influence the legislature—something you actually did last week.

Or motivate your fellow students, which you know happened here on campus after the federal government stripped the visas of some of your colleagues. I don’t know if you specifically joined in, but SUNY Albany students used some of the same tactics we discussed in class, and joined hands with others across the country in protest. And it worked. And the federal government with all its tanks and guns, and all its deportation flights to El Salvator backed down because thousands of college students across the county peacefully assembled right in the hearts of congressional districts across the country. They used indirect advocacy to win one battle.

But make no mistake. Politics never stops and the work does not care. Another line from a Bowie song is, “while we sleep, they go to work.” And it true. When you choose to do nothing, someone else, maybe someone else more powerful than you has not made the same choice.

Moving from Bowie to Rush—do you even know the band Rush? Well, the Rush rule, taken from one of their songs is If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
The scariest aspect of politics is that you are practicing it right now, and are forever and always. Whenever you are out of the fight, you are helping the winner.
And the winner probably doesn’t want you to realize that. The winner doesn’t want you to know that you had a choice that has something to do with the price of eggs, or why you got sick, or the intensity of the hurricane, or your salary, or the pot holes, or yes, when, and how and why you live and die.

So they don’t want you to read the paper and have a sense of what’s happening in your world. They don’t want you to read at all. They certainly don’t want you to vote.

And what they really don’t want is for you to think that an individual can make a difference. Or worse still, that as much of a difference that an individual can make, a group can be much more powerful. So the idea of working together as a group is another one of these secrets that those in power don’t want you to stumble in to.
They want you to think, instead that the individual’s contribution to the group doesn’t matter. Or that while it is sometimes difficult to disentangle exactly how the individual contributed to the group’s success or failure, those who realize that each individual does, would probably rather you think the opposite.

A professor where I went to grad school, the Harvard Kennedy School once wrote a book called Bowling Alone, where he made the observation the decline of organized social and civic engagement leaves individuals increasingly isolated from community life. That, in turn, has implications for the efficacy of democracy.

More than 20 years later, we are bowling more and more by ourselves and democracy is increasingly on shaky ground.

It was my intent to set up scenarios for this class to reveal what working together can do, how an impossible problem can be overcome by planning and numbers. And to the extent that these exercises did not work, I would implore you to think about the possibilities of what could have happened if they had.

I am not expecting you to leave this class fully armed for political combat. But I am expecting you to walk out of here with an idea of what is possible. Of your own potential within this political world. It is virtually limitless.

I’m going to retire in a year and a half. You porobably don’t have to take it from me personally, but your whole career is ahead of you.

Many of you will live to the 22nd Century. And the world will be very different then. And you will help make it so.

It is my hope that if you take anything from this class it is that your relationship with the world is more interactive than is comfortable to fully accept.

So, accept it.

I’ll close with one last David Bowie quote:

“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

Think about that. Think about this class. I’d rather you master the subject mater 10 years from now than today. Every one of you can.

And I truly, sincerely look forward to what you’re going to do with it.

Thank you.