Obama narrative of why democrats are democrats--because it bothers them when strangers on the southside of chicago go hungry--seems like the very moral vision that we could use right now. It isn't foreign to us, is it?
Or, am I just a fruithat, speaking Neptuneese?
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No. Not at all.
You're directly on target.
As my thinking evolves, I've come to believe more and more in the need for competing, mythopoetic ideas and imagery to counter the 'winner take all, devil seize the hindmost - but we're still compassionate' narrative that presently dominates.
...
A few weeks before the election I stopped talking about Bush's many deficits, missing WMDs, and the global radio being tuned to the chaos frequency and narrowed my debating topics to one: do you want to be the sort of nation that kills children? Of course not. Surely that's not your vision of what this nation is all about. Yet that's what our precisely clever bombs are doing. Why don't you join me in helping change our course? Halting steps; a still primitive counter-story but with encouraging results.
This did more to alter the terms of day to day debate than a million expertly tossed shuriken of policy wonkiness or geopolitical analysis (deadly accurate? yes effective in changing minds? nope).
Not a widely popular notion amongst materialists who (justifiably) insist everyone wake up and smell the burning bodies but a big part of what's required.
A war of dream against dream to create a more just world. This is the political game space of the American, perhaps the planetary, 21st century.
Almost no one expected such a fight but it's upon us.
.d.