By Nick Mockiavelli Political Playhouse
CHANGE ISN’T JUST A HANDFUL OF grimy dimes and nickels you put into the laundry machine. Change doesn’t have to be limited to what you do in lanes of traffic, or what you do in life when you realize you’re in a poisonous, co-dependent relationship with a manipulative woman who happens to look exactly like a hammerhead shark. We can do better than some chick that looks like a hammerhead shark.
Yes we can. Change is a vague concept we can all glom onto. Change is something we can all embrace, because we’re kind of lazy and pressed for time, but we can probably spare four minutes and 30 seconds for something that’s really hot on YouTube. If Scarlett Johansson is featured in that video clip all the better. In fact, we’ll do whatever she says with regards to politics even though she’s never stepped foot into a college classroom and probably can’t point out Missouri on a map. We can get into politics if dopey Hollywood types are into it for a few months.
Yes we can. We can take a fairly normal politician, and make him into an amalgam of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Gandhi, because honestly those are the only three people we remember from our history books.
Yes we can. We are young and naive. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be know-it-all electionistas who act like this is the first time there have been Democratic elections in the United States. We’re pretty sure there was an election four years ago, but it was between two boring white guys who went to prep school. Sure, all our friends are white, but it would be pretty neat to have a cool, well-spoken black friend with an exotic name. We can see ourselves getting into other cultures down the road someday when we have more time.
Si se puede. Wait, what does that mean again? Spanish, right? Again, not a lot of Hispanics in our life at the moment, but we totally might do a semester in Madrid. We can see having a lot of fun in those nightclubs.
Yes we can. We can faint at rallies. We’ve never worn an American flag on a piece of clothing in our lives, but now it’s hip. It’s off the hook. Patriotism rocks. It’s like, the bomb (the good kind, not the totally lame kind we drop on the Middle East when we’re in oil stealing mode). We can speak loud and proud on a Facebook page where we face no risk of direct confrontation over the words we spew without discretion. Mom and Papa coddled, babied, encouraged, burped and sheltered us our whole lives into young adulthood, so frankly, this kind of sheltered forum where our actions have no consequence fits us perfectly. We can keep going on like this.
Yes we can. We dream audacious dreams. We are hope. We can do anything (admittedly, this one’s a little easier for us, because Dad’s a managing director at Bear Sterns). For instance when we graduate, we’re going to change the world by doing something wild, unpredictable, and never seen before. We might be the world’s first Astronaut-Poet. Imagine … NASA launches us high into space, and when we get into orbit, we refuse to do all the establishment science experiments and just write verse. Ha, take that NASA! That sounds like freedom. We can dig freedom, any time, any place.
Yes we can. We also dig airy, sonorous pronouncements. We tend toward broad, all-encompassing topics like courage, hope, change and unity that truly defy explanation when you try to pin any one of them down. After all, we went to a liberal arts college and making random, disconnected arguments while sprinkling in AP Literature vocabulary is our forte. We can see how other people hate us.
Yes we can.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 29, 2008. Read the original PDF.