This follows on from my standing up and being counted when I voted for Obama, and is also connected to the notion that society may not need a figurehead these days.
Although when I stood up and was counted as part of a grassroots movement for Obama, I was standing up for a figurehead. But that’s not so complex, really. I wasn’t actually voting for Obama. I was voting for a message.
There’s a social value right here, in Grassroots City. Any collective – a group, an organisation, a crowd, an audience – has that kind of grassroots power because they go through a grassroots experience together.
And a grassroots experience is anything that gives people a shared story. That’s what brings a collective identity into being:
a story
The story of what it means to Be An American or Change America. Or, in the corporate world, the story of what it means to Work For Starbucks: as a ‘colleague’ not an employee; you get a different character name, and it turns you into someone else.
It’s all about how you self-identify, and that was once about how other people identified you, but now it’s about the potential other people see in you, which gives you the freedom to be those things if you so choose.
Obama found the language of potential and he used it to describe politics (which is the thing we were voting for) but most critically, he used it to describe me (or rather, the person I could be, depending on how I voted).
Back to finding a language to illustrate the social value of the arts.
Could corporate language be used to illustrate the social value of the arts? It already is. Andy Burnham himself did it in a speech that appeared to be very supportive of the arts, but there was no transparency to it. If you look at it in detail, it shows little other than corporate spin. It certainly didn’t make me feel – emotionally feel – that he is my creative leader.
Not in the way that I feel Barack Obama is someone I would follow.
(Transparency? What is that? Isn’t it just another word for freedom? Obama posts all his official proclamations and executive orders on the White House website so The People – that’s me – can read it and have the potential to take action. Have the potential. That’s just freedom.)
This leads onto the tube to Bethnal Green.
