On Magic vs. Power.

One of the odd things about my political writing and commentary in Philly over the last few years (mostly on Young Philly Politics) is the fact that I used the term magic. I used it over and over again in place of the word power, eschewing the word power itself almost completely and creating, over two years of writing, an alternate universe in which I recast everything around me in a fantastical light. Candidates or campaigns or political acts either had magic or did not - political actors were pirates or wizards – my political intuition and professional assessment of a campaign’s chances were couched in terms of whether they had good voodoo or bad voodoo.

I did this over and over again, on a public blog, and in conversation as well, without ever really thinking about what I was doing, or why I preferred to talk about politics in terms of spell casting (which is, really, all a campaign is – the concentrated repetition of powerful words.)

I’ve asked myself lately why I did this. And I found that the answer was actually incredibly important and complicated – that I did this because it was my negotiation with the political world I was entering, the action I took to set the terms. When you first get into politics there is a reeducation-camp thing where you learn where the power centers are and where they are on the scale. And ‘power’ in those terms, I found, meant really only one thing: having access to a lot of money. That was it. At first I just hated this, and I didn’t understand it. I was very mad, and it seemed unfair, and I was just full of disgust.

The most amazing and powerful political feats are accomplished not by those with access to money, but those who have very little, and still make things happen. They have to be smarter than anyone else, and they have to work harder, but in the end they are the only people who really change the world. And that is power. This I knew in my heart, but I did not see it reflected in the way that journalists would write about politics. So what I did was come up with my own way to talk about it. They had cleaned out all the meaning of the word ‘power’ – which is, in reality, a very complicated algorhythm. So I had to use another word. The word I chose was magic.

I liked it for a number of reasons. One – magic is entirely too complicated and mysterious for people to fully understand, which is in keeping with reality. If I had to sit down and make a list of the most powerful people in Philadelphia, I don’t know if I could do it, because there are simply too many factors for which to control – is someone born into money, do they have a familiar last name, etc. Even then, I would miss people like Amy Dougherty, the Executive Director of the Friends of the Free Library, who runs a grassroots organization that operates in every neighborhood in the city, and just ran one of the most amazing campaigns I’ve ever seen with a staff of three. Power is much more fluid that people think. I used the word magic originally as a naming device, but I was right in more ways than even I knew. Power behaves, really, more like magic. It is odd, and very fleeting, and sometimes the window opens and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes you can push and it won’t work anyway. Sometimes you are ten years ahead of your time. The word just means “to be able to do something.” That doesn’t reside permanently in any organization or operation or person.

The word itself also causes harm when it comes to organizing. Within the ‘power vs. powerless’ matrix, you have to spend a tremendous amount of time and energy convincing the ‘powerless’ that they do, in fact, have power. It would simply take too much time, it seems, to break apart the whole falsity of this silly word and the brainwashing that goes with it. Maybe that is what I will do down the road, I don’t know. So you have to go out there and say over and over again, you do have power, you do, even though you don’t have any money and very little time and the game is set up so that you can’t participate or are scared or intimidated. It takes so much work, it really does, and I am always so moved by the incredible bravery that people find within themselves. But power is such a foreign word. It has become a word that prevents us from making progress.

I am learning what I refer to as ‘Chinese magic’ now, which is basically the principles as laid out in the Tao Te Ching. This really proves my point about timing – knowledge is very much a form of power, and sometimes it comes to you and sometimes it doesn’t. Books find me when I am ready for them. I tried to read it fifteen years ago and gave up, I even lived in China, and I never got any of this. But it’s a way of talking about power that I love and that speaks to my heart. I am very lucky, at age 33, that I am at a place where I can understand this.

from Chapter Eight of the Tao Te Ching:

The sage’s way,
Tao,
Is the way of water.
There must be water for life to be,
And it can flow wherever.

And water, being true to being water,
Is true
To Tao.

. . .

The sage rules with compassion ,
And his word needs to be trusted.

The sage needs to know like water
How to flow around the blocks
And how to find the way through without violence.

Like water, the sage should wait
For the moment to ripen and be right:

Water, you know, never fights

It flows around
Without harm.