Starhawk Explains Obama's Magic

She is amazing! This blew my mind as surely as when I first read her books:

If politicians hired Witches or magicians as consultants, we’d tell them that your deep mind responds to positive words and images, and doesn’t get ‘no’. Linguist and political theorist George Lakoff makes the same point in his book Don’t Think of An Elephant. You can’t not think of an elephant—because as soon as you say the word ‘elephant’, that image fills your mind.

Magically speaking, then, Obama is casting a good spell. Whether he wins or loses, he’s filling the psychic and emotional atmosphere with words like ‘healing’ and ‘hope’. The effect is like a clean breeze blowing through a morass of stinking, noxious fumes. People want to believe, because they like the way he makes them feel about themselves.

And then:

In this country, we ask our politicians to do four main things: to make policy, to defend the country, to be good administrators, and to carry a huge load of our archetypal projections, embodying our hopes, fears, dreams and aspirations. The first three tasks are rational, the last goes much deeper. It falls into the realm of what we Witches call ‘magic’—the ‘art of changing consciousness at will.’

She has some advice for Hillary too:

In the contest of archetypes, women are at a disadvantage, facing a deep, unconscious sexism that limits our collective imagination. We so easily turn into Mom, either Nagging Mom, or Bitch Mom who doesn’t really love us, or harried, responsible but dull Mom, complaining about how she does all the real work while sexy, divorced Dad just takes the kids to Disneyland. My personal sympathies lie deeply with Mom’s cause. She does do all the diaper changing and the homework while Dad breezes in for Ski Week and holidays. But if I were Hillary Clinton’s campaign advisor, I’d tell her, stay away from that archetype. Responsible Mom is not going to win over Aragorn the Exiled King. Instead, I would urge, be Joan of Arc. Find your vision, and be so passionately driven by it that you would stand forth and challenge kings and armies. Show us your courage, which we know you have. Tell us “I stood forth and went into realms where few women dared to go, because I care so deeply about the welfare of all of us.”

Whatever you do, don’t attack Obama on issues of faith and trust. Doing so will be just as effective as warning your teenage daughter that the sexy biker she’s fallen in love with has no history of gainful employment. more