Politics, climate and the nature of change

By William Safire

'Love is not love," observed Shakespeare in a sonnet, "which alters when it alteration finds." That crush on constancy placed the Bard against the windiness of change, and therefore outside the raging mainstream of modern sloganeering. "It's time for a change!" boomed Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York at the Republican National Convention of 1948. His rallying cry inspired the partisan crowd, but Harry S. Truman supporters reminded voters of Lincoln's admonition when running for re-election in 1864 - not to "swap horses while crossing the river" - which could not be overcome by the Republican counterslogan "Change horses or drown!"

Undeterred, Republicans trotted out the old time-for-a-change slogan in 1952, which met Adlai Stevenson's riposte: "They talk of change. These days they do little else but talk of change. But where were the Republicans when the great changes of these 20 years were made? I'll tell you where they were. They were trying to stop the changes." But Stevenson was up against the heroic Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the majority went for a change in Washington. In their 1988 convention, it was the Democrats' turn to latch onto time-for-a-change. The retiring Ronald Reagan told the Republican conventioneers his policy changes had been resisted by the "liberal elites who now loudly proclaim that it's time for a change. . . . Well . . . we are the change." In 2008, both major parties have decided to stick with - indeed, adhere relentlessly to - the theme of change. " 'Change,' the word, if not the deed, keeps proliferating in both parties like kudzu," Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times two weeks ago. "In last weekend's twin ABC debates, Mr. Obama's 14 invocations of 'change' or 'changes' were surpassed by Mrs. Clinton's 25 and nearly matched by Mitt Romney's 10." A Barack Obama campaign poster reads, "Change We Can Believe In," while Romney signage heralds, "Change Begins With Us."

The word is so much in demand that it has acquired an agent: Romney declared he was "the change agent that voters say they want." The same day, former President Bill Clinton described his wife as a "world-class change agent" and an Obama backer was reported deriding "the assumption that because Bill was a change agent in 1992, that she is now a change agent in 2008." (If you were starting a political-talent agency in Hollywood, what would you call it?) Climate Change: As a phrase, global warming is slowly, inexorably cooling, and if something is not done quickly and on a worldwide basis - hang the cost - the planet will be in the grip of the collocation climate change.

The 50th anniversary of the coinage of both global warming and global climate change came and went with no commemorative rock concerts or scientific Sanhedrins. My earliest citation of both phrases is a report in The Hammond Times (of Indiana) dated Nov. 6, 1957, about California scientists "studying the possibility that this continued pouring forth of waste gases may upset the rather delicate carbon dioxide balance in the earth's general atmosphere and that a large-scale global warming, with radical climate changes, may result." (There must be earlier citations in print, which I welcome from the Lexicographic Irregulars and will pass along.) For a time, the phrase global warming dominated the discussion; of late, there has been a surge in usage of climate change. Why is the phrasal competition getting hotter? Not merely the desire to be less judgmental; rather, I think, due to worldwide ensorcelling by the noun change. A Google count shows the latter percentage of change enchantment creeping up to 33 percent against the 66 percent of global warming. Regime change: In the old days, we used to overthrow governments; in the Era of Change, we "bring about regime change." Some consider the action an affirmation of human rights, others deride it as a cuckoo coup, but all embrace the phrase containing today's magical vogue word.

The Oxford English Dictionary tracks the phrase to 1925. It became the policy of the United States toward Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, as expressed in the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 and the phrase was later popularized by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on her travels to moderate Arab states. Opponents of the Iraq war displayed bumper stickers reading, "Regime Change Begins at Home" in 2004, but these are seen in less profusion in this year's primaries; their future use depends on the outcome of the surge.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Kamis 21 February 2008, 07.39 pagi)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.routers.com),(www.iht.com), (www.routers.com), (www.nytimes.com)