The Politics of Oz: Locating The Self In Absence

The politics of absence seems to me to have been a pervasive fact of life. History has been an apparent series of gestures by a select few who have pointed to what is missing. That missing element, once named, is then promised to be delivered by the politician, the leader, the despot. 'Here is what you lack. This I will give you.'

Salvation. Jobs. Security. Vengeance. Empire. Conquest.

Capitalizing on a sense of absence, incompleteness, and insufficiency is often the most politically expedient way to secure the devotion of the masses. Tell people what they are missing--play a ruse on them in the name of lack and deficit. Explain to them how this glaring absence is the fault of some Other, and then promise to offer a plan to correct it--to fill the gaping hole in the Body Politic.

Point to the 'lack of national security.' Point to the 'lack of economic growth.' Point to the 'lack of solvency in one or another government program.' Point to lack, and lo and behold you will be pointing to something that every human seems to inherently have a keen understanding of. We know lack. We know insufficiency. We know dis-content dear Dr. Freud. Therefore, any mention of the missing and the insufficient is sure to draw the interest of the masses. Invoke lack and you have the ear of Joe Public.

Like in the Wizard of Oz, where the Scarecrow lacks courage, the Tin Man lacks mind, the Lion lacks heart, and Dorothy lacks a home. So they all go to the Wizard to get what someone, somewhere has told them they lack. The journey is but a journey to satisfy their sense of lack. Or, should I say, the false, socially-imposed sense of lack, i.e., the lies about lack... the illusions about what is missing.