The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell has a very Gladwell-esque piece out about “simultaneous discovery”–the idea that lots of big thoughts are initially thought at roughly the same time by multiple people in different places. In 1611, for instance, four different people discovered sunspots in four different countries. Two Frenchmen created color photography at around the same time. And three mathematicians have been credited with inventing decimal fractions.
We here in the political world are not, as a rule, the sharpest saws in the tool shed. But perhaps we can apply the simultaneous discovery notion even to our lowly minds. Take for instance the House Republican leadership’s stunning new slogan, “The Change You Deserve.” Can any Republican be faulted if the exact same combination of words was used just last year to market an anti-depressant called Effexor XR? Surely not. As Gladwell advises, great ideas, “must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place.” I say, Well done Republican leadership. You are to Newton as Wyeth Pharmacueticals is to Leibniz. (Those are the guys who came up with calculus, separately but at roughly the same time.)
Now for a trickier example: Barack Obama has a slogan, “Yes we can!” which is widely seen as a derivative of the United Farm Worker chant “Si se puede!” which translates to “Yes it can be done!”
But that is not the entire story, at least according to the state propaganda machine of the Islamic Republic of Iran. As my colleague Adam Zagorin just noticed, the Associated Press reported this week that the phrase “We can do it” has been hung over the Azadegan oil field in southwestern Iran. Says the AP:
The slogan, made famous by Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, highlights the country’s new drive to tap its oil riches on its own.
Which begs the question: Were UFW honcho Cesar Chavez and the Ayatollah thinking the same thoughts thousands of miles away from each other? Or are Iran’s supreme leaders just now trying to hop on the Obama train? Or did Chavez and the Ayatollah both steal their slogans from Rosie The Riveter? Or–and this is the most likely–should I just stop reading Gladwell and get back to work?
(Can’t wait for the comments on this one.)