William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection started National Empty Chair Day. Today he wrote that one picture from that day may become the universal symbol for lost hope and change for the worse because it needs no translation.

The empty chair staring at the empty teleprompter.

Words are not necessary.

Like Michael Faraday’s 53 observations of a burning candle, I think it would be instructive to observe all the ways that Jacobson is right about this picture. This is the picture worth a thousand words.

1. The chair is empty. Cool and lifeless, the chair votes present on the lawn.
2. The teleprompter is  ”…a floor lamp and plastic top from a Kodachrome slide box” according to its creator, “creeper” in Comanche, Iowa. He built that.
3. This neighborhood has no manicured flowerbeds or  brick-lined sidewalks–or any sidewalks at all.  No millionaire lives here. And yet the man who put this chair here has resisted the administration’s call to class prejudice. This chair in this neighborhood tells the world “I see what you are doing. It won’t work.”
4. There are weeds near the base of the “teleprompter.” Dead leaves show that no leaf blower has tidied this lawn. This is not the lawn of a one percenter. The media spent a week in Tampa constructing a visualization of those who oppose the current administration, but the picture pushes over that house of cards.
5. A fire hydrant reminds us there is an enormous and complex infrastructure created by a previous generation that to this day stands guard over Americans. This humble fireplug mocks the current inability of government to execute grand works of construction for the public good.
6. The chair is a simple thing. It is not the chair of a greedy man who will not pay his fair share to support his fellow Americans.
7. The shaft of the “teleprompter” is the same color as those states who put the current administration in office and who now are having second thoughts about the effectiveness of that administration.
8. At the upper right is a large swing set with three swings and a patch of well-worn dirt underneath. This is a neighborhood of families. The children in these families can now stay on their parents’ insurance well into adulthood. They will need the various beneficences of the healthcare changes coming in 2013 and 2014. Yet some people in this neighborhood oppose the current administration. How can people be so ill-informed as to vote against their own self-interest? This photograph reminds progressives of troubling questions that they can’t answer.

Please comment if you have more observations.

p.s. I conclude this juvenile post in the tradition of juvenile YouTube editors the world over by placing my object of affection behind ironic music.