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Published: December 12th 2008
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Obama
ok broc took this in KC MO A lot of people have and will write about the US election in 2008. The vast majority of them will do it better. Here are a few disjointed thoughts from watching this thing unfold from a few thousand miles away. Somewhat surprisingly, Obama won Iowa. Then he kept winning. The democratic establishment was blown away. Perhaps it was because the black guy from Illinois was selling a different brand of snake water. Perhaps it was because a lot of people wanted to and still want to believe in the cultural mythos that informs and is the United States: from ‘We hold these truths to be self evident. . .’ through ‘four score and seven years ago . . .’ and ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself’ to ‘I have a dream. . . ‘. This was American optimism, American idealism, and capital T - The American Dream. Meanwhile in the realm of the mundane, getting online, sending text messages, and letting everyday electors pony up for $20 bucks helped. Especially since lots of them did. It cost only twenty dollars to feel like you mattered. This combined with high falutin hope rhetoric will go a long way after 8
jingoism or dunkenism
crowd mere moments before breaking into boisterous Amerikkka F- Ya fist pumping horribly out of tune Star Spangled Banner rendition years of good old fashioned ‘incomprehensibly shitty’. All this mattered.
But Obama got some other help too. The economy chose this opportune time to implode and blow down the 30 years old house of cards called Reaganomics. As Michael Kinsley wrote in the NY Times in November, “the real Reaganomics — keeping the economy over-stimulated with huge deficits and irresponsible consumer borrowing — not the fantasy Reaganomics of government run like a family and tax cuts that pay for themselves. . . .” And the Republicans only hope was McCain. Yep, he was in Vietnam. Yes sir, he was a ‘maverick’. But then, this wasn’t 2000. Since then, McCain had sold his soul to the White House and had decided to embrace the whackos in the religious right. He sang songs about bombing Iran and shockingly, revealed that he hadn’t been briefed on the arrival of the information age. He choked on the economy and couldn’t get people scared with the usually reliable terrorist boogey muslims. Then he got anachronistic and tried the 50s style pinko socialist angle. Finally, he tethered himself to a vice-presidential candidate that though she had a blackberry and an email account, she wasn’t sure
dinosaurs existed. Loose in front of a tv camera without a teleprompter, she was less reliable than the plumber who wasn’t a plumber from Ohio. God help the Republicans and possibly us all if the half baked Alaskan is the new face of the Republican Party.
Anyway, Bradley effect or not, this was as close to a sure thing as you could get. The enthusiasm was infectious. It was something historical, reaffirming, and positive, and it was energized by quintessentially American values like optimism and the can-do spirit, instead of the more recent values of fear, hate, suspicion, violence etc. . . . Obamamania was serving it and people were buying. He called it the ‘ground game’. I would call it the basic need to believe and participate in something meaningful, something greater, and something idealistic. This stood in stark contrast to and was fueled by the anger and bile of the odious reign of BushCheney Corp.
Knowing all that, someone dug around and figured out that there was a healthy chuck of voters -some 7 million or so- outside of the US and went looking for them. Or rather they sent out the true believers to do it. The good thing about recent college graduates is that they know everything, and they will work tirelessly, traipsing across continents, and preaching endlessly for only a few coins and the right to be obnoxiously self-righteous about it. The Chilean version was called Zac. There was a meeting. Not surprisingly, the wierdos came out of the woodwork. Zac talked, the there were emails, information, and something called Americans Abroad for Obama. Posters were printed. Debate watching parties planned. Absentee request and FWAB (federal write in absentees ballot) forms were filled in. Enthusiasm grew.
Nov 2nd arrived and the United States citizenry -excepting MO which though dear to me, continues to slip deeper and deeper into the quagmire of fundamentalist evangelicalism (LEAVE WHILE YOU CAN!!!)-delivered. We found a bar and watched results with a couple hundred Americans that for one reason or another found themselves on the other side of the world on Super Tuesday. There was concern and hope and cheering by the Americans and price gouging by the bar. With Ohio and Pennsylvania in the bag, Carly and I fled the $6 warm bad beers and relocated to a gringo owned bar that held the possibility of bourbon.
We arrived, no bourbon, ordered cheaper colder better beer, and McCain conceded. Euphoria: in the form of jumping, shouting, dancing, crying, high fiving, shot drinking . . . beer bonging. Then things got surreal and the bar erupted into The Star Spangled Banner. The ancient hidden wound healed. Bush, Darth Vadar and the Emperor had finally been defeated by the rag tag rebel alliance. ET had phoned home. The shining castle on the hill was once more resplendent. Camelot was reborn. A new dawn. The collective catharsis. All that and more. For one night, I really wished I was in the USA.
Gringos were deliriously happy. Chileans were shocked and relieved and then shocked. It had come out in the papers that Senator never-meet-with-despots McCain had visited Chile and (Dictator) Pinochet back in the 80s. This didn’t go over well in Chile, but the idea of the racist gringos electing a black man was borderline unfathomable. Though the US is one of if not the most ethnically countries in the world, there seems to be a widespread belief that white people in America are incorrigibly racist. Equally prevalent was the presumption that ‘The Man’ (who I assume looks something like Cheney and is the omniscient omnipotent puppeteer) would never allow Obama to win. But then US democracy did its graceless, bumbling, kind of awkward but largely fair business and elected the black man.
Obviously, the next day, the election was the news. Newspapers proclaimed “Change Has Arrived”, “The USA Believed in Change” and so forth. There were bios, graphs, photos etc. Standard fare worldwide I would assume. Then I went to Spanish class and got blindsided by the moron truck. One of the Cepalinas (one who works at CEPAL) was beside herself with self-righteous fury. The Chileans were referring to Obama as ‘el primer president negro de EEUU” !!! What followed was the farce of a bunch of linguistic 8 year olds trying to discuss linguistic and cultural relativism. Somehow, this woman who clearly must not be a complete imbecile, was unwilling to distinguish the fact that ‘negro’ in Spanish means black man. Though the word very well may have come into English from Spanish, I was fairly certain that the Spanish speaking world wasn’t responsible for the US taking a common adjective and loading a couple hundred years of institutionalized slavery and racism on it. Obviously, the nasty baggage is the US’s problem. ‘Negro’ means black to people who speak Spanish. It doesn’t mean slave trading, the Confederacy, Appomattox Court House, Jim Crow, the KKK or any of the rest of it. They got their own f’d up atrocities and histories to worry about. Though struck dumb by the idiocy of this position, I was pleased that the ‘view-everything-through-the-cultural-lens-of-the-United States’ perspective was a European. She fairly quivered with outrage while a certain American did a lot of eye rolling. Well PC language police be damned, we will see what mr. Obama can do about rebuilding the city on the hill.
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
So, how do you think Obama did about rebuilding the "City on the Hill?"
Would you give him another four years?