Election reflections, random and rambling, but with some tasty links.

'No matter how comfortable I feel in England, I know that Americans will always be family . . . precisely because they can make me so crazy.

They can also make me so proud.' Bee Drunken, Election Euphoria.

'I shall watch and wait with many other deeply reluctant sceptics, wondering, in the constant triumph of hope over experience, whether this time Sisyphus will fulfill his overwhelming task.'

Dick Jones, November 05, 2008.

~~~

The medium so successfully harnessed by the campaign has been the one that's helped me to share in the celebrations. One blogging friend in the US thought of me before she went to bed and left the words 'we did it' here, just as I was blearily opeing my eyes and stumbling downstairs to get the news. Another literally across the world in Melbourne posted his photo of fireworks then came across to leave a few words. And I read of others' journeys across faraway cities, their whoops of joy or sighs of relief, their lists and memories of other momentous occasions, which they stopped to record before laying their heads down. Two old friends I've never seen shared a celebratory lunch of champagne and curry and Kingfisher beer, another offered up his hair (read that one if you haven't, it's haunting and wonderful).

I couldn't be there for the party, but all these things I will remember and treasure.

~~~

Though it seemed regrettable and risky at the time that he didn't choose Hillary Clinton for his running mate, I couldn't imagine her and Bill on that stage in Chicago, without it striking a jarring note.

~~~

I have reservations, in principle, about public figures parading their families as accoutrements, but the girls were a heartbreakingly beautiful sight.

~~~

The best thing I've read hereabouts, and that's saying something, was Teju Cole's essay over at Beth's. I tended to steer a bit clear of Teju when he was blogging, because, in my poverty of spirit, I knew I would probably just give up hope of any form of verbal self-expression and not get out of bed in the morning (though really that would go for a lot of people I read if I let it...). My loss, but smallness is like that. It's long, but please, take the time and go read, you won't get a better ringside view from anywhere.

~

He draws attention to Obama as a 'hybrid', his story a hitherto unrecognised one: 'the story of immigration in the age of air travel, the kind of Americanism that issues from exchange students and H1B visas and lapsed work permits'. This cuts both ways, it frightens reactionary 'old America' because it's something new and unquantified, but it's also safe for queasy white folks, because he isn't 'an angry black man', from a people 'maimed by slavery'. I'll stop drawing from this piece, just do as you're told and read it.

~

But from that I was rather led to think about Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, who, had she lived, would be of an age with my sister, about 18 years older than me. She seems to have been an earnest, intellectual girl, raised in and embracing rootlessness but intensely seeking authenticity elsewhere. She had negative memories of the Christianity she grew up with, and chose no other religion, took on secular humanism but brought her children up on the speeches of Martin Luther King and every holy book of every major religion. She didn't fall out with her husbands, encouraged her children to know and own their fathers, but went her own way. Obama's youth with his white grandparents in Hawaii was his choice, he wanted to finish his high schooling, but she pursued her life elsewhere in the world as an anthropologist.

~

A white middle class girl, educated, intelligent, independent, liberal, humanist, adventurous, well-travelled, apparently fearless, seeking relationships and experience outside of the known and the comfortable. Nothing feckless, no abandonment or self-indulgence , but no self-sacrifice either. I'm not like her; I'm not American or a mother for a start, and I lack that independence of spirit, but I know women she reminds me of. If this new man is this kind of hybrid, rootless, undamaged, and if this is, as I think perhaps it is, good, then I like to think that a woman I can recognise had something to do with it.

~~~

The note of caution, of course, that brave if reluctant people are making sure is sounded: too easy to be swept along with the joy of it, to mistake simple shared excitement for real, authentically experienced epiphany, relief for true change for the better. Jean spoke of her hope as slow-burning, but expressed reservation about any politician partly stemming from disillusion with the Blair government. I too heard a warning voice, even as I watched and wept and felt quite taken out of myself, reminding me of that other moment of election night euphoria eleven years ago, which was followed so quickly by disappointment, the bitterness of which intensified over the years. The possibility that the impulses and motives which led to the betrayals might have originally been noble was no justification or comfort.

~

Hindsight always colours memory, of course, yet I still feel this is qualitatively different from that, in terms of the hope kindled and the power for healing represented. Some of the difference is in Obama's demeanor, what Beth remarked on as the gravity of the man, his sober, almost sombre, acknowledgement of the enormity of the task ahead of him, his dignity and humility. It may be he hasn't always shown so much of these qualities, but nevertheless. The 1997 UK elections were followed by an orgy of self-congratulation, a wave of entitlement they didn't come

down from. Dignity and humility were not much in evidence.

~

Any sensible person understands that the real work of change is ahead, much of it cannot be accomplished, many of his priorities may not be right and just. He is a politician, that's not just a glib dismissal; without a politician's guile he would be useless, with it he is flawed, I don't know how we can get around that. It may be, as Dale said in another post which explores delicately, personally and, of course, beautifully, the tension and difficulty surrounding all these questions of hope and realism, of personal engagement and detachment, (and more besides,read that one too if you know what's good for you)that 'we are dug into a hole so deep that maybe we will never get out', but at least I feel that if the change we hope for proves mostly impossible, it won't be through lack of courage, intelligence, will or engagement. And the change we have already seen is still a heartening one; less bad is better.

~~~

I'm not sure that joy, euphoria, the high that comes with relief, is necessarily to be knocked anyway, as long as we know it for what it is, and don't resent its passing. I'm not even convinced that the mythologising of a person or situation, that carries us along in a wave of collective exaltation, is altogether to be despised either, as long as we keep some sane and steadying part of ourselves apart from it, our centre within us, not them. It seems to allow us access to something unique and human and important. One of the problems of it is it often seems to involve death.

~~~

And finally, I am struck and moved by the sheer weight of pain my good American friends seem to have been carrying, which, I have the impression, they didn't always seem to be fully aware of, until now they find it has been lifted. And I am happy for that.

~

[Sorry about the squiggles, Blogger's refusing to double space and the block of text without looked frightful...]