“Man is by nature a political animal.”
- Aristotle.
One of my guilty pleasures is going on discussion boards and reading what other people – often people I vehemently disagree with – think about politics. I haven’t really added to the discussion since burning some bridges at a James Bond forum back in 2003 with the onset of Gulf War Part II. No, I just read. That’s how I get my jollies. And the more vocal the disagreeing sides are the better. Interestingly, Bond fans tend to veer to the right a lot more than Lord of the Rings fans. At the same time, they are also a lot more politically aware, though the view may be skewed somewhat by the influx of teenage girls into the Rings fandom due to Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom. Although I think even these hormonal lolitas were politically wide awake yesterday, as history was being made.
Allow me to be controversial just for a second here. George W. Bush, current Commander-In-Chief of the United States of America, is an idiot. Shocking, right? Nobody’s come to that conclusion before. He may very well be functionally retarded. Most people worth having an intelligent conversation with agree that somebody, anybody, anything could do a better job. Cartoonists have compared him to a monkey but that’s an insult to all simians. In fact, a bonobo would be much preferable to the current occupier of the White House. Conflict resolution through sex? I could get with that. Would certainly make diplomatic summits a lot more lively.
It is a byproduct of our current capitalist/globalist epoch that I, a Dutchman raised in New Zealand and living in the United Kingdom, know as much if not more about the American political process and its major players than I do about those of any of these three countries. Since the assassinations of gay extreme right-wing politician (only in the Netherlands) Pim Fortuijn and controversial left-wing filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (yes, related to the Van Gogh) Holland has reacted by burdening itself with a conservative Christian government headed by a guy who looks like Harry Potter and has the force of will of a piece of white bread soaked in milk. New Zealand, the first country to give women the vote, has been governed by the fairer sex for ten years, but also considers anything left of centrist to be radical and has a disproportionate number of fundamentalist reactionaries and people who just can’t seem to grasp how lucky they are to have the natural heritage they do. Great Britain, finally, had the charming Tony Blair, who had us all fooled he was on our side until the Collaboration Of The Willing. Now it has sadsack Gordon Brown, who isn’t fooling anybody.
But all of them, even the guy living in 10 Downing Street, are small fry compared to whoever is behind the desk in the Oval Office. The American Presidents are the kings of today. There is more ceremony, more pomp and circumstance, more traditions, symbols and worship of both, than in the governments of any other on the planet, save a few tinpot dictatorships. Which is surely a coincidence.
And now, or rather on the 20th of January, because unlike most of the rest of the world the transfer of power is not immediate in the US, we – and I do mean we, we’re all affected in a way – have a new President, and his name is Barack Hussein Obama. I hadn’t heard of him a year ago, but then, neither had I heard of John Kerry before 2004. Unlike the man who married into a baked beans family, Obama has industrial amounts of charm, a way with speeches, and from what I can tell so far some genuine progressive policies. I’m not the first to describe him as our generation’s JFK – hopefully with a less messy ending. Indeed, having someone one can admire in the White House may take some getting used to, and the Presidency will not now function as the punchline to a cheap joke. We can no longer take for granted that the Americans will automatically do the absolute worst thing in any given situation.
I stayed up all night to watch it play out; in fact, I was the only one who stuck it out until dawn and the final ballots, although by then it was pretty much a foregone conclusion. By the time John McCain, the weathered and weary Republican candidate, finally came out to give his concession speech, supported by his family and the caricature known as Sarah Palin, the margin separating the winner and the loser was more than 6%. McCain seemed almost endearing. His audience let him down by booing every time he mentioned the President-elect’s name.
And then it was Obama’s turn. “Change has come to America,” he said. And it sure has. For one thing, we should not underestimate the symbolic power of a leader of the free world with a non-Western name. Kenyans claim his as their own, with scenes of joy I haven’t seen since Usain Bolt won gold for Jamaica. Race is a huge factor. If Hilary Clinton had lasted the distance we would have had our first female President, and our first First Husband. But Obama’s has been the greater feat. As a popular phrase that’s doing the rounds has it: “Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin walked so Barack Obama could run.” And for the first time, my dream of a pagan lesbian Arab President is now possible.
Even empty platitudes are better than all-out hate, which is what the neo-cons have been spouting with the regularity of fountains. But not Obama. There’s something energising about his optimism, about the hope and humanist faith he seems to secrete from his very pores. I was not alive for the speeches of MLK and JFK, and it is of course ridiculously early to place BHO on a similar pedestal. But the possibility is there. For the first time in a long time, we have a chance at regaining our sanity.
For me, social and geopolitical, issues are astronomically more important than economic ones. What a man stands for will define his actions. Economic policy is slave to the moral compass of politicians – what will their heart allow them to get away with? Gay marriage, a woman’s right to choose, alternative means of energy, these are the sorts of choices that forge a man’s soul. Is Obama perfect on these issues? No. For instance, though he supports civil unions he’s against gays actually getting married, although that may be a ploy to avoid political suicide by alienating a whole bunch of supposed ‘moderates’ who somehow base their entire world view on opposing gay marriage. Personally, I always figured the legal ramifications should be limited to the civil union and available to everybody, while the marriage, hand-fasting or whatever you want to call your ceremony can be conducted at whatever church, temple or sacred circle accepts it. Otherwise the cloud of that hateful phrase ’separate but equal’ will continue to linger in the air.
The US election coincides with Guy Fawkes here in the UK, and fireworks have been going off outside my window for a few nights now. Guy was a revolutionary, a rebel intent on bringing down the system in the most literal way possible. What we’ve just seen may be the revolutionary sneaking in through the front door, not to blow the place to pieces but to rebuild it, in the subtlest way possible: with the people’s permission.
It may just be. We continue to live in hope.
