Congratulations on Getting Your Country Back
My brother and his missus were over here this week, and we all stayed up late to watch the American elections on Tuesday. It was interesting to see how nervous they were, how happy they eventually were, and the general fervour with which everyone embraced the whole thing.
I have said before that I don’t think Obama is quite the messiah he is being treated as. He is financially quite conservative, and just as prone to politically expedient u-turns as any other politician, as evidenced by his about-face on FISA. People seems to expect a lot more than he is going to deliver. His acceptance speech was, after the first few minutes, embarrassingly hyperbolic and downright ludicrous, and anyone that smooth just has to be full of shit somewhere under the surface. Remember the lesson of Tony Blair: how charismatic he was, how sweet the victory, how hard we partied and ultimately how slippery the little weasel turned out to be.
Having said that, from an outsider’s perspective, I don’t think this election had as much to do with the parties themselves, or even the candidates, as it had to do with the identity of the country. America seems only recently to have gained any awareness of how the rest of the world views it, and that seems to have been a pretty shocking epiphany. ‘Christ, we invade countries for no reason, we actually are not some amazing haven of domestic peace and freedom, we are not something to which the rest of the world aspires, we do not give everyone a fair trial and we abduct, torture and bully’ . It was almost as if the Bush administration was so caricatured that the nation was forced to remove it’s parochial, rose-tinted, lazily patriotic spectacles and realise that the people in the world who do not like America might actually have some very good reasons to for feeling the way they do.
Then, especially once Palin came on board, it became obvious that the Republican campaign represented pretty much all of that ugly side of the country: inward facing, thuggish, willfully ignorant, parochial, narrow-minded, blindly dogmatic, hypocritical and mean. It was as if Americans could look at them and finally understand ‘When people say they hate us it is because this is what they see‘. Suddenly it became much more emotive because it was about national identity as much as it was about taxes or healthcare or the usual things – it seemed to be about the fact that America was turning into the kind of country that a lot of Americans actually disliked. For me, irrespective of Obama’s obvious flaws, this election seems to say something quite reassuring about the kind of nation America actually wants to be.
Congratulations on getting your country back, people.
Elbow – Leaders of the Free World
Billy Bragg – Some Days I See the Point
Billy Bragg – The Few
Your brother came to visit, you say? How is it we did not know about this? How wude.
Beautiful.
Check out what Obama will do for the Arts:
http://fullbodytransplant.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/obama-for-the-arts/
We did it.
Yes we did.
out with old, in with the new.
it’s all about the timeless things called hope opportunity and possibility.
Lets enjoy the moment and keep out fingers crossed that the chimp Bush doesn’t do anything rash over the next 70 odd days!!!
I made myself read whatever right wing press I could find in the last week or so of the campaign to try and avoid too much triumpalism, and one strange consequence of all of this is that I’ve become strangely addicted to reading rabidly right wing comment sites. Free Republic is a new favourite. I am now aware of the fact that Obama is a socialist marxist communist, that he is a muslim, that he is the anti-christ, that a great many Obama voters will, over the course of the next few years, realise what they have done and as a consequence probably take their own lives. And that’s just the moderate stuff.
He’s a baby killer as well.
Yeah, the Freepers have a particularly fascinating brand of lunacy. But that’s just what this election seemed to be about. Does America want to be a Free Republic kind of nation? And the answer, refreshingly, seems to be no.
And America is an eerily quiet place today because nobody will admit to having voted for him. And he only won because 18 million aborted black babies voted for him. Well, obviously.
Well given how in favour of terrorism he is, the honeymoon should be over quickly.
Some of those babies were Mexican, you heartless cow!
it’s really weird, but ever since tuesday night my skin is turning darker and i’ve got the strongest urge to put on a headscarf . . .
And I have a strange urge to travel to new and interesting places. Oh no, wait. That’s tourism
I feel like I’ve been saved from drowning. As usual, Paul Krugman says it best:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/the-monster-years/
Adam, I think you’ll find it was 18 million gay and lesbian aborted black babies.
I think you’ll find, young Dylan, the proper wording to that potentially alarmist sentence is: sexually confident gender deliberate African American oxygen-dependent relieved new people.
I just looked up Democrat in the dictionary and it said exactly that!
I already said this on the Elbows forum Matthew, but this really does perfectly encapsulate how we all felt about this. It was less about Obama than it was about *us* coming to a realization that we’d turned into something collectively ugly. It was a frightening epiphany, but a necessary one.
Amen brother! We “heart” you xoxoxo
Thanks. I’m pretty pleased about it. Let’s see how he does, I may go ‘home’ some day.
Many Americans are just realizing that it is important how the world views us, many more could absolutely, utterly give a shit. It is important how we are viewed. I do think this was largely about parties. Believe me, a 1/2 black man named Barack Hussein Obama could only win with a great campaign + tons of money + a winning personality + 8 years of Republican rule that has been totally pathetic. Even Sarah Palin, as sad as that was, garnered as many votes as she lost for McCain. I work with a 57-year old, college educated woman who said just last week she was voting for McCain because he was about family values, Obama was sworn into Congress using the Quran, he and his family refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and, by the way, we found WMD’s in Iraq. With “smart” people this misinformed it is a wonder Obama won. It did restore my faith a bit. Take care.
I mostly agree with all of the above, original post included, though I don’t see Obama turning Catholic at the end of the day.
By the way, anyone watching Fox (hell, if you were) notice that during McCain’s speech, when he tried to encourage his followers to support Obama and then hush down the booing that followed, the camera closed in on Palin, smiling in support of the booers? I’ve never been more proud to vote and see a politician win than when I saw the look on that moose-killing bitch’s face.
I agree with the suggestion that Obama is just a politician, and not any sort of messiah. He will probably in time prove to be just as slippery as the rest of them.
However, given the alternative, I’m happy to accept your average slippery politician as at least that’s a known quanitity.
It’s a relief to be back on familiar territory away from the control of the shadowy, mercenary oil companies and arms dealers that were behind the Bush administration.
“she was voting for McCain because he was about family values” Me too – I once did a woman and both her daughters over the space of a weekend*. The family that lays together…
China, do you really think it’s a bad thing if Palin runs in 2012? I am not sure. I think she is so Special Needs that she might end up forcing way too many people over to the Dems, particularly against a fairly centrist candidate like Obama. Blair shifted the Labour Party so far to the right that the Tories were marginalised for years because the only way to maintain their identity and stay to the right of Blair was to become totally barmy. Cameron has realised that right and left mean nothing, and simply spouts the anodyne platitudes du jour, which may give him the edge over Brown who is an actual, serious politician.
If the Republicans get behind a potential Palin ticket, which many of them may want to, then they run a considerable risk of opening up far too much ground in the centre for Obama to claim, and thus may end up marginalising themselves as well. Then again, this is America we’re talking about.
If only the South had won the civil war… Bye bye, rednecks!
*Warning: may be completely made up for the sake of a weak punchline and to make me seem like much more of a casanova than I really am*.
*But you never know*.
*No, it is bollocks really. Sorry.
You might be right about Palin being so far right that anything’s an alternative, in which case, no – it might not be so bad for her to run in four years. However, this time around I was worried – not because she got the Republican party (or, god forbid, Hillary supporters) excited enough to vote McCain/Palin – but because she was running as lackey to McCain, a perhaps-onetime-gently moderate candidate who stood a reasonable chance to win. Before she came along, anyway.
As for 2012, she’s apparently telling people she *can’t possibly* imagine what she’ll be doing so far into the future as four years, that she’s not yet thinking about the president’s spot. What concerns me about her running is the possibility of a role reversal from this election. So many democrats and independents got fed up with Bush that voter turnout was at a record high, just so the more liberal lot of us could vote against the Republicans. We ate up all that “change, progress, hope” stuff. What if, then, McCain’s disappointed followers and conservative independents realize that their turnout wasn’t enough, so they do an extra good job of getting their fellow conservatives to register and vote in 2012? Would Palin stand a good chance? And hell, now that you mention Blair bringing his party to the right, what if Obama turns out to be a closet conservative or communist by the end of his four years, and Palin uses it against him while running? Anything’s possible in this country.
Much appreciate your comments on the elections over here in the land of the free-with-purchase-of-suv and the home of the brave-when-there’s-an-anonymous-option… at the end of the day, Obama’s still a Capitalist, not a Materialist bone in his body; but since I couldn’t figure out how to reanimate Eugene Debs or magic Billy Bragg into the Oval Orifice, I can at least take some measure of satisfaction that Sarah ‘whut?’ Palin won’t end up assaulting my ears for the next 4 years and Mrs McCain (who looks like Stalin in drag–no offence meant to Mr Stalin,who’d be more to my liking than McCain any day) won’t be assaulting my eyes for the next 4 years. Some justice, i suppose… and I mean that in the sardonic I, Claudius sense. I do like your blog. You’re what the young people I (reluctantly) keep from blowing up a political polling call center here in the pacific northwest would call the ‘diggity-dank’ or maybe it’s the ‘tits’ but I can’t remember: whichever’s most complimentary.
The bollocks! Song, by Toad is the bollocks!
And Cindy McCain, yes she’s a scary one isn’t she, cadaverous old harridan that she is.
Billy Bragg = amazing.
If you like him, listen to the rest of the Anti- artists on their sampler. It’s great.
You can download it OR stream it: http://www.antilabelblog.com/