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
