Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the second in his new series on the Obama era.
On November 4, a white Oregon businessman was travelling in In-donesia, from Borneo to Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok. Everywhere he went, he reported, someone noticed his Obama ’08 button and called out, ‘Obama!’
The hotel desk clerk gave him the thumbs-up; the taxi driver refused to take his money; the airline counter clerk waived his overweight baggage fee. A little Asian girl asked him if he wanted Obama to win, because she and her whole family did. The little girl’s father came over. He said that his whole community was praying for Obama, and added, “We are praying for all of the American people too.” Then he said, “All of us, together… do you understand?” “All of us together,” the Oregon businessman said. They parted smiling.
On the plane, the stewardess told the pilot, who stood up in the cockpit to give him a thumbs up. The immigration official barely looked at his passport while quizzing him about how he thought the election was going. In a cafeteria, all the counter staff came over to say kind words to him. Learning he had already voted by absentee ballot, the waiter who gave him his chit “took my hand and thanked me for voting for Mr Obama. There were actual tears in his eyes.”
It’s not a little thing, the election of Barack Obama. One has a sense that he’s about to become, not just the 44th President of the United States but, by acclamation, the first Leader of the World. It’s a mind-boggling thought, and one that needs exploring.
How, why did this happen? How will it manifest itself? How much of it is due to Obama himself, and how much to an intimation of the evil which, between them, he and the American people, late in the day, acted to forestall?
Given that he is about to become (indeed, perhaps already is) the most powerful human being in history, who is this “skinny but tough” (his own self-description) mixed-race kid from Hawaii, this son of an imperious African intellectual and a world-wandering white idealist from Kansas, this 47-year-old mestizo whose last white mother-figure passed away the day before his election, leaving him, in the moment of his apotheosis, with no shade tree in his life’s field anymore, but having instead to be the shade tree now for his own small daughters − as well as, by acclamation, for billions of men, women and children everywhere?
(Someone said, “She lived for him, and she died for him,” meaning that, with her death, his grandmother gave him to the world.)
Who is this man that a shaken, disarrayed world opted to invest its last, best hope in? And how will he govern, especially now that eight years of unrestrained plutocratic venality have left the world’s sole superpower so broken as to be all but irreparable?
They are questions we shall have to come to. But first to give praise where praise is due.
The liberation, in the very depths of their beings, which African-Americans experienced as, over ten long months, Obama’s campaign progressed inexorably towards victory, is too immense a subject for this column; only recall, eg, Oprah’s exhausted tears.
But the daunting “psychological leap” (Roger Cohen, NYT) which so many white Americans made in voting to put the Obamas in the White House should not be underestimated. What happened was, partly, that they sensed the horror blooming at their backs; looked at the chasm of the unknown before them; and leapt!
Thus Anna Quindlen, writing in Newsweek of why she wept on election night: “Perhaps it was because this man seems so young and vigorous in a nation that seems old and tired. Perhaps it is because he promises change and hope, and both are so badly needed… But I suspect that, like many others, I wept for myself, too, because I felt I was part of a country that was living its principles. Despite all our prejudices, seen and hidden, millions of citizens managed, in the words of Dr King, to judge Barack Obama by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. There were many reasons to elect him president, but this was one collateral gift: to be able to watch America look an old evil in the eye and to say, no more. We are better than that.”
And thus Frank Rich (NYT, last Sunday):
“On the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy. Our nation was still in the same ditch it had been the day before, but the atmosphere was giddy. We felt good not only because we had breached a racial barrier as old as the Republic. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place − in cities all over America.
“For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid − easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign… [But] what we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration dragged on: That’s not who we are. This was the week that [Americans] reclaimed their country.”
Lastly, let us celebrate the African-Americans of North Carolina, though by the time the news arrived that they’d snatched that blood-red state for Obama he’d already won. African-Americans had helped put Obama over the top in important states like Indiana, Virginia and Florida. They tried in Georgia, too, but their numbers there made it an impossible climb. The crux was North Carolina, a state where a study of the demographics showed that virtually every last striking African-American would have to come out to vote (along with a substantial minority of whites) for Obama to win there; and they did! (One had the image of some infirm old black man being stretcher-borne five miles through fields to touch his faltering finger to ‘Obama.’) It was in North Carolina that one felt the all-in, last-gasp, history-abolishing effort of African-Americans acting as one to take the Golden Boy over the lip of victory: a promethean effort more intimate than utilitarian in the end, since by then it wasn’t needed.
Now, this writer knows cynics who claim that with Obama’s election nothing is going to change; that ‘The System’ will soon tame the 44th President, or even that Obama was only ever ‘ambitious’ and that his policies will confirm that drear claim.
This new column-series, slugged ‘In the Obama Era’, devolves from the contrary view. To this columnist, the Obama adventure − meaning not just the man but the world’s investment in him − is only just beginning; and it will be an education and an adventure to see how − so terrifically embattled! − he goes.
