Bizarre channel hopping incident

So just flipping around, as you do, and stumbled on some black and white footage of a large man singing in Russian on one of those old studio variety shows, complete with full fur hat and belted tunic. I recognised the voice immediately, since my parents played his records when I was a kid. Ivan Rebroff was a big thing in popularising Russian folk songs in the 60s and 70s. Of course, he was actually German. When you think of the context, it was all pretty odd. His claim to fame was a voice that spanned four octaves, from deep bass to high counter tenor. I watched him finish the song, one of the show-off pieces that covers the whole voice. And then, very bizarrely, once Rebroff had done his bows in his beaver hat looking like Peter Ustinov's younger brother, the camera cut to a very young Rolf Harris, in massive Buddy Holly glasses, as host of whatever weird variety show it was. 'Thanks Ivan.'

Weird blast from the past on the music for me, and just plain weird otherwise.

Outrage

Now I'm good and mad. Really, really furious. While the euphoria over Obama's victory on Tuesday is still widespread and apparently keeping most of the world on a high, the degree of the challenge he and his administration face domestically couldn't be more starkly illustrated than by this article from the Washington Post highlighting the lack of medical care in the poorest communities. It's beyond outrageous. There are more difficult problems in the world, more serious decisions that need to be made about the wars we are fighting and their horrible cost in lives around the world, but this is indicative of the callousness with so many people have been treated within America while the Republicans played political power games with wealthy health care donors. Why should they care about rural Afghans or refugee Iraqis when they have so little interest in their own?

Over the summer for the past nine years, an organisation called the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps has set up a giant field station for dentistry, eye clinics and other medical care for three days a year in Appalachia, Virginia, trying to treat the thousands of people who drive and sleep all night in their cars to get treatment they and their families cannot otherwise afford. They were set up to work in Africa and South America, but have extended to rural America. Read the article and then watch the videos. The statistics on diabetes are terrifying, while people go to the three day event for cancer screening, unable to get scans in any other way. Think about it: your only chance to afford treatment, screening, dental work, glasses for you or your children is three days a year with thousands of other people. It is upsetting and disgraceful and enraging that in the eight years of the Bush administration, any attempt to provide some kind of state health care has been greeted with the kind of 'socialist' label thrown at Obama in the closing stages of the campaign when he dared to mention that perhaps some redistribution of the spoils in America might be necessary.

In this acceptance speech he said that Americans need to look after each other. The people volunteering in Virginia do the best they can. But it's a disgrace that a single mother can't get her own teeth treated because by making sure that her daughter has her teeth done first and gets the glasses she needs for school means there isn't time to treat her too. Virginia is not in the Third World. But you wouldn't know it. That a little boy of two has potentially life-threatening abcesses in his mouth that would not otherwise have been diagnosed, less than a few hours drive from the Capitol, should shame everyone in power. I am so enraged for these people. They may not have even voted for Obama, but if he has the courage to take on some powerful interests, then he may be their only hope for a decent, better life.

The morning after the night before

So much has been written about the Presidential election all over the net that it hardly seems worth adding my two cents worth, but tonight of all nights I wanted to jot down what it’s meant to have seen the numbers stacking up for Barack Obama last night and finally explode into history with such resounding joy. His speech was worth waiting for and of course it strikes me as both sad and absurd that anyone who heard it could still doubt his sincerity, dedication and ability to be President. But the faces of the crowd at McCain’s concession rally spoke not only of disappointment, but real anger that bodes ill for the enterprise of rescuing the country on which the Democrats have embarked.

Already today the knives are out for their own witchhunt and more worrying, to reform what can only be an even more dangerous and desperate right wing movement. As Joan Walsh on Salon commented on one such outburst, it looks like some kind of Onion spoof, except that it’s real. And here in the UK, I also read a splenetic and vitriolic diatribe by non other than Melanie Phillips in the Spectator which, together with her and others’ inexplicable persistence in believing in a John McCain that never existed, shows how hard it’s going to be to achieve the healing cohesion that Obama set out as one of his aims.

I hope that Obama will gather around him the best and most thoughtful minds in the country and beyond, people who have spent the last 21 months, or four years or eight years questioning, harrying, shouting, persuading, arguing on all the topics on which this election hung – war, healthcare, poverty, education – and that he uses their expertise and experience to help him forge a new blueprint for the country. There are sane, measured, intelligent, compassionate and above all positive voices that need to be heard around and beyond the White House and the new administration.

I should say ‘President Elect Obama’, which sounds clumsy and absurdly formal, but it also sounds good, like a couple beginning to savour the flavour and shape of unfamiliar words - my fiancé, my husband, my wife. Because today feels like the beginning of a real relationship, not a dewy-eyed surrender to some messianic figure, but an engagement between adults, on a level of equality. The kind of relationship between govenors and governed in which the compact can be forged on a basis of mutual respect. I don’t know if President Obama will be the kind of great reformer that some groups and commentators have been hoping for since his candidacy began, or how far he wants to fundamentally change the way we are governed. He could start with how the electorial system itself functions.

But changing the way we are governed was what the Bush regime has been working on with their shameless and shameful recasting of even the basic meaning of what it means to be an American citizen, what the Constitution means and their perpetual redefining to their own dwarfish and cynical vision of what America, that most specific and elastic of ideas, can be allowed to encompass. With Sarah Palin’s transparent lack of understanding of even the first principle of the first amendment of the Constitution, which does not in fact enshrine her or any individual’s right not to be criticised, any of the apparently respected and responsible people who thought she would be good enough to be second line to the Presidency should be ashamed of attempting to perpetrate such a fraud on the public. Because at heart, that is what it came down to. Sarah Palin was, and unfortunately is, the worst epitome of a creed that decries generosity of spirit as socialism and has elevated ignorance to the status of a virtue. These pernicious lies must be denied loudly and often.

Throughout the campaign but particularly in its closing stages, the Republicans, and their unprincipled candidate, proved that they would rather sow vicious seeds of division, hatred and fear than allow the citizenry to make their own decisions based on whatever personal criteria were important to them. The Christian Right have made a mockery of the first word of their own movement with their utter failure to honour the most basic precept of of their religion – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Pretty fundamental stuff, except that the fundamentalists appear to have long since decided that certain unhelpful ideas can be excised from the bedrock of their faith. While we heard plenty about the former domestic terrorist that Obama knew, no mention was made of the other domestic horror-mongers in the South who murdered and terrorised the black popuiation with impunity. It’s nice to know that even Creationists will indulge in the odd deployment of natural selection when it suits.

As I write this the fireworks are bursting in air for Guy Fawkes – that cheerful bastion of iconoclastic bigotry transformed into harmless clouds of drifting cordite. It sounds like peppered gunfire. And meanwhile in Afghanistan today, an estimated 40 people were killed by real bombs in a US strike. Eleven people were killed in bombings in Baghdad and and Gaza is still a byword for misery. And then there is Congo. The role the United States plays or should play has to be discussed openly and with a maturity that recognises that victory, that glib rallying cry, comes in many guises, one of which may be called defeat. But an honourable defeat, whatever that may be, is worth more than continuing despair and new generations of hatred. The pivot on which we all feel ourselves turning since this morning will, I hope, at least allow this discussion to take place. Instead of building on the fear of others and of ourselves, we need to accept that humility is a virtue that has fallen out of the national lexicon. As a nation, we need to reacquaint ourselves with it.

Ever since I saw Obama’s speech, I haven’t been able to get Jesse Jackson out of my head – the pictures of him so deep in the emotional significance of the sight of the first black President Elect have haunted me all day. The tears that overwhelmed Jackson and swamped his joy in that moment were a reminder of the cost in lives great and small that it took to get here. In California my 17 year old god-daughter danced around the house as the result came in because she and her sister now believe that the world is made anew for them. And although I may more cynically feel that history and experience tells us never to entirely let down our guard, I too have to believe today that now there is a chance for what has been so wrong to be put right.