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.