Hope of the States (and the rest of the World, too)

Well, we are leaving the old world behind. A new day has dawned. What it will bring is anybody’s guess, but you can be damn sure there’ll be change. That’s the promise Barack Obama made and so far he’s looking very much like a guy who tries to do what he says. But whether he is or does is immaterial because everything is upside down anyway so change is coming, like it or not. The big question is whether we surf on it or sink.

The former American Secretary of State Colin Powell called Obama ‘transformative’. It’s an interesting term. It suggests that the man is himself an agent of change. He probably is, but he has also appeared at what post-modernists sometimes call a hinge of history, a moment where one era becomes another, where an existing order yields to its successor. More a rider on the storm…
A fortnight later, one recollects with more detachment. Many people have told the Hog about how they broke down when the Ohio result was announced, about how they sensed the ice cracking, the bad djinns being banished and the world awaking from a deep and terrible slumber.
For Americans, especially, there was release. After eight dread years they once more have an identity of which they can feel unashamed and a president who seems in tune with their great, troubled but oh-so promising country in the 21st century.
Even if Obama was just a rhetorical wizard it might be enough, so desperate were they for redemption. But he also harnessed the internet and incorporated new cultural and demographic realities.
He’s cool and intelligent as well. He looks like the real deal. Sure, there has been careful attention to the iconography – sometimes even the angles of photography – to evoke 1960s and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in particular. Yet he’s very much of the 21st century…
His victory seems to finally lay the ghosts of 1968 to rest. That’s not to say that the intervening years have been ghost-free. They haven’t. Worse, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan leave Obama with the prospect of many more. Nonetheless, there’s no going back.
Of course, as the Clinton Democrats said, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. And it’s true. Thirty years of greed-fuelled free-market capitalist madness collapsed into chaos in the last months of the US election.
It made the difference.
We are all emerging into the light of a fresh day. There will be a new financial order. It won’t have the triumphalism and extravagant growth of the last thirty years. It will be more hard-working, sober and restrained. Things will be more measured. But it might be more sustainable and that’s a word we’ll have to get very used to.
Last week we had Armistice Day, the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War, a cataclysm in which many millions died, Irish included. It afforded most reasonable people an opportunity to reflect on the human cost of war and to look coldly on present misadventures. We can but hope that the new American regime will advance the world towards peace.
Next week comes Thanksgiving, the biggest holiday in the American calendar. How apt! Many glasses will be raised to the new order in the fervent hope that it can live up to even some of the expectations. Why, they might even do something about climate change.
None of this need frighten us here but we’ll not want for challenges. Many of the people being appointed to Obama’s cabinet are old Clinton team members, people who will be more sympathetic towards the Irish than the pessimists feared. That said, we’re still in the deep dark woods and few of us have much faith that we’ll find our way out (or be led out either) for a while yet.
Well, even though the Eurozone is in recession (following our lead, eh?) and inflation, interest rates, employment and confidence are all falling, things may actually have bottomed out.
A best case scenario sees Obama’s election releasing a wave of energy in the US, maybe even comparable to that which followed JFK’s election in 1960.
Let us watch in faith and hope and hang on for the rising tide…