Obama, eh? What a let-down.

The way I see it, best get your sense of betrayal in early, so as to ease disappointment later on.
The disappointment will be spectacular. The dizzier the hopes generated, the more dismaying the subsequent plunge into gloom.
Obama has touched the feelings of half the world. The night of his Chicago coronation was a Princess Di moment of global dimension. Many of those chirruping with joy from the sidelines – including the entire Irish media commentariat, it seemed – will feel foolish in a month or three or four. Some of the same people must squirm with embarrassment now at recall of their incontinent gush of flowery grief at the accidental death of Ms. Spencer.
But they never learn. When you have none but nebulous ideas and no clear perspective on history unfolding, ersatz emotion substitutes automatically for rational assessment.
Bill Hicks once explained that any new president is escorted on the day after election into a darkened room where a projector is cranked up to show seven and a half minutes of black-and-white footage shot from a grassy knoll in Dallas in November 1963. “Now you got it,” the spooks pronounce. Meaning you won’t if only you behave presidentially.
Presidents come and presidents go. But the security establishment continues in place before, during, after the interregnum.
The foolish feel-good factor may last a little longer than I anticipate. It was impossible not to be moved, even feel the sting of brimming tears, by the sense of liberation from a dark interlude that greeted the result, all those faces shining with joy, the sight and sound of middle-aged whites jitterbugging with joy in the arms of African-Americans on the streets of once-scary Harlem. My first prediction for the Obamage is that the polls will be showing before Xmas that fewer than half a percent of the electorate voted McCain. Nobody wants to be associated with a loser who would have poured more troops into the Afghan mincer, bunged further billions to the Wall Street banksters, supported execution for crimes less than murder, and ruled out free medical care for the elderly. Nope. What the broad mass of the people came out in support of was a svelte and graceful, cool and cosmo, charismatic guy who promptly made it plain he, too, as president, would do all such things and more.
His first appointment, as chief of staff, was of a fanatical supporter of Zionism. No diminution of US backing and bank-rolling of Israeli thuggery, then.
The point was made with sharpness and humour and more plausibility than I’m capable of conveying at the most brilliant political meeting I’ve attended in an age, in jam-packed Sandino’s on election night, closely in the company of Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture in the Black Panther Party from its inception in 1967 ‘til it dissolved in 1982, and the Party’s historian and archivist, the great and genial Billy X.
“It’s a wonderful night,” said Emory. “Full of hope, and we have to hold on to the hope, so we can push for the things he promised would come when he fails to deliver. Real change, if it comes, will come from below, just like here, just like anywhere.”
Billy X cautions: “Wall Street will still be there. The Israeli lobby will still be there. The chiefs of staff and the CIA, the industrialists, oil barons, the owners of the media, all of them still there, the people with money and their mouthpieces who hate and fear the working class. All Obama has won is the presidency. All the folk who organised for him down in the streets have to stay together, stay strong, if they are to see this through, because the job’s not done, far from done.
“If he seriously tried to make the changes that are needed, they’d kill him. Kill him without even thinking about it. Maybe they will anyway.”
The rest of us should stay real. This bubble will burst.
There is one area of politics where Obama can make a practical difference and probably will – in relation to the right to abortion. He has been a consistent supporter of a woman’s right to choose abortion, and said straight in a television interview a month before the poll: “I believe in Roe v.Wade”– the 1973 Supreme Court finding which authorised federal funding of terminations. He can be counted on, we must assume, to appoint judges – the appointments are entirely in his gift – who will resist “pro-life” pressure to reverse the ruling.
Many might reasonably feel that this, on its own, was a good enough reason for making the effort to vote.
Incidentally, despite the intervention of the hierarchy, and even threats to excommunicate Catholic candidates who refused to issue “pro-life” pledges, 54 percent of voting Catholics plumped for Obama and the right to choose. Same would happen here if the issue were ever honestly placed before the people.

Had an email from the Panthers the day after they departed agog at the entertainment which followed their talks, awed by Poetry Chick Abby Oliviera, who chanted, sang (with Conor Kelly on keyboards) and declaimed a coruscating selection of iambs and trochees, spondees, anapests, even the occasional dactyl, that scorched the imperishable paint off the walls. Bewitching, beguiling, blistering, insurrectionary, the most exciting woman in Ireland.
Wish she’d give over about guardian angels, though.