Time to Laugh and Cry, Scream and Sigh - It's Four Years of an Obama Presidency Ahead!
November 8th 2008 07:28
Category: No Category
Less than four days ago, the world United States of America elected Barack Obama to be the next president, and I have taken the time to feel ecstatic about it... I've come to expect my sense of wild contentment with the world to grow, and while the right to same sex marriage has been taken away in California, I am still wishing that I was lucky enough to live there more permanently.
Reactions from around the world have been interesting to watch, and the latest one to come to my attention has taken the form of a Facebook group:
Palin in 2012! Because the Apocalypse isn't going to start itself!
This is the kind of nervous joke that indicates that these people can’t leave their petrified envisioning of Sarah Palin as President behind as yet... well, everyone suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder might begin to wave goodbye to their anxieties by taking in what the Russian newspaper, Pravda, had to say:
Eight years of hell are over!
It's worth considering: the widely discredited Bush administration is only a few weeks from dissolve. I'm going to pay close attention to every development therein, so that I can truly appreciate what's to come. We should all be placed in a position to breathe a bit easier, look forward to a sharp spike in tolerance towards ambiguity in the mass media, a revival in the arts and sciences alike, and an inclination towards more creative thinking in general, from January 20, 2009 onwards...
Someone who has responded to Barack’s victory in an equally impassioned way is Viggo Mortensen, who is interested in making sure the extent of the injustices that the American people and the world has had to witness are given proper context. Here’s his direct message to Mr Obama, posted on his excellent website, www.percevalpress.com:
Dear President-Elect Obama,
Please do all that you honestly can to bring to justice Dick Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo, William Haynes, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell, George Tennet, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzalez, Karl Rove, and numerous other members of the Bush administration since the start of 2001 who have either been directly responsible for or complicit in the numerous acts of treason, human rights violations and other crimes in the United States of America and abroad, including in but not limited to Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Colombia, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. There have been many violations of domestic and international law by the Bush/ Cheney regime, but the use of torture by this administration, in blatant disregard of long-accepted international and U.S. standards, is on its own enough to see many U.S. officials prosecuted and jailed. The energetic promotion and white-washing of torture by U.S. interrogators are not only reprehensible and damaging to the reputation of the United States, but have undoubtedly placed all of its citizens - military as well as civilian- in increased danger from reprisals and acts of terrorism for years to come. The war crimes and clearly-impeachable misconduct of the Bush/Cheney administrations cannot go unprosecuted and unpunished if citizens of the United States of America are to move forward with relatively clear consciences and the hoped for restoration of their country's relatively good standing in the community of nations. This is about moral responsibility, common decency, and historical legacy. Thank you in advance, Mr. Obama.
If you have been to PostmodernCritic.com over the last few months, you would have noticed that I had a picture of Barack as my wallpaper up till today. It's not that I am an ardent supporter (his obsession with 'unifying' disturbs me, for one), but it wasn't difficult to see which of the two candidates would provide radicals a more palatable political standard to subvert, transform and renegotiate. There were significant doubts from many spectators that Obama could pull it off, and I decided that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have gotten involved in the process of introducing a fresh face to the White House. There were a few times I was eager to change my background to something more personally appealing, but I held on to the image (remembering that I craved 'Change' a little more than 'change' at the moment), cultivated my interest in alerting all the visitors to my blog (I have over 100 per day, and there must be some radical progressives who come back periodically
) who are disillusioned with American politics that I cared about, and was even inspired by, the race to the White House. I am happy to have supported this unique politician in my own way, from what feels like the backwaters of the West (Sydney, Australia), mainly by way of online campaigning and the occasional word of mouth.
Many things about the election results and the discourse around them will be memorable to me many years from now, but it was an email I received on Facebook that might have captured my imagination the most:
The 16 members of the Causes team want to thank all of you for donating your status and participating in our election day rally on Facebook. In just under 5 days, 1,745,754 people sent out 4,919,071 status messages.
No matter your political persuasion, November 4th was a historic day. This is particularly true for young people. We at Causes are all in our twenties, and we are very proud that our generation overcame many doubters and turned out to vote in unprecedented numbers.
But our generation did not just vote, we built innovative tools that changed how the election was conducted, and the Election Rally was just one of many successful initiatives. Our goal was to make sure as many people in our generation voted as possible. We did not think it would be enough just to remind people, you would have had to have been living in a cave to not know it was election day. We wanted to use the unique social nature of Facebook to create peer pressure to let everyone know that all of their friends wanted them to vote.
To this end, the focus of the initiative was the “Midnight Rally,” which people could sign up for starting the evening of October 30th. Just after midnight the night before the election, 932,846 people's status messages all changed at the same time. This rippled across Facebook and Feed, leading millions of the friends of the participants to wake up the morning of election day with multiple friends reminding them to go vote. This was perhaps the largest simultaneous action in internet history. We can never know its true effect, but we like to think it made a significant difference.
I don't intend to delete this email.
I will also never forget the relief, disbelief, excitement and anticipation at Barack, Michelle and their daughters entering the stage set up in Grant Park, so cool, confident and poised. I'll never forget the dress Michelle wore, a dramatic design in which red faded into black, or the way Barack's luscious face caught the light, the way the pixels on the screen trembled and rearranged before me - it was beautiful. In that moment of proud containment and humble acceptance, he was captivating. And that was before he started to speak. I could have listened to him talk for much longer than he did, even though I felt I had trouble tuning into what I felt was the emotional intensity of the moment. I was impressed that he was interested in celebrating minority groups such as gays, Hispanics and disabled people as much as African-Americans that night, and even more impressed by the determination he had in describing his commitment to the States. After his speech was over I wept on and off for about a day, celebrating different aspects of my emotional involvement as they came.
Even if Mr Obama turns out to be half as misguided as President Bush (boy, were those standards low or what?), he will still have made such important and much-needed contributions to America's political, cultural and social landscapes as to be regarded as an iconoclaustic figure. I will never see him as a transformational soul, but I look forward to analysing his contribution to public discourse, and critiquing him enthusiastically, respectfully, over time, in good times and in bad. This commitment is my choice, and I look forward to reinventing it in the future.
To everybody who supported the somewhat inspirational Obama Jr, you ought to congratulate yourselves! You have made all the difference - and some of you may not even have been American citizens! I will bask in the splendour of this success this week (mine, and yours), refresh my sense of love for the world, my interest in forgiving but not forgetting the darkness I sometimes sought in response to the brutality of Bush's influence, and my pure, unbridled optimism for the future, because I sincerely believe that there is nothing we can't do together…
The next big change in the works? Re-introducing same-sex marriage to the world (starting with California).
Hib, An to Postmodernisme (that's Love in Arabic, Peace in Vietnamese and Postmodernism in Danish - the 'to' is 'and' in Japanese),
Epiphanie
[Edit: I just found out today (Dec 12th, 2008) that 'an' actually means security, and 'hoŕ běnh' was the Vietnamese word for peace I was looking for! Sorry for the misinformation, folks!]
Oh yes, yes... Yes We DID!
Reactions from around the world have been interesting to watch, and the latest one to come to my attention has taken the form of a Facebook group:
Palin in 2012! Because the Apocalypse isn't going to start itself!
This is the kind of nervous joke that indicates that these people can’t leave their petrified envisioning of Sarah Palin as President behind as yet... well, everyone suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder might begin to wave goodbye to their anxieties by taking in what the Russian newspaper, Pravda, had to say:
Eight years of hell are over!
It's worth considering: the widely discredited Bush administration is only a few weeks from dissolve. I'm going to pay close attention to every development therein, so that I can truly appreciate what's to come. We should all be placed in a position to breathe a bit easier, look forward to a sharp spike in tolerance towards ambiguity in the mass media, a revival in the arts and sciences alike, and an inclination towards more creative thinking in general, from January 20, 2009 onwards...
Someone who has responded to Barack’s victory in an equally impassioned way is Viggo Mortensen, who is interested in making sure the extent of the injustices that the American people and the world has had to witness are given proper context. Here’s his direct message to Mr Obama, posted on his excellent website, www.percevalpress.com:
Dear President-Elect Obama,
Please do all that you honestly can to bring to justice Dick Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo, William Haynes, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell, George Tennet, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzalez, Karl Rove, and numerous other members of the Bush administration since the start of 2001 who have either been directly responsible for or complicit in the numerous acts of treason, human rights violations and other crimes in the United States of America and abroad, including in but not limited to Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Colombia, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. There have been many violations of domestic and international law by the Bush/ Cheney regime, but the use of torture by this administration, in blatant disregard of long-accepted international and U.S. standards, is on its own enough to see many U.S. officials prosecuted and jailed. The energetic promotion and white-washing of torture by U.S. interrogators are not only reprehensible and damaging to the reputation of the United States, but have undoubtedly placed all of its citizens - military as well as civilian- in increased danger from reprisals and acts of terrorism for years to come. The war crimes and clearly-impeachable misconduct of the Bush/Cheney administrations cannot go unprosecuted and unpunished if citizens of the United States of America are to move forward with relatively clear consciences and the hoped for restoration of their country's relatively good standing in the community of nations. This is about moral responsibility, common decency, and historical legacy. Thank you in advance, Mr. Obama.
If you have been to PostmodernCritic.com over the last few months, you would have noticed that I had a picture of Barack as my wallpaper up till today. It's not that I am an ardent supporter (his obsession with 'unifying' disturbs me, for one), but it wasn't difficult to see which of the two candidates would provide radicals a more palatable political standard to subvert, transform and renegotiate. There were significant doubts from many spectators that Obama could pull it off, and I decided that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have gotten involved in the process of introducing a fresh face to the White House. There were a few times I was eager to change my background to something more personally appealing, but I held on to the image (remembering that I craved 'Change' a little more than 'change' at the moment), cultivated my interest in alerting all the visitors to my blog (I have over 100 per day, and there must be some radical progressives who come back periodically
) who are disillusioned with American politics that I cared about, and was even inspired by, the race to the White House. I am happy to have supported this unique politician in my own way, from what feels like the backwaters of the West (Sydney, Australia), mainly by way of online campaigning and the occasional word of mouth. Many things about the election results and the discourse around them will be memorable to me many years from now, but it was an email I received on Facebook that might have captured my imagination the most:
The 16 members of the Causes team want to thank all of you for donating your status and participating in our election day rally on Facebook. In just under 5 days, 1,745,754 people sent out 4,919,071 status messages.
No matter your political persuasion, November 4th was a historic day. This is particularly true for young people. We at Causes are all in our twenties, and we are very proud that our generation overcame many doubters and turned out to vote in unprecedented numbers.
But our generation did not just vote, we built innovative tools that changed how the election was conducted, and the Election Rally was just one of many successful initiatives. Our goal was to make sure as many people in our generation voted as possible. We did not think it would be enough just to remind people, you would have had to have been living in a cave to not know it was election day. We wanted to use the unique social nature of Facebook to create peer pressure to let everyone know that all of their friends wanted them to vote.
To this end, the focus of the initiative was the “Midnight Rally,” which people could sign up for starting the evening of October 30th. Just after midnight the night before the election, 932,846 people's status messages all changed at the same time. This rippled across Facebook and Feed, leading millions of the friends of the participants to wake up the morning of election day with multiple friends reminding them to go vote. This was perhaps the largest simultaneous action in internet history. We can never know its true effect, but we like to think it made a significant difference.
I don't intend to delete this email.
I will also never forget the relief, disbelief, excitement and anticipation at Barack, Michelle and their daughters entering the stage set up in Grant Park, so cool, confident and poised. I'll never forget the dress Michelle wore, a dramatic design in which red faded into black, or the way Barack's luscious face caught the light, the way the pixels on the screen trembled and rearranged before me - it was beautiful. In that moment of proud containment and humble acceptance, he was captivating. And that was before he started to speak. I could have listened to him talk for much longer than he did, even though I felt I had trouble tuning into what I felt was the emotional intensity of the moment. I was impressed that he was interested in celebrating minority groups such as gays, Hispanics and disabled people as much as African-Americans that night, and even more impressed by the determination he had in describing his commitment to the States. After his speech was over I wept on and off for about a day, celebrating different aspects of my emotional involvement as they came.
Even if Mr Obama turns out to be half as misguided as President Bush (boy, were those standards low or what?), he will still have made such important and much-needed contributions to America's political, cultural and social landscapes as to be regarded as an iconoclaustic figure. I will never see him as a transformational soul, but I look forward to analysing his contribution to public discourse, and critiquing him enthusiastically, respectfully, over time, in good times and in bad. This commitment is my choice, and I look forward to reinventing it in the future.
To everybody who supported the somewhat inspirational Obama Jr, you ought to congratulate yourselves! You have made all the difference - and some of you may not even have been American citizens! I will bask in the splendour of this success this week (mine, and yours), refresh my sense of love for the world, my interest in forgiving but not forgetting the darkness I sometimes sought in response to the brutality of Bush's influence, and my pure, unbridled optimism for the future, because I sincerely believe that there is nothing we can't do together…
The next big change in the works? Re-introducing same-sex marriage to the world (starting with California).
Hib, An to Postmodernisme (that's Love in Arabic, Peace in Vietnamese and Postmodernism in Danish - the 'to' is 'and' in Japanese),
Epiphanie
[Edit: I just found out today (Dec 12th, 2008) that 'an' actually means security, and 'hoŕ běnh' was the Vietnamese word for peace I was looking for! Sorry for the misinformation, folks!]
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Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
Comment by Postmodern Critic
Postmodern Critic
Daily Inspirations
Relativity Watch
Padsoc
I didn't even consider that I was not immune to his charms until I dreamt of him in an intimate embrace with Viggo, seeking acceptance... but enough about my unconventional fantasy life, haha... I guess it really doesn't hurt to have a crush on someone I'm going to see on the news all the time!
Anyway, I was thinking of all the kids of Malia and Sasha's generation, and how they might be inspired by seeing their black contemporaries assume the most powerful position in the country. Wooooooooooooooo!
I can't imagine what was going through B~O's mind either... how he negotiates between his sense of personal achievement and the bigger picture of him being the first African-American President-Elect... what a unique position to be in!
He is the new face of America for all the people who have barely seen a black person before! He is the new face of America for closeted white supremacists who will now see his face on TV every single day for the next four years - they won't be able to stop hearing about him, and eventually they will be caught unaware by the wisdom, eloquence and intelligence of his personality, and have multiple revelations which will create big ripples on the face of America (and the world).
On the other side of the spectrum, he has by now become a role model for just about every African-American, and a great many non-whites (hey, he's a role model for me too - I have had other dreams in which he was a guide of mine). People who never even considered entering politics before will end up future leaders, because his presence suggested to them to think outside the box of what was previously constituted as a realistic achievement for minority groups. The most common 'keep you in your place' line will be 'Who do you think you are, Obama?' Lol.
In the continents where black people are a very small minority (Europe, Asia, South America), and you don't have to look far to encounter racism, people are now standing up and taking note. This is the beginning of a steep learning curve for the entire world... it may be long overdue, but it's here. Such is the beauty of the present. And among those of us who are already open-minded, this updating of the world scene only furiously sparks our imagination into gear and reinvents the signs and symbols which we negotiate in order to inform our conceptual landscapes. 'Diversity' just got an update. 'Acceptance' has new meaning. 'Love' is being reinvented. 'Power' has startling new connotations. And 'Change' (which will mean something entirely different to Mr Barack Obama at the end of his term than it does to him now) is going to be increasingly celebrated as a potent conceptual orientation.
But enough generalisations, for this is about me and you. How do you think his election will affect you?
Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
The main thing is that I want to live in a world that is progressing. I don't think Obama himself is all that progressive but he is certainly a step in that direction. It's not that Obama will bring change to the world, it's that his election shows that the change is already under way.
Comment by Morgan Bell
Deep Pencil
Current Business News
Movie Train
Artist Quirk
i hope Obama prioritises education and health (including sex and sexuality in both categories) . . . ban homeschooling and Fox News and confiscate all the weapons . . . ok im getting a bit out of control, but you get the general direction
Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
Comment by Morgan Bell
Deep Pencil
Current Business News
Movie Train
Artist Quirk
i guess if you were the head of a radical mormon suicide cult right now you would be shitting yourself!
Comment by Postmodern Critic
Postmodern Critic
Daily Inspirations
Relativity Watch
Padsoc
I'm sure that you will get your wish, if his willingness to talk to people representing what Bush dubbed 'the axis of evil' is anything to go by. Suddenly speculating over a war with Iran seems nice and outlandish.
I did have qualms about associating Obama so strongly with Postmodern Critic, because I find much about his public persona that upholds the status quo. But hey, I'm still basking... I have four years to get stuck into him, and right now I'm still a little amazed that he looks so different from every other President of the USA has ever had, or that he has added his name - B-A-R-A-C-K O-B-A-M-A - to that list! What a week...
I hope to write about the idea of change, and what it means to me, as soon as I can... I found your analysis of the historical moment very powerful, and I'll be over there to comment soon...
Cya,
Epiphanie
Comment by Postmodern Critic
Postmodern Critic
Daily Inspirations
Relativity Watch
Padsoc
Thanks, I think I'll keep this one for a while.
I am with you on education and health, and I hope, mid-way through his term, Obama realises that Americans *are* ready for same-sex marriage in all states and passes a nation-wide law. (To be fair, I'm not waiting with baited breath.)
Have you seen Nas' Sly Fox video? I'm 'praying' the so-called news program dies the quick, silent death it deserves. I can't believe that it's part of Australia's cable news line-up, next to CNN and BBC.
Comment by Cibbuano
20/20 Filmsight
Science News
Hunt Famous
Orble Post of the Day
Fat Cult
Techbreak
That's crazy - she was born in 1916... imagine how different things were!
With regards to the ban on same-sex marriage, Keith Olbermann gave a passionate comment on the immorality of banning marriage to same sex couples. He was almost brought to tears, not because he knew people that it would effect, but because of the outlandish inhumanity of it all.
He pointed out that as late as the 60s, 13 states had laws making it illegal for interracial marriages to occur. How can we justify this?
Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
Comment by Mrs M
Mum's Word
I think the whole world sighed with relief on 4 November.
Here's an article I think you might like.
SMH LINK
Love & stuff
Mrs M
Comment by Postmodern Critic
Postmodern Critic
Daily Inspirations
Relativity Watch
Padsoc
Dear Mrs M, Thank you so, so much for that article, it's exactly the kind of text I was hoping to find in response to this unique and spectacularly encouraging election! Thank you once again for the link
Dear Ruby and Cibby,
The relationship between the legalisation of interracial marriage and now same-sex marriage is worth examining in plenty of detail, however I don't feel like I dedicate my time to that at the moment. Alt_ed wrote a brill post on exactly this topic about the two a few months ago, but I can't find it atm.
Here is the Keith Olbermann clip, which moved me as well:
I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to respond, I've just been really busy and a bit scattered.
I just posted on Jon Stewart taking up his full-fledged support for same-sex marriage with Mike Huckabee here, on PADSOC.