Change I Can Believe In
Brodey Bend, Arkansas River
 

October 30, 2008

As the Quadrennial Clearing-house Sweepstakes near the day of the Great American Raffle, I am certainly ready for a change that I can hardly believe is coming to pass but which has now passed the knick point, overtopped the levee, bum-rushed the soup kitchen, and even managed to get the thirteenth monkey in a family way.  A few days ago I bought a new laptop, and as I nervously migrate my content from my old one to the new one, I am a little edgy about the change from Windows XP to Vista.  It is a cloudy day to be leaving XP’s docile, grassy shore to venture across choppy waters to a hostile and strange landscape.  Rather than change I can believe in, it feels like change that I cannot avoid, and I tremble and quaver at the metaphor’s power.

Still, in this dark night of the American soul, any change is for the better.  I have never voted for a presidential winner but am sure that my candidate, Barack Obama, is going to walk away with this year’s Oscar for best illusion.  As late as August I was doubtful, leery that the wily Republicans would successfully smear his candidacy and that America was still too racist to elect the right man.

I still think that I am not far wrong, but his opponent, the Methuselan senator from Arizona with the mean-looking, richer-than-Midas, Paris-Hilton-plus-forty-like trophy wife, has been so nasty, so ill-tempered, so mendacious, so mean-spirited, so contrarian, so self-defeating, so clueless, so ineffectually Machiavellian, and so smitten by the fey winds of fortune as to even the playing field in this center-right nation, even despite the pockets of racism and intolerance that are more widespread and pervasive than any of us presumably post-racial types like to admit.

I am reminded of an old partner of mine, who would observe that my writing about something I want to happen would be a sure-fire way to jinx the outcome.  But superstition has no more place in contemporary America and the planetary present than the neoconservatives have in the modern Mesopotamia nor than do the cultural conservatives have in Greenwich Village.

Since the year 2000 I have enjoyed a comfortable exile in Costa Rica, returning cautiously to the United States to occasionally visit and vote, always holding my breath at the immigration desk, forever watching its existential upheavals from afar and bemoaning the results of the abominations of its leadership inflicted upon the under-privileged in America, entire societies abroad, and the cognoscenti everywhere.

I believe, however, that in the absence of bad, we are unable to recognize and celebrate good, and that without the execrable example of George W. Bush and his incurious and immoral faith-based certainty, that without his cavalcade of congressional toadies or the mantle of darkness entrenched in the vice-president’s office that like a black hole sucks even light toward its extinction at his gravitational center, that without the patsies and acolytes and sycophants with which he has surrounded himself in his cabinet and office, that without all that batch of cowards, opportunists, and silk-tied privateers that we would not be ready for real change and would be inviting more of the same, whether in the form of the wizened wannabe-maverick McCain and his intellectually flat-lined, ethically-challenged, morally ambivalent, and celestially-inspired Palin-drone running mate or in the form of the erstwhile president-designate, Hillary Clinton, who betrayed her very nature in a spread of raptor’s wings across the fertile crescent, just another of the many bloody-kneed playground boys playing soldier and tousling in the shifting sands of serendipitous destiny.

There is something about karmic balance that makes it impossible for any outcome other than the unfathomable:  the election in this center-right, still-a-little-racist nation, of America’s most liberal senator and black man.  I have George W. Bush, in part, to thank for this momentous historical event.  And the nation has George W. Bush to thank, in part, for a national transformation that will be an inescapable consequence of Tuesday’s election.  Nothing could be more post-racial than a black president in the USA!  Nothing could be more emblematic of a powerful nation’s restored virility than a man as young as me in its highest office.  Nothing could better reflect America’s reining in of reactive over-reach to our enemy's 911 success than our electoral elevation of so improbable a candidate.

I certainly do believe and revel in the belief and now consider it practically cast in stone.  If it is change I can believe in it is also the hope that barely dared whisper its own name.  Yet, it is obvious and in the fading echoing footfalls of America’s most calamitous presidency ever, it could be no other way in a rational world in which hope has not yet been dispatched to the gallows nor waterboarded into meek obeisance unto the braying forces of fear and darkness.

The ascension of Barack Obama to our nation’s presidency shows that we are not a bunch of dumb-ass sheep, after all, unlike so many of us have come to fear.

To all of us comprising the electorate, all of us without exception on both sides of the coin and brandishing all manner of intent and purpose, let us now celebrate the victorious:  let us now praise one another!

This is an editorial.  This is only an editorial.  Had this been an actual fact you would have been advised to withdraw to your nearest fact shelter to await further instructions.  We repeat.  This is only an editorial.  If you wish to add your own two cents to this debate, you may mail me here.

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