“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven”
William Wordsworth
So wrote protean romantic William Wordsworth, talking about the early days of the French Revolution. And look where that all led. (That pre-Hitlerian, empire-line demagogue Napoleon with all his evil works, in case you didn’t know).
Self coronation
Well, the euphoria greeting the Obama victory was a little like that. If you believe in the man, and you’re under 25, then you’re more likely to think that hallelujah, the new Messiah has stepped onto the world stage, and possibly also that Americans everywhere can once again be proud of their great country. As if the result of one election wipes the slate clean for all the suffering caused by America’s bogus imperialism, something tolerated and even endorsed for decades by a shockingly self centred and apathetic populace, all driving around in SUVs and tuning into the home shopping channel to order more fitness equipment they’ll never use. But I digress: Obama’s older supporters and admirers (count me in the latter category) are still very upbeat about the election, but that optimism will be tempered by experience, skepticism and cynicism. Or in my case, by pessimism: Think carefully and cast your mind back to a time around eight years ago. Americans were, for a giddy winter in 01/02, all pretty crazy about Bush. And who is George Walker Bush if not the father of the next President. As a talented young actor friend said to me, “It took Bush to get us to Obama”.
And personally, I think Americans love their presidents in an oddly anti-democratic style: Which is to say, it runs against the grain of the essence of democracy to put so much faith in any one person. Think about it music lovers.
It was in that spirit, that on my Facebook status line for November 5, the day of Obama’s landslide victory, I wrote: “Remember, remember, the 5th of November, Gunpowder, Treason & Plot”. It was my ‘virtual commemoration’ of Guy Fawkes Day: An anniversary celebrated in New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s when I grew up. It was and always will be my favourite holiday; for its pyrotechnic qualities obviously, and for its almost complete historical irrelevance to the South Pacific. Fawkes was of course a radical Catholic who was caught trying to blow up the British House of Parliament in 1605. He was burned at the stake for his trouble, and the festival observes this with an effigy burned on a bonfire, and as many fireworks as Mr. Trevor Young could afford on his printer’s salary back in 1969.
That icon of cool, my Dad.
To bring us back to Mr. Obama, some of my best friends are American, and looking at that Guy Fawkes Facebook status line, I can imagine some of them thinking “he just doesn’t get it”, and they’re probably right, up to a point. But even if I were a ‘Norteamericano’ I don’t know how much a change in the administration would mean to me. Thinking it over, I suppose I’d probably be about as excited as Charles Bukowski might have been when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected. “Yeah, great, guy: seems really idealistic and focused, but what’s he going to do help out hard drinking, unsuccessful writers?” With Obama, there’s a lot of talk about reaching out to help hardworking nurses with husbands in the army and a hockey team of kids to support, but I don’t hear much about my constituency. Insolvent, obscure and with prodigious appetites to buttress: When is someone going to do something for us?
