The Cedar Lounge Revolution

My nerves are made of steel
And my eyes are eagle sharp
And what would freak the average man
Does not affect my heart
Not even if this jinxy jet
Should shake itself apart
’cause I’m the right stuff baby
The right stuff
The right stuff baby
The right stuff
As hard as nails
I never fail
Just watch my trail

Or so sang Bob Calvert of Hawkwind (and later covered in the video above – something bracing for a Thursday morning – by Dave Wyndorf of Monster Magnet), back in the years of zonk.

It’s amazing stuff we’ve seen over the last forty eight hours. So much information and so many soundbites that it’s almost impossible to put any shape on this. Overriding it all has been the weird feeling that I’ve seen Obama’s face before. And it’s taken me ages to work out where.

Something 1960s, or so I thought, and so it was. A quintessential American quality to his face. One that seems closest in look to that of the first wave of astronauts, so richly drawn in Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Right Stuff’ (a fantastic read for those who haven’t). It’s in the close cropped hair, the jaunty smile, even the planes of his face and the way his ears stick out awkwardly. And it’s also in the way he seems very slightly uncomfortable while wearing a jacket, and much less so when he’s in shirt sleeves. All American. Literally.

Still, any one who read Moon Dust: In search of the men who fell to Earth, by Andrew Smith, a fascinating exploration of the personalities of those astronauts which was published some years back, will know the conflicting nature of their psyches. Lives and personalities left adrift after participating in truly historic events. Think of Armstrong retreating from the public eye, Aldrin hardly able to keep out of it. John Glenn transitioning to a lower key version of it by becoming a Democratic politician.

Yet while McCain is the man who flew fighter jets it is Obama who has the almost nonchalant calmness, the sense of logically working everything through (although on Slate the point was made that McCain’s campaign had some of the sheer dogged utilitarianism of a fighter pilot in a plane going down… ‘Try this. Doesn’t work. Try that. Doesn’t work. Try…’.)

And already the tone has changed…

…Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

And tone is important. Let’s see how long he can ride the wave of enthusiasm and good will. Let’s see how long before the wall of advisers closes in around him to stifle any new thinking, any spark of originality.

CNN had some interesting parsing of the polls 55%/43% of whites voted for McCain/Obama. Which is… as good as Bill Clinton. The analysis is that race was less of an element than had been feared. And according to the analyst, Bill Schneider, this was truly a ‘national coalition’…

A Time correspondent suggested that the ‘..arc of American history has moved after the last eight years back to the centre… ‘ from which it had been wrenched by the Bush years.

He also suggested we might see an ‘FDR Depression style job creation programme’ .Bloody hell. Nationalised banks, and now job creation. In the US. In 2008? Now that, that is something.

And while Obama is not a leftist and let’s keep that in mind, he is a man who has a back story of remarkable power. To see the town his father came from in Kenya was to realise that he is most certainly not your usual candidate, or indeed US President. Or as he mentioned, ‘…all those huddled around radios in the forgotten places in the world’. Or a lifetime of working in community organisation in a way which is familiar to those of us who have lived however briefly in the US. It’s leftish, but not left. And I take a certain bit of hope from that, but it also contains problematic aspects.

Because it’s not a million miles from a form of political activism we know in this country. I’m thinking of the approach of one or two of our left-Independent TDs. Theirs is an activism based on community, on people. And that’s both its great power but also, and here’s a word of warning, its great flaw. Because communities change, people leave them. The class mix is shaken up and then shaken up again and social mobility, often low, but never entirely absent can annihilate achievements. Without a clear left programme it can dissipate in muddled projects that drift between the community and the commercial giving benefit to no-one. And as we’ve seen the political expression of same can range from rigid localism, which while giving definition within a community can lose connectivity with those outside it, to something that can come perilously close to opportunism dancing in and out of support for governments. That something akin to this is the political base Obama emerges from is something to consider at some length. It is, in some respects, beyond the labour and union movement, one of the relatively few leftish power centres in US society. But as with many many manifestations of left of centre politics these days it is that leftish aspect which is so problematic. How he governs will tell us which version he is instinctively closest to.

How does this work? How does any of this work? What does it mean? Well, this by Henry Louis Gates Jr. – perhaps – offers us some sort of an answer, however limited and contingent. A ‘those few magical transformative moments in African-American history’

Or as the piece puts it bluntly:

How many of our ancestors have given their lives—how many millions of slaves toiled in the fields in endlessly thankless and mindless labor—before this generation could live to see a black person become president? “How long, Lord?” the spiritual goes; “not long!” is the resounding response.

And more pointedly still:

What would Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois say if they could know what our people had at long last achieved? What would Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman say? What would Dr. King himself say? Would they say that all those lost hours of brutalizing toil and labor leading to spent, half-fulfilled lives, all those humiliations that our ancestors had to suffer through each and every day, all those slights and rebuffs and recriminations, all those rapes and murders, lynchings and assassinations, all those Jim Crow laws and protest marches, those snarling dogs and bone-breaking water hoses, all of those beatings and all of those killings, all of those black collective dreams deferred—that the unbearable pain of all of those tragedies had, in the end, been assuaged at least somewhat through Barack Obama’s election? This certainly doesn’t wipe that bloody slate clean. His victory is not redemption for all of this suffering; rather, it is the symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle, the grand achievement of a great, collective dream.

The word ‘collective’ is central. Remember this is about class as much as race. And if the US remains an imperial power (of a…erm… unique kind) let’s not ignore the possibility for change from within. Slowly. Slowly.

I was reading recently a fine book on the American Revolution entitled Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis, which, despite being written from a rather conservative historical viewpoint does not shirk the reality that that Revolution had at its heart a central stain – the fact of slavery – and that stain endured, and still does, to this day. It is almost possible to see its existence, and that of the fate of Native Americans, and all the political events that came after as the original sin at the heart of the United States. This doesn’t ‘wipe that slate clean’. But it changes, it transforms. It means that what was unthinkable until last night – I remember even last year thinking that the US would not, could not, elect an African American to the Presidency – becomes an actuality.

A nice speech by John McCain, as ever a palpably decent man and so much better than the Republican party as it is now constituted. A man, who had he been allowed to be himself might have represented even more of a challenge to Obama (although can I just point out one really spooky thing, the number of women in the crowd, young and old wearing Sarah Palin glasses)

Let me, conclude on this particular topic by noting the demise of the PUMA’s that curious group of supposedly staunch Clinton supporters who demonstrated their great love for the values she espouses by… voting McCain/Palin. I found them a source of fascination throughout the campaign and wondered at one point was it possible that they might gain some traction. But no, they couldn’t.

They were, and remained, marginal. The concern that they could ’swiftboat’ the Democratic run was allayed over time. But in an age where the internet is an important element of political campaigning the effect of such manifestations is often unknowable. Next time out who is to say we won’t see something more effective.

Anyhow, great was the wailing and gnashing of teeth as they discovered that Pennsylvania was trending Democrat. Their dreams of a supposedly Clinton loving, but McCain voting, fifth column of fired up voters shattered on the rocks of reality – oh, about 2.15 pm Irish time.

And to be honest, stuff them. For any group that across months allowed a critique of Obama to develop that bordered on, no crossed into, the pathological, deserves to eat ashes (and if you don’t believe me I can only direct you to PUMA PAC and check out the threads on the Tuesday).

A plaintive post which posed the question ‘…maybe we aren’t the good guys?’ was met with derision and disbelief by others unable to comprehend the actuality of the McCain/Palin defeat.

But the figure of 52% of the voting public in one of the most hotly contested elections in history is the answer.