Scissors and Cake

Well, how about that? At least as far as I can tell from London, everything that the US media is reporting about the collective sigh of relief breathed by most of the rest of the world upon Obama's election seems spot on. There's a large news shop down the street from me that specializes (specialises?) in international papers, and I made a point of passing by yesterday to see what I could about how the international media was reporting the results. Now, I don't read Turkish or Japanese or Hindi. But, like the nytimes.com breaking out the 72-pt headline, I didn't have to: the exuberant typography conveyed enough.

The sense of eubullence will fade soon enough, of course, as it perhaps should. The bulk of the real work that remains to be done is nowhere near as direct, simple and straightforward as electing a president (and as we've certainly seen, a presidential election is none of these things to any meaningful degree), and while the two are obviously related, it matters less who is in office than the policies he enacts and the government he builds. It could all go terribly wrong. But I also think it may have the possibility to go well for once, and that's a change. For the first time sense arriving here, I took no particular delight in being the stealth American yesterday, unrecognizable as a foreigner until I open my mouth. Rather, I wanted to let those flat vowels and dropped t's. More significantly, for the first time in my politically aware life, I feel proud to be an American. I mean, I feel it, and it is a qualitatively different feeling than what I've felt before. This is a sentiment I have heard echoed again and again and again amongst friends and acquantances in the past day or two, and I think it's hard to understate its potential import. You'd have to crunch some numbers to get any true sense of the size and scope of this group (though my gut tells me it extends far beyond my de facto focus group of humanities graduate students), but there is a whole generation of people out there, under thirty, who are for the first time feeling affection, connection, and acute interest in their government.

(But, you know, think about California. Track down Judith Bulter's "Uncritical Exuberance" which makes a number of very good points and is actually quite lucid and making the rounds on various blogs. Think about the fact that total political unity is neither achievable nor desirable, particularly in a democracy. "Change," if we're going to keep harping on that word, is a dialectic, not a light switch, and I would hate to see the left turn around and prima facie shut out more conservative voices as the right did to liberals at the height of the Bush administration. The campaigns of both parties showed American political discoure of pretty much all persuasions to be incredibly fraught, and wounding, and divisive, and downright nasty and I personally think that needs to change before any other kind of meaningful progress can be enacted.)

(So exhilirating, a ride on a high horse.)

Until I and some of my fellow Americans (and also Canadians, and a stray Mancurian or two) got set up with live feeds from the US news networks, we watched the BBC's coverage. Particulary early in the evening, when they were explaining the electoral college again and again, they reported it as though it were a football match: the dossiers of key players, statistics based on past performance, an analysis of the critical moves that needed to win the match. Were I relying on vocal patterns and inflection alone, I would have believed these were sports casters. In closing, a side note: it is impossible to explain the electoral college to anyone without sounding slightly foolish. "But you already count the popular vote!" they will object. And you will be forced to acknowledge that yes in fact we do count the popular vote, but that it doesn't matter because the framers of the constitution way back in 1787 could not count the popular vote.