The Audacity of Hope

There are endings and there are beginnings. The United States, and by extension the world, experienced both this week. The ending, of course, was the final exit of George Dubya Bush, who decamped to his suburban ranch in Texas, smarting in the wake of Obama’s devastating indictment of his legacy so eloquently framed in his inaugural speech. While Bush no doubt wished for nothing less than full imperial powers, he also must feel relieved, finally left alone to indulge his penchant for mountain biking and brush-clearing unencumbered by the unceasing demands of the Oval Office. Like a house full of graduating frat boys, he and his cowboy cabinet left one helluva mess for the rest of us to clean up. The Patriot Act, FISA, torture of prisoners and the suspension of habeus corpus, have left our Constitution tattered and faded, brittled by spending too much time immersed in the fires of ignorance and self-righteousness. Much damage was done and much needs to be undone.

The beginning of the Obama era started on Election Day and really lifted off in Washington on Tuesday. Along with everyone else on the globe I was riveted by the spectacle of an African American with a Muslim father and a strange name, take the oath of office a scant eight years after the World Trade Center collapsed into a hole in the ground, dragging with it our leaders moral compass and our collective sanity. I felt something that I haven’t felt in a long time. Hope. For those of you who have read this blog with any regularity over the last four years, you are well aware that hope is not an emotion I have usually expressed when holding forth about the capability and intent of our leaders. Nevertheless, the sheer size of the paradigm shift which is occurring here is, I think, beyond all of our capacity to fully appreciate.

Let’s face it, the perception of America around the world is of a country full of scoundrels and self-interested, naval-gazing consumers. We pull our heads out of the feeding trough just long enough to turn the channel on the television, pray to Jesus or start a war, then its back to our slop. Yet this very same group of people put a (relatively) young black man in the White House and gave him the keys to the treasury. It defies stereotype. It further defies stereotype that our new president is single-handedly restoring faith in reason and intellectualism. (The fact that concepts like “reason” and “intelligence” have taken on a pejorative air speaks volumes about how far off track we’ve gotten in the last eight years.)

I’m not expecting miracles. Obama is an establishment politician and still beholden to the interests that allowed him to accede to the seat of power. However, in his first two days in office he has suspended the Guantanamo show-trials and issued an executive order to close the prison within a year. If he keeps going in that direction we’ll be in pretty good shape in 100 days, or even eight years.I think Jefferson would be proud of us today.