Celebrate the moment. From then, it's not who Obama is, but what he does

[Ghost Dog]

o Gary Younge
o The Guardian, Monday 19 January 2009

<snip>

Not for the first time, ridiculous claims will be made for this particular historical moment. Some will say this could not happen anywhere else, without acknowledging that putting one in three black men born at the turn of this century in jail could not happen anywhere else either. A black man in the White House seems so unlikely precisely because a black man in prison, dead or impoverished is so much more likely.

Some will claim that Obama's advance shows that anyone in America can make it, regardless of race or class, without acknowledging that, in fact, class fluidity and racial uplift are in fact in retreat, and have been for several years. And yet others will insist that a black face will help promote US interests abroad, without acknowledging that the face of American foreign policy for the last eight years has been Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

Those who hold that America is a land of boundless opportunity and relentless progress are no fans of fact or history. Pepsi will be using the inauguration to launch its "optimism project", with slogans like Yes You Can, and Hope. Ikea has set up an Oval Office in Washington's Union Station featuring "fiscally responsible furnishings" with the message: "Change begins at home."

In all sorts of ways, from pomp and polemic, this will be a particularly American affair.

"All the domestic controversies of the Americans at first appear to a stranger to be incomprehensible or puerile," wrote the 19th-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic book Democracy in America, "and he is at a loss whether to pity a people who take such arrant trifles in good earnest or to envy that happiness which enables a community to discuss them."

...

For those on the left who have sneered at this joy, tomorrow is their last chance to join the rest of the people whose liberation they claim to champion. Anxious to get their disappointment in early and avoid the rush, they have been keen to point out the various ways in which Obama will fail and betray. Their predictions may well prove correct. The best is not the same as adequate. He has been elected to represent the interests of the most powerful country in the world. Those will not be the same interests as those of the powerless.

And yet, in the words of Friedrich Engels: "What childish innocence it is to present one's own impatience as a theoretically convincing argument." Obama was the most progressive, viable candidate possible in these circumstances. A black American, propelled to office by a mass popular campaign pledging income redistribution and an end to torture and the war in Iraq, has defeated the Republicans and is about to replace the most reactionary president in at least a generation.

The global outpouring of support for Obama suggests a constituency for a world free of racism and war, and desperate to shift the direction of global events that is in dire need of leadership and an agenda. Dancing in the streets tomorrow afternoon doesn't mean you can't take to those same streets in protest from Wednesday.

/... http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/19/obama-inauguration

:)