Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. Today he begins a new series on the Obama era.
We know him in these parts; he’s a child of the islands — in his case Hawaii and Indonesia — just as we are; and that means that, like us, he lived his formative years open to the diverse cultural winds of the world, so that today he is sophisticated, cosmopolitan and rootless: as close to being a true citizen of the world as we are.
For islands are the opposite of provincial. To live facing the sea is to develop an uncommon sensitivity to what’s beyond the sea; and just as you and I ‘know’ England or India, Nigeria or Brazil, even if we’ve never been there, so Barack Obama lives with intimations of the variegated, wide world coursing through him; and in that he is emphatically not American.
Think for contrast of the faces of the crowd on that Arizona lawn on election night, as McCain transfixed them with what commentators naively praised as a “fine, magnanimous” concession speech; “The old McCain,” they wrote relievedly.
In fact, it was the cruellest moment. For they were simple, credulous people, these people of the American heartland. All their lives, knowing nothing of the world (how many could find France on a map, say?), they’d lived by simple certitudes: God made the world in seven days, some 5,000 years ago; America was The Greatest Country on Earth (‘USA! USA!’); white people were superior to blacks and other minorities and constituted the ‘real’ America; the touchstone of a man’s manliness was his gun; and so on.
And they’d believed without reservation the McCain-Palin demonization of Barack Obama, the ‘foreigner’ with the Muslim name, the anti-American terrorist-lover, the ‘socialist.’ If the third of that motley triptych of intended slurs made gibberish of the others, such distinctions were beyond them. It was enough that all were sinister elaborations of the mystery and menace of Blackness. They’d believed them.
And here now was McCain, abandoning them to the bogey he and Palin had sown in their dreams, McCain preparing, via his concession speech, a way to show his face back in the US Senate, while they stared at him in terror and bewilderment.
Some booed. Others clapped uncertainly. None knew what to do, really. A demi-devil had just been elected president of their country, and what could that mean except that they had lost their country, these people whose country, however fictive by now, 44 years after the Civil Rights Act, was also the only world they knew?
They had lost their world, had been used and were being discarded; and, watching the shock, bewilderment and terror on those white faces in the Arizona night, you had to feel for them.
What a world away from them was the suave mestizo, Barack Obama, child of both Africa and their heartland, but island-born and bred, and Harvard-educated, and after that a willful, would-be Black Knight, questing forth to earn his political spurs in the dragons’ terrain of Chicago’s south side! How merciless of fate that they, those shocked faces, should have had to come up against… him!
Through both the primaries and the presidential election, this column has referred to him as The Golden Boy, because he made it look so easy. But the ease was deceptive, the impassivity of an arm wrestler whose mien seems so, almost, pensive, that his alarmed supporters start urging him to ‘Fight harder!’ — until they notice that, across the table, his opponent has started to shiver and sweat.
In both cases the end came suddenly, as a collapse. The Clintons woke on the morning of February 20 (yes, as early as that; it was the Wisconsin primary that put Obama over the top, bar only the superdelegates) and saw that by the numbers they had lost, and in panic began to throw the kitchen sink, and that was all.
As for McCain, he never really had a campaign (or, as the late Lloyd Best might have said, the McCain campaign had ‘pre-collapsed’). ‘Hate Obama!’ was all the imprecation it was reduced to; and that message was picked up and amplified by the ignorant Palin, a squeaky-voiced ‘Hate Obama!’ And that was all.
Deep down, Obama must have had a professional’s contempt for them, for the panicky, tilting-at-windmills campaign they waged.
For here’s the thing: beneath the exterior of the Golden Boy is what Joe Biden accurately called pure steel. Consider:
Earlier this year, Obama reneged on his promise to accept public financing for the general. Then, the moment the primaries were over, he went back on his vow to filibuster an upcoming FISA bill; supported the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the District of Columbia’s gun-control law; promised evangelical Christians to expand GW Bush’s Faith-based Initiative; opposed the Supreme Court’s barring of the death penalty for non-capital offences; opined that Nafta was a pretty good thing, after all; and threw a key supporter, retired General Wesley Clark, under the bus for his blunt but unexceptional remark that McCain’s war experience didn’t by itself qualify him to be president.
These flipflops startled and dismayed many observers (including this columnist); and it was only by and by that one understood the clear-eyed determination behind them. In American politics, good guys finish last, and Obama − whose campaign models, strategically, were JFK and Reagan, and whose campaign learnt tactically all there was to learn from Karl Rove − had no intention of joining the ranks of McGovern and Mondale, Dukakis and Gore and Kerry, good guys who either didn’t know or wouldn’t do what it took to win.
Once you knew to look out for it, Obama’s steeliness was everywhere apparent − most recently in the silent way that Biden, once he’d committed his gaffe about Obama being tested, was plucked out of the spotlight and set down to campaign from prepared scripts in the shadows, in places like Jupiter, FL, and Scranton, PA.
By election night, Biden had not yet been forgiven: on stage in Chicago, the new president-elect, having delivered his victory speech, never once bestowed eye contact on his affable VP-to-be.
Some may think that a spoilsport observation. Most people everywhere are still rightly rejoicing in last Tuesday’s transcendent moment, when America awoke at last from its long nightmare, and the world felt as flooded with good as with light. “Walking in the Sunshine,” wrote the Washington Post’s black columnist Eugene Robinson exultantly.
But Obama is already moving fast, from campaigning to governing, and the profoundest remark this columnist has read recently (by a female Daily Kos blogger a week ago) is this:
“If Obama is elected president, the world will calm down.”
Well, hopefully. But it won’t be quick or easy. It’s going to be fascinating to watch. And as he goes about ‘calming’ his still-polarised country, and our Bush-agitated world, one suspects the steel will be rather more apparent beneath the gold.
In any case, joy is wordless; its true language is tears. And wasn’t that something, last Tuesday night, that benediction of tears from so many quarters, as America and the world for once, after such a long time, returned to Camelot and walked in the light?
