It's such a perfect day

by: Edward Keenan

November 05, 2008 10:30 AM

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It’s Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, and I feel — no, I am overwhelmed by — hope.

It’s not blind optimism. My eyes are wide open and I expect a fair share of frustration and disappointment to come in due time. But today is a perfect day, this moment a definitive turning of the page, so full of promise and beauty and pure potential that I cannot restrain the absolute joy, and I do not want to.

Between the time I wrote that last sentence and the time I’m writing this one, I went into the bedroom to check on my four-day-old daughter, Irene — who probably bears some of the blame (or credit) for putting me in such a sentimental state of mind. People become parents every day, and yet something about the first days of my daughter’s life make me feel like this moment is unreal, this joy undeserved and too good to be true. So I go into the bedroom and check on her and, sure enough, she’s still there, sleeping peacefully beside her mother. It really is a perfect day.

And between the time I’m writing this and the time you’ll read it, Barack Obama will be elected president of the United States. That, too, seems unreal and too good to be true. Stack up the odds: he’s black and under 50 years old, his father was an immigrant and he lived part of his childhood in Indonesia and he’s not just intelligent but gives speeches that seem to assume his audience is intelligent too. All that and his middle name is Hussein and his last name rhymes with Osama.

Four years ago, when I saw Obama giving the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention on the television in my living room, I called my wife Rebecca in from the kitchen and said, “Come see this! I’m looking at the first black president of the United States!” Hope stirred in me then, but I did not even begin to think that the task of turning that state senator into this president could be accomplished in four years. He was too young and the US was too racist, and he’d need to empty his rhetoric of anything approaching humanity so as not to offend the imbeciles.

But Obama himself based his campaign on a gamble that, after two terms of fear-mongering, criminal foreign policy and the selling off of the American Dream to robber baron dice players in the finance sector, the United States would be ready to leave childish things behind and let a grown-up run things. And it turned out he was right and everyone else was wrong. New daughter or no, that’s making me giddy too.

Barack Obama is a transformative symbol for the United States, in what his election says to the country itself and to what it says to the outside world: as racist as the United States may be, with its legacy of slavery and segregation, it has just elected a black man — a biracial man, in fact — president.

Obama is a citizen of the world, educated as a child abroad, the son by birth of a Kenyan immigrant and by upbringing of a single mother. He’s a man who has mentioned gay rights frequently, unprompted, and often in front of hostile audiences. He is a scholar and a constitutional law professor and a writer of books and a speaker of magical, arena-lifting speeches.

Obama calls himself a “hopemonger,” and in its implied opposition to the pervasive fearmongering of recent years, that self-definition alone should stir the expectations of the outside world. The Bush administration has defined itself by the spread of terror within its own borders and without, and by a casual disregard for international law and its own constitution. Obama has promised diplomacy and respect for human rights, and already the world is safer because of his election.

For those of us who have come to equate American patriotism with mindless and violent xenophobia, the most astonishing thing about Obama’s campaign has been how much of it is based on patriotism. Obama’s big gamble has been to bet that America would, given the chance, attempt to live up to the words of its founders, to the proposition that all men are created equal and that they are endowed with fundamental rights.

From his “Yes, we can change” speech through his unprecedented movement of volunteers and legions of donors, he has displayed an optimistic faith in the goodness and reason of the American people. Taking an image of America as a shining beacon of light — mythologized in Hollywood gloss to imperial effect by Ronald Reagan and cynically manipulated in the cheap and destructive manoeuvrings of Bush mastermind Karl Rove — Obama based his campaign on the unlikely proposition that those oft-repeated slogans were true. Suddenly, at least on this perfect day, American patriotism doesn’t look so scary.

Shortly after my first child, Colum, was born in 2006, I said to a friend that I just hoped I wouldn’t screw him up. And she said, “Of course you’ll screw him up a bit; that’s what parents do.” In the relationship between parents and children, frustration and disappointment are as much a part of the natural course of things as pride and love. But the knowledge that heartache and fights inevitably lie ahead does nothing to dim the boundless hope and joy I feel tonight holding my newborn daughter to my chest.

In a moment I didn’t at the time see as related, an activist at a party some months ago asked me what I expected of Barack Obama. “I expect him to let me down,” I said. “That’s what US presidents do.” And today as much as ever, I expect his presidency to be a series of disappointments, as political realities — and the fact that he’s human — get in the way of the image he’s helped billions around the world craft in our heads.

But that knowledge dims not one bit the glow of this moment, takes nothing from the magnificence of what he has already achieved and diminishes not at all the certainty that something fundamental in the United States has changed for the better. Reason has replaced dogma, compassion has replaced greed, persuasion has replaced intimidation. Where there was fear, there is now hope. And that’s a world to which I’m excited to introduce my daughter.

As I said, it’s a perfect day.

More election coverage: Welcoming America Back

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It's such a perfect day

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