Fin Keegan

Enjoy the moment, yes, but let’s not get all black-and-white…he’s too good for that–and the situation’s too serious.

What a week–and the excitement is for good reason. At last, in Barack Obama, we have a leader who promises to be worthy of the name, who has authentic insight into hardship and struggle together with the nuanced grasp of complex issues and of history so absent in the Bush White House.

Worldwide, and throughout the United States, Red or Blue, there has been euphoria, even among those who voted against him, as the achievements of Civil Rights pioneers find some fruition in the 44th Presidency, a symbolic transformation hailed by conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike.

American flags sprouted worldwide as a suppressed love dared to speak its name for the first time since 2001.

Even Jon Stewart had to remind overseas viewers that Obama “belongs to the US” and that other countries “can’t have him”.

The United States, it is said, went from “zero to hero” in the space of a single Tuesday in November.

Zero to Hero? Woah. Hold up there, pardners.

We have to be careful here, all of us, stateside and outside, not to take the simplistic view of America and its position in the world that we were so quick to accuse President Bush of.

Under Bush or Obama there remain several undeniable facts and positions that wishful thinking will not change.

First, Obama’s America will remain the world’s only superpower.

The country carries, as an accident of history brought on by centuries of European/Asian militarism and overreach, a burden of global security on which all of us in the First World and many elsewhere daily depend.

The fuel that gets you to work or allows you to tour charming Alpine villages on vacation would be priced out of your reach if it wasn’t for American military forces guarding the shipping lanes along which supertankers faithfully carry your crude oil from the Middle East day-in, day-out.

In fact that Alpine Village might have been razed to the ground if the US had not guaranteed, by threat of arms, peace between France and Germany after 1945, a security shield which made the EU possible and for which all Europeans owe Americans a debt that should not be forgotten.

Second, America is never going to give up on Israel. Let’s hope that Obama exerts moral pressure on them to the degree that their political class allows itself to empathize with their victims in Palestine and then acts accordingly: it is a blot, a pathological blot, on Israel that a state founded by and for the victims of brutality should repress those in its own care so heartlessly.

Third, Americans are Americans. They boast citizens speaking every language known to man, but they are, by and large, not Spanish or Irish or Bolivian. There is no monarch on their coin. Their interest rates are set by their own central bankers. And, just like Spanish or Irish or Bolivians, they act, and understandably have to act, in their own self-interest: Obama has to worry about American citizens first: the plight of the Spanish, Irish or Bolivian bourgeoisie and their dependants is not his first concern.

Fourth, and lucky for us, the US is a mature nation with a clear understanding of its responsibilities. This sense of leadership was even found, albeit in clouded form, during the Bush administration: it is acknowledged for instance that Bush did more to fight AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa than any predecessor. And America’s attitude towards the UN has been patient when you consider the lamentable state of that institution (as the unlucky people of DR Congo are the latest to be discovering). I trust Obama, a true man of the world, will maintain a firm scepticism towards that body.

Iraq was a mistake and he called it early–but Obama is desined to be Commander-in-Chief of US occupying forces in the Middle East for some time to come.

Depend on Russia, an increasingly irresponsible state, to test Obama in his first term. And Obama will put Medvedev and Putin firmly in ther place when that time comes.

America, in short, is not going to turn into the world’s poodle come Inauguration Day in January. It is and will always remain an exceptional country with exceptional powers and resonsibilities. Obama, I believe, understands that. You don’t get black-and-white thinking, in any sense, from this man.

He gets it.

The question is: do we?

Image by January20th2009 on Flickr

We are moving back to Ireland, after 14 years away. Perhaps I might be permitted some Torschlusspanik?

In Edouard Roditi’s Dialogues, painter Oskar Kokoschka talks about this curious German word, defined by him as the “panic that breaks out before the closing of a door”

Given its usefully precise meaning, the word has been used in English on occasion: the OED records the following instances:

1963 P. Bracken I Hate to Housekeep Bk. ix. 92: The random housewife is often prone to Torschlusspanik, or fear of being locked in the park at night, after the gates are closed.

1977 Time 8 Aug. 21/3: She was haunted by Torschluss-panik (mid-life crisis).

1980 Times Lit. Suppl. 14 Mar. 287/2: Mme de Staël is perhaps history’s most outstanding case of Torschlusspanik: the panic at the shutting of the door.

and our lexicographer ventures beyond the painter to offer a more metaphorical definition:

Torschlusspanik [Ger., lit. ‘shut door (or gate) panic’] A sense of alarm or anxiety (said to be experienced particularly in middle age) caused by the suspicion that life’s opportunities are passing (or have passed) one by; spec. that manifested in an ageing woman who longs to (re)discover the (sexual) excitement of youth, and who fears being left ‘on the shelf’.

Either way, the door closes in two weeks…

PENELOPE FITZGERALD experienced a dream denied to all but a lucky few: her debut novel was accepted by the first editor to read it. Within a year the book was published, to be swiftly followed by further and better books: a year later she had won the Booker Prize and captured a loyal, readership which was to grow steadily over the following years. Her final novel sold 100,00 copies in the United States alone. Until her recent death at 83, Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most widely admired writers in the English language.
      The difference of course–when is there not a difference–was that Penelope Fitzgerald was in her sixty-fourth year when this career began. Though resolutely English–daughter of a Punch editor, granddaughter on both sides of Anglican bishops–this debut novelist was as far from the Beatlish perception of sexagenarian dotage as was the late Quentin Crisp: Penelope Fitzgerald was, and remained to the day of her death, one of the world’s sharper tacks…Read MORE of my review of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.

Andrew Sullivan prises from Kant three tests for judging political leadership:

Kant distinguishes between the “clever” but ultimately immoral politician who views everything in terms of political expedience and manipulates a superficial or false morality for political gain and that rarest of creatures, the moral politician, who recognizes the ultimate harmony between morality and good government.
Kant then cites the three tests which can be applied to discern the immoral from the moral politician. Under three Latin rubrics, as follows:

• Fac et excusa – does he use thin pretexts to seize power in his own country, or, after coming to power, to invade and conquer another nation?
• Si fecisti, nega. When his policies bring about ruin or failure, does he blame his own subjects for the failures, or place the blame on other nations? Or does he admit mistakes and change course to reflect this recognition?
• Divide et impera. Does he maintain his position of power by sowing domestic hatred and discord; through the demonization of a portion of his own citizenry?

Source: Immanuel Kant, Sämtliche Werke vol. 5, pp. 695-97.

Martin Kettle, in passing, makes a useful point about some unexpected consequences of the 1989 revolutions:

It was not…just [in] eastern Europe [that Communism collapsed] but across the world, above all in Russia and China. Once these countries, with their billions of skilled but largely impoverished inhabitants, began to become market economies, the writing was on the wall for high-cost welfare settlements in the developed world.

Source: Kettle: Germany and France are struggling with a new world, The Guardian, May 24th, 2005

WITH THE DEATH IN 2001 OF W.G. SEBALD, Europe lost one of its greatest writers. He was born in Germany–the initials stand for Winfried Georg–in the alpine town of Wertach-im-Allgau in 1944. Since his early twenties he lived in England, first in Manchester and then, from 1970, in Norwich, where he taught at the University of East Anglia. We can safely say Sebald did not cross the North Sea to hobnob with the literati: his own agent once claimed never to have met him… Read MORE of my review of W.G.Sebald’s Rings of Saturn