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

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

Alexander McCall Smith visits Las Vegas:

After Beverley Hills I am taken to speak to the Las Vegas Literary Society. There are more society ladies, and the event there is even grander. I sit opposite the wife of the last Governor of Nevada. She has two guests to entertain that week, the other one being Mr Gorbachev. The night before, whispers one of the other ladies, they took him to a Russian Restaurant. I nod: the Russian Restaurant is in my hotel and I have noticed it. You couldn’t fail to notice it: it has outside it a large statue of Lenin and they have chopped the head off it. Then they have covered it with artificial bird droppings. It is a gesture of quite unbelievable triumphalism. I reflect on the fact that they took Mr Gorbachev to dinner there. Even by the standards of Las Vegas that defies belief.

After lunch and the signing of books, I jump into the powerful car of one of the society ladies and am taken off to the Liberace Museum. There is much to be seen there, and in a very curious way it is rather touching. The human spirit, I have decided, moves in mysterious ways.

Source: Alexander McCall-Smith: A flea in your ear can be a very pleasant thing, The Scotsman, April 12th 2004

AS RUSSIA SLIDES further into chaos and dissolution (what internal strife does not achieve sheer loss of heart and conscience seems likely to) and her miserable people wage war on their neighbours and themselves, there is little to give observers hope for the Russia of the third millenium, a nation whose glories, though usually tainted by expansionism and xenophobia, are now long past and well beyond repeating, even in benevolant forms. Russia’s population is falling, her regrets accumulating and, with persistant anti-semitism, a parlous economy and a sense of having been duped by History, she increasingly resembles inter-war Germany. One of the few things to cheer about is the rude health of her literature, since in Russia books are still important, though never approaching the state-sponsored print runs of bygone days or the intense devotion of samizdat literature. And among young writers none is more accomplished or admired than Victor Pelevin, whose failure to win the Little Booker in 1999 was greeted with outrage by the Russian reading public. Read MORE of my review of Victor Pelevin’s Omon Ra