Obviously politics is still on my mind. Though I am happy about the Obama win I am still smarting over the depth of the American plunge over the past decade, which I have spent in China in a permanent state of Cringe. From what I’ve heard from many friends in the US is that they too have been hunkering down. When I left America in 1998 the country was feeding on a young, hapless Jewish woman, an indiscreet Democratic president, a cigar and a stained dress, all of which combined to nearly bring our country to ground. As if that debacle weren’t enough, the General Election of 2000 did it’s best to dig the hole even deeper. The Bush presidential response to the tragedy of 9/11 and the subsequent lack of response to the near annihilation of New Orleans by hurricane were two of the incalculable travesties that not only took the winds out of the sails, but appeared to also consciously take a sword to them in what can only seem like a deliberate attempt to turn the ship of state into a dead-in-the-water creaking hulk. In the name of democracy and its criminally misguided neoconic programs of global “democracy” promotion I, along with much of the US and the world, have watched in horror as the senseless gutting of the nation’s ethical core seemed to stumble forward unchecked. My country, which I love and have fought for, appeared to be driven by a numbing fear, intent on utter wreckage. No matter how the first eight years of this century are eventually spun, there will no doubt be a consensus that it was the most incompetent and noxious White House in US history. The Bush/Cheney axis of disruption will forever be pointed to as the low point to which a democracy can plunge and still manage to officially spew. This administration has become the most convincing argument against the spread of democracy in the world. Why would any country, other than the most boorish, want to emulate a muscled executive branch as vulgar and mean as this one has been (and will continue to be for another two-and a half months). Their supercilious disregard for the Constitution has driven their national approval rating through the floor, and their unhinged shamelessness in pursuing what can only be described as a vigorous plutocratic global agenda has earned them, and, by national association all Americans, an international disrepute. We are lucky that there is no gauge to measure how far we have fallen in the minds of the global community. That this administration will soon be gone is, unfortunately, not soon enough. When they slink off to their respective secured ranches they will have left in their wake a country where only a privileged few will be able to say that they are better off now than they were eight years ago.

What we saw and heard in Grant Park on the evening of November 4th was the beginning of our recovery from national and international shame. It will be neither an easy nor a quick recuperation. And, unfortunately, it most likely will be hampered by the low-browed sniping from the permanently disgruntled and goofball extreme, which, I might add, is not the same as the Conservatives. This is what respectable Republicans know. And this is what they will have to confront in order to redefine themselves as more than just a magnet for the wing nuts.

I was raised in a large household that was politically divided: my father a Republican, and my mother a Democrat. I have no recollections of any parental political knock-down, drag-outs; there was a respect as well as diplomatic silence that allowed the two to not only live together in the same home, but to attend the same church and propagate at a baby-booming, Irish-Catholic clip. Personal politics rarely clouded the atmosphere within the home; there were other more pressing and urgent familial issues that managed to provide enough other weather to downgrade politic disagreements to sporadic drizzles. Though I consider my parents’ differing political opinions as both having come from reasonable – though not always highly reasoned (they were Catholics, not Jesuits) – interpretations of events and personal experience, I ended up leaning in the direction of my mother’s take on things. In 1972, when I briefly returned home from four years in the military, my father, a WWII vet, was so appalled by the Watergate scandal and the Nixon Administration’s mishandling of Southeast Asia, he actually voted for George McGovern, a seismic rip that afforded me a critical insight into the man who, from the crib forward, I had spent my lifetime battling, despite having inherited his love of baseball and the Phils. His admission on election night that he had pulled the Democratic lever (one of eight McGovern votes from that single household) taught me that change is actually possible, even if, at times, it seems more miraculous or humbling than we could have ever dreamed. It’s both the benefit and the cost of thinking. In the next two subsequent presidential elections I feel quite sure he went back to voting straight GOP. He didn’t make it to Reagan’s second term, though I cannot imagine him casting his vote for Walter Mondale.

The critical question for the Republican party now becomes how to deal with Sarah Palin, a self-promoting, revisionist fundie. How they handle this one will tell us if they will be able to recover. If they choose to continue sheltering and pandering to those who pride themselves on fundamentalist, anti-intellectual, and intolerant methods of understanding both politics and religion – “The way I see my god (and foreign policy out my window) is the only way to see god (and foreign policy), and if you don’t see it my way then there’s no need for further discussion” – will doom them to further muddling. This is not the basis for responsible political discourse. Haven’t we yet learned that hypocritical religious zealots are responsible for an inordinate amount of pain in this world? This sort of intolerance implies a basic fear of imagination, rather than the embracing and understanding of imagination as a tool that must be kept finely honed in order to responsibly respond to the constant changes that define all times. I expect “You betcha” and a wink at a county fair, not in the rooms where the serious business of governance and diplomatic negotiations take place. If the Republicans can’t see that they will deserve everything they will get. If they do not distance themselves from the whacko fringe then they will lose even more of their good faithful followers. This is not a secret.

So, that’s what I’m rehashing on my way to bed, listening to the wind.

The one topic I have not dealt here has been the US elections, though not from lack of want. I’ve wanted to badly. In fact, so badly, I have exercised enormous restraint in order to remain nominally within the “Chinese box” that I have set myself in. But sometimes you just have to step out and swing at something else. Restraint has been particularly difficult for me over the past two-and-a-half months, particularly after John McCains’ cynical selection of his running mate, a choice that proved to the core that they didn’t “get it.” And ultimately this was their undoing.

A further mark of this disconnection was deeply embedded in John McCain’s concession speech.

“This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.”

The implications of this victory go far beyond the African-American community. They go to the very ideal heart of what America has imagined itself to be, even while it has not been. To explain that this victory has “special significance for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight,” proves that John McCain was fundamentally disconnected from what the United States has so desperately needed for as long as it has been a union. This was a victory of finally … finally rising above the empty rhetoric of high ideals. The United States can now say that it has squared itself with it’s Declaration of Independence where “all men are created equal,” and the subsequent terrible ‘silence’ of the Constitution where it was agreed that a slave was valued at three-fifths of a white male, and then only for the white male’s benefit: as a deflated number to tax and choose representatives in a single race, single sex national congress. (This is hardly judging the past from the comfort of the present; our history tells us very clearly that the voices who railed against these terrible inconsistencies were vocal and many at the time that this was all being hashed, though for the sake of ‘unity’ they swallowed their tongues.) It’s not often that we get to clear an ‘ideal’ and say, “Finally, we’ve gotten over this one.”

Here in this time of national crisis, we ended up electing an African American as president, the son of an immigrant, the most qualified of those who desired the position. It’s taken 221 years and millions of lives tragically lost to acts of unspeakable inhumanity, in order to make the critical correction at arguably the lowest point in our history – after eight years of executive pillage and crimes – to reach the point where we can look past the chains that the founding fathers shackled all of us with, not just African Americans. We have all, every shade and color, been diminished by a belief in an ideal that fell critically short of realization. This victory was of “special significance” to all of us, even for those who don’t yet understand it as such. We have all, finally, been freed, and that speaks to the possibility of America, where a member of a 13% minority can be elected by a clear majority to lead us into a very shaky future.

Now begins the real work, which I hope we are all up to.