Wednesday, 5 November 2008

we can has

Wednesday, 5 November 2008 11:20 am
freckles_and_doubt: (Default)
Reading Obama's acceptance speech is making me cry. McCain's concession speech (linked from that page) is also surprisingly graceful.

I've carefully ignored local politics recently, both the South African and the despair-inducing Zimbabwe version - I certainly don't follow them in the way I've been following the American presidential race. America's fundamentally crazy system is much better theatre, for a start. But I think my comparative disinterest also comes down to two things:

  1. In a weird sort of way, disenfranchisement. I'm a white person in black Africa. Zimbabwe is insoluble, South Africa is not my country even though I've adopted it, and in any case it feels as though, as part of a postcolonial discredited minority, these struggles are not about me. I freely admit that this is illogical and probably defeatist, but there you have it.

  2. I don't actually like any of the people involved in local politics. I'd support them for what they say they stand for, rather than who they are. Kerry/Edwards left me lukewarm, but I like Al Gore a lot, and it is a happy astonishment to me that someone who projects integrity as Obama does should have made it through a corrupt political system focused, at least in the last four years, on narcissistic venality.
In a way it doesn't even matter if Obama's aura of thoughtfulness, integrity and reason turns out to be a carefully-crafted political façade. Current African politics only really echoes the tendency the world over, to take for granted the politician as corrupt, money-grubbing and fundamentally uncaring about the health of the polity. (The Onion is not far wrong). Obama is politician as emblem in the same way that Mandela was, and it's hugely hopeful that America, an influential society whose cultural choices tend to ripple out into the world, should have started to recognise the need for him.

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