“If I was running Al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats.” ~ John HoWARd, February 11, 2007
We All Earned the Puppy
(“On Faith” panelist) Starhawk
Washington Post (Blog)
November 5, 2008
On election night, after Barack Obama made his acceptance speech, I was filled with too much excitement and elation to stay indoors. I headed out to the streets, and eventually found the party in my neighborhood, the Mission district of San Francisco. A crowd filled the streets, drumming and dancing and hooting and high on sheer elation. It was mostly young, but with a sprinkling of us older folks. And it was incredibly diverse, reflecting just about every race and color and ancestry of people on the planet: black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American. Not in separated knots of friends, but grinning and hugging and riding on each others’ shoulders, all mixed together, like the way you mix up flour and sugar and cut in the butter for a pie crust to hold a good old American apple pie.
- “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” ~ H. Rap Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin)
~ versus ~
Uncritical Exuberance?
[Sauce unknown]
Judith Butler
Very few of us are immune to the exhilaration of this time. My friends on the left write to me that they feel something akin to “redemption” or that “the country has been returned to us” or that “we finally have one of us in the White House.” Of course, like them, I discover myself feeling overwhelmed with disbelief and excitement throughout the day, since the thought of having the regime of George W. Bush over and gone is an enormous relief. And the thought of Obama, a thoughtful and progressive black candidate, shifts the historical ground, and we feel that cataclysm as it produces a new terrain. But let us try to think carefully about the shifted terrain, although we cannot fully know its contours at this time. The election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a redemption, and if we subscribe to the heightened modes of identification that he proposes (“we are all united”) or that we propose (“he is one of us”), we risk believing that this political moment can overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political life, especially political life in these times. There have always been good reasons not to embrace “national unity” as an ideal, and to nurse suspicions toward absolute and seamless identification with any political leader. After all, fascism relied in part on that seamless identification with the leader, and Republicans engage this same effort to organize political affect when, for instance, Elizabeth Dole looks out on her audience and says, “I love each and every one of you.”
Bonus!
Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job
The Onion
November 5, 2008
WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, “It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can’t catch a break.”
Don Martin – Bushkiller Style Mixtape
See also : Boneheads vote with a bullet (October 29, 2008) | Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman (and Jim Perren) (October 30, 2008) | Token post on US Presidential election (October 31, 2008) | Mississippi Goddamn (November 6, 2008) | It’s an ObamaNation!, Capitalism Wins at the Polls : Anarchy Brewing in the Streets (November 7, 2008)