inauguration day myth at work: Obama in pictures

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The myth has one more day to gestate before it becomes everyday reality – well, a dream come true. And we know what that means.

As the scholar Joseph Campbell told us in his book, the hero has a thousand faces. Obama – the man who has been reduced to a sound, to three unusual syllables which sound, perhaps symbolically – homeopathically – magically – Jungianly – like the name of the greatest enemy of all – who by this means alone can be invested with the power to defeat that enemy, other enemies and evil itself – is adopting many of those faces. Our need is so great that he must fill it.

I now it’s true because I can feel it, even though I know Obama isn’t going to fill the bottomless void… though it will be good to have America back in the real world. A regular guy – we’d have played kick the can together if he’d bene in Hartford CT or I’d been in Hawaii. In his private school. Which probably means I’d have had to be a boy. And I’d have had to be outside playing kick the can, not inside reading books about clever little kids who grow up to do amazing things. So okay, I probably wouldn’t have played kick the can with him… but, like everyone else I’m making him my kind of all-around guy, and like everyone else I was sitting there waiting for this to happen.

Our generation has ever experienced anything like this. We never even had Kennedy. We’ve had all the big seismic events, the cataclysms, the wars, we’ve had Nixon, and Nancy Reagan’s new china, and Iraq, and Iraq again, and the Contras and Watergate and Monicagate and what was that other Gate of Clinton’s, and the all the rest of it. Hell, even the miners’ strike and Thatcherism can be traced to Milton Friedmann, that crazy free-market friend of the Reagans. Here in the UK we have had our civil liberties eroded since 2001, as Blair attempted to keep up with the Bushes. (See, over here we don’t even get Obama. We need someone to come sweeping into Number Ten with a red cape and give us back our civil rights, and do away with ID cards and the third runway, take away all the speed cameras and fix the schools and libraries etc. Fat chance. But back to being American…)

Look:

Even poetry! This is Walcott’s Selected and the Obamas have been in a parent-teacher meeting.

“…watching over the Union he saved, sits the man who in so many ways made this day possible.”

This puppy has only three legs, by the way.

This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land! Oh, the freight that song carries. An essay in itself. It was a Depression song, as well, written as protest by Woody Guthrie. I know: he’s no Benjamin Britten, and Seeger is no Peter Pears. (I mean, thank heaven.)

Obama is not God. He’s not Superman. He’s not even Spock. But he’s also not George W Bush. If he wasn’t a bit of a player I wouldn’t trust him to make a go of it in Washington. So he’s a politician, a good one, with good ideas – with ideas! But he’s also an all-around guy. It doesn’t matter who you are – he’s an all-around guy. No wonder he’s going to save the world.

No pressure on the guy, then: none at all…

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Tags: America, barack obama