Deification and other conceits

"Tuesday the world changed. It was a great day. Monday it rained hard for the first time this season and on Election Day, everything in San Francisco was washed clean. I went on a long run past several polling places up in the hills around my home and saw lines of working people waiting to vote and contented-looking citizens walking around with their "I Voted" stickers in the sun and mud.

People have again found one of their -- our -- most buried and powerful desires: to make a better world together. I ran across an online collection of photographs of people crying in public, so moved by what is happening in this country, and I cried a little myself last weekend and choked up again when my local paper ran a story on a woman who'd crossed the country 40 years ago for Martin Luther King's funeral and left her polling place Tuesday singing hallelujah, amazed like so many older people that she'd lived to see the day."- Rebecca Solnit (via ATR)

"You've made it clear that no matter how bad they become, you'll still dutifully march into the booth in November and give them your vote. All the agonized indecision and ethical struggling in the world don't matter one bit at that point; the votes count the same whether they're cast enthusiastically or under protest. All they want is for you to put them back in power so they can ignore you and piss on your deepest concerns for another few years—until it's time for you to do it all over again."- John Caruso


"Make no mistake, people. Barack Obama will disappoint all of us at some point in the future. That's because we live in an imperfect world with a far worse political system, one driven not merely by cynicism but also money, power and status that derives from all the worst qualities that popular people exploited in high school. But he is, I felt that night and continue to feel today, the absolute best and brightest our political system has produced since John and Robert Kennedy and perhaps since Franklin D Roosevelt. And need I add, both FDR and JFK were not merely white, but also incredibly rich, born to enormously influential and ambitious political families. Barack Obama did it all on his own."

-Eric Alterman

"Obama's uncanny ability isn't the nuance and vision Solnit describes. It's something much simpler: a highly refined talent for performance. Above all else, this is what Americans across the political spectrum have desperately missed for the last eight years: a convincing, well-spoken liar whose mind is as sharp as his teeth."-- Arvin Hill, " The Man. The Myth. The Mass Delusion."


Will.i.am "it's a new day"[video link]

Is it possible to be pleased that McCain didn't win while concerned that Obama did? It must be, because I am, and Descartes' famous saying about the proof of existence should work both ways. I've been incredibly fatigued of late, recovering slowly from a lingering bug and going to work, because I really can't afford not to, which is the main reason my posting here and at Hugo Zoom has been very light of late. I would like to call attention to the commendable yeoman work of the inestimable Rob Payne of late, more than holding his end up, seemingly leading a Dead Horse to water and making it drink, if you'll forgive me my questionable taste in puns. More soon.