I heard from the trees/a great parade
Nov. 8th, 2008 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupRich called me on my cell phone in the middle of Tuesday night to return the favor of my calling him in celebration back on election night, 1992, the first time in my life that I got drunk (the thought of strawberry daiquiris still makes me blanch). So no, everyone, I am not ducking the events of this week. To be among the few liberals in high school means that you can't help but feel something powerful at a moment like this.
But it's a strange thing about faith; you wait so long for things that when they come, they feel different than you expected them to feel. I guess I've used up my quotient of moralistic-eschatolgical yearnings on other things lately, and for the most part, you all said it for me. It's still an enormously satisfying culmination of everything we've all been saying and wanting for years. I just don't have much to add to that.
Indeed, what's most interesting is that the cynicism of a seasoned historian, political junkie, and member of a compulsively sarcastic generation is failing to kick in. Not just because, for once, the country did the right thing, although it's kind of a shame that it took the utter destruction of our economic system to get there, not to mention a horrifying tolerance for torture and unabashed fascism in our public discourse. Obama seems genuinely thoughtful and wise; if he's learned from 1992 -- or 1861-65, as they say that he has -- he'll do some good things.
All I will permit myself to admit is a sneaking feeling of irrelevance. We grew up on a diet of particular kinds of issues that are now probably gone, and what will replace them is unclear. For the short term we may be looking at a reprise of the 1930s, and not in a good way -- in the gloom of men and women starving to death kind of way. All those Algonquin round table wiseacres of the 1920s had nothing to do in the 1930s except write screenplays or fade into a resigned shock at this outpouring of earnestness, of young people adopting hokum (either liberal or Communist mythology) with a straight face. It may be that within a few years we'll have a hard time remembering the surreality of living under Dubya, or the grim mirth that it engendered. Not necessarily a bad thing. I hope it's not pissing on the party to admit that it does feel as though it's all come just a little too late for me. But better late than never.
But it's a strange thing about faith; you wait so long for things that when they come, they feel different than you expected them to feel. I guess I've used up my quotient of moralistic-eschatolgical yearnings on other things lately, and for the most part, you all said it for me. It's still an enormously satisfying culmination of everything we've all been saying and wanting for years. I just don't have much to add to that.
Indeed, what's most interesting is that the cynicism of a seasoned historian, political junkie, and member of a compulsively sarcastic generation is failing to kick in. Not just because, for once, the country did the right thing, although it's kind of a shame that it took the utter destruction of our economic system to get there, not to mention a horrifying tolerance for torture and unabashed fascism in our public discourse. Obama seems genuinely thoughtful and wise; if he's learned from 1992 -- or 1861-65, as they say that he has -- he'll do some good things.
All I will permit myself to admit is a sneaking feeling of irrelevance. We grew up on a diet of particular kinds of issues that are now probably gone, and what will replace them is unclear. For the short term we may be looking at a reprise of the 1930s, and not in a good way -- in the gloom of men and women starving to death kind of way. All those Algonquin round table wiseacres of the 1920s had nothing to do in the 1930s except write screenplays or fade into a resigned shock at this outpouring of earnestness, of young people adopting hokum (either liberal or Communist mythology) with a straight face. It may be that within a few years we'll have a hard time remembering the surreality of living under Dubya, or the grim mirth that it engendered. Not necessarily a bad thing. I hope it's not pissing on the party to admit that it does feel as though it's all come just a little too late for me. But better late than never.
