Category: Sunday

Now that the Obama extravaganza has come and gone, it is time for nations, societies and people alike to learn some important lessons. There are major lessons to be learnt from the events preceding, surrounding and succeeding the glittering spectacle. While it lasted, snooper was in the thick of things, arriving at a crowded and festive Dulles International Airport on the Sunday preceding the inauguration and not leaving until Hillary Clinton was firmly ensconced in office on Thursday morning.
The triumph of Barack Obama has been a great public relations coup for an America that was widely reviled abroad as a seething conurbation of unintelligent and feckless militarism, a land that projects its internal injustice and political inequities on the rest of the world with the malice of a naughty but supremely devious toddler.
It was clear that if nothing was done, America was going to inflict its own internal contradictions on the rest of the world with apocalyptic consequences. With unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with its economy hobbled as a direct consequence of its arrogant unilateralism, it was only a question of time before the entire globe was dragged under in an economic and political maelstrom.
With the Obama miracle, the tendency has been to over-romanticise the sturdy values and endearing attributes of the society and nation that has thrown up America’s forty fourth President. We were all Americans this last week. From Australia to Zambia, from Auckland to Yenagoa, the entire globe stood still in admiration and awe of a truly functioning democracy, of people’s power at its most potent and potentially devastating.
It was one of those great moments of history, a spectacular ritual of human renewal and societal self-validation. History may be a nightmare from which we are all struggling to wake up, as James Joyce famously quipped. But history can also be a sweet dream from which we do not wish to wake up or be disturbed by uncomfortable reality. The quintessential American dream was at work last week, and it was a glimpse of Elysium, of human paradise on earth.
Yet in our rapture and admiration, we seem to have forgotten or conveniently overlooked the fact that an Obama presidency, as brimful of hope and promise as it is, does not even begin to disturb the litany of woes that has plagued America since its birth. Nor does it automatically presage the end of the multiple scourges that have turned America into a consuming hell for many of its nationals.
These helpful reminders notwithstanding, let nobody take away the considerable achievement of the American nation in casting traditional bias and hateful prejudices aside to elect its first president of African American extraction. The triumph itself may be largely at the symbolic level. But to continue to dwell on this is to ignore the extraordinary collective courage and visionary resolve that went into cobbling the Obama rainbow coalition together.
All nations are artificial constructs, counterfeit contraptions arbitrarily slammed on a territorial space by the imperial will of a mighty few. The United States of America is no exception to this iron law of modern nationhood. The modern history of America itself bespeaks a constant and occasionally violent struggle to impose order and cohesion on an increasingly unwieldy and dramatically shifting territorial space. Empires, kingdoms and fiefdoms are nothing but signifiers of space delineation at specific historical conjunctures, subject to change and terminal duress. What is permanent are the human communities so arbitrarily marked by the human will to power.
In this Homeric battlefield, some nations have turned out to be more cohesive and coherent than others. This is because if the nation is an expression of the imperial will of the few, it takes the collective heroic will of the many to turn it into a national community of organic principles. A nation that has not transcended its inchoate origins to become a national community of shared values and common destiny remains what the revered Obafemi Awolowo has called a mere geographical expression or a congregation of mutually antagonistic armed camps permanently at war with themselves.
Once the organic principles that bind a nation together evolve, it is the constant battle to reaffirm these core principles that shape and frame the evolution of the nation. Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains, as Rousseau famously asserted. The founding fathers of America envisaged a nation of freeborn where all are equal before the law. But the ink had hardly dried on this noble declaration before America reverted to the default setting of a savage slave plantation.
It is in the nature of human societies for noble ideals to be corrupted. The chief culprits are often the visioners themselves. What is important is not the corruption of ideals or their progressive desiccation in the roiling cauldron of history and lived experiences but the innate capacity of each society to summon the will and the inner resources of strength to challenge the decimation of its core principles. This is the road to renewal and self-validation.
It is this battle for the soul of a nation, for its core values that the world has just witnessed in America. With the election of Barack Obama, America has once again demonstrated an amazing capacity for self-renewal which should be the envy of the rest of the world. It has not been easy for this change to come, and it has taken decades of blood, sweat and tears.
Freighted with several contending and mutually contradictory notions of what is good for the nation and society, America has been a natural candidate for a deadlocked existence and the inevitable paralysis of the collective will. But once in a while in every society, an extraordinary figure of charisma and vision often emerges to break the deadlock and defreeze the frozen dialectic of history once again. In Barack Obama, the gifted son of an absconding African immigrant, America appears to have found such a person.
It is too early to say whether the old stalemating demons will not return to hobble Mr Obama’s presidency. Many an American presidency had started on such a glorious note only to come spectacularly unstuck. Defeated, demoralised but not completely demobilised, the old warmongers and petrified foes of progress are still lurking with intent. In Obama’s case, youthful idealism and visionary vigour may well be a stuff that will not endure, as Shakespeare famously noted of youth itself.
But if Obama’s extraordinary campaign and the swift and surefootedness of his opening move on the political chessboard are anything to go by, the omens are very reassuring indeed. Obama has shown a precocious understanding of the dilemmas and uncertainties that face his beloved country. He has shown an unusual empathy for the tragic emptiness of contemporary American society and the ultimate futility of the rampart militarism of its super-security state.
The comparison with old Abe Lincoln may not be farfetched after all, and it is one that Obama himself seems to deliberately invite. The gangling and inexperienced Lincoln also won a gruelling campaign against better fancied opponents and went on to become arguably America’s greatest president till date. Lincoln went ahead to build bridges and to invite his implacable political adversaries like William Seward to the cabinet.
Obama has done exactly the same thing, drawing sustenance from his opponents’ strength while building bridges of goodwill and genuine fellowship across a bitterly polarised polity. While his Republican opponents ran a divisive, partisan campaign and politicised everything under the sun, Obama chose to remain wisely above the murky fray coming across in the process as the healer and statesman America needs at this particular moment of its history.
With President Barack Obama, it is morning yet on creation day for America. It is in the nature of nations and human societies to falter, to stumble and even to fall at critical moments. What is important is to find the courage and the strength of character to get up and get going again. Anybody who has been in America in the past few days will bear witness to history and give testimony to the inherent good nature of humanity.
The mammoth crowd that witnessed the coronation of an American of African extraction is unprecedented in human memory. It was a carnival-like atmosphere of human regeneration. Something is astir in God’s own country. In transforming itself, America may yet help to transform the rest of the world. It will do so by the might of its example and not by the example of its might.
•First published in January, 2009

In times of grave political emergencies, the human imagination often develops outsize wings possibly as a strategy of containing and coming to terms with impossible reality. What cannot be imagined is what cannot be endured. The civilized world has been filled with apocalyptic trepidation as the prospects of a Donald Trump presidency drew nearer, and the world woke up on Friday to the possibility that the rogue contrarian may actually pull the nuclear trigger on the occasion of his own inauguration to send the human race on a terminal snooze.
But as the inauguration proceeded peacefully without a nuclear incident and without Donald Trump physically roughing up his running mate, one has been forced to scale down the Order of Calamity and to downgrade the furious political gale to a Category C storm. Trump even spoke brilliantly about patriotic protectionism as a harbinger of national prosperity. It is a de-globalizing project, stupid.
Even then, the prospects of Donald Trump physically assaulting a visiting African strongman or suddenly unleashing his infamous verbal grenades remain real and gripping. Flashes of impatience and irritation with political rituals bristled as Donald struggled to maintain icy composure. There is also the possibility that the whole thing may end in a historic fiasco with Trump committing an epic security infraction which will trigger a bi-partisan impeachment proceeding against him.
As the Trump presidency got underway, yours sincerely headed for his favourite watering hole to drown his sorrow. It has not been a good year for pundits and the stellar commentariat. The advent of Donald Trump has thrown the business of political star-gazing into disrepute. Eight years ago yours sincerely was in Washington to witness the triumph of Obama. At least one got that one right. But this one has been a huge lump in the throat. One had been praying that the day would never come or that Trump himself would make life easier by just disappearing.
Here we are watching on television as the Obamas welcome the Trumps to the White House in a seamless transition which spoke volumes for the strength of American institutions and the magic of human power. In revenge, snooper has resolved to collect all of Donald Trump’s verbal howitzers as a constant reality check. We call them tantrumps.