From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

Last night electoral votes were counted, and with excitement rising--nervous excitement, because we feared the sudden crashing, crumbling, or poisoning of the various voting machines being used throughout the nation, a group of friends and I, all ObamaManiacs shifted between CNN, MSNBC, The Comedy Channel, and occasionally Fox (just to make sure they weren't messing with the results), waiting, hoping, watching, praying (even the atheists among us) that it would all end as we had for so long now and so very ardently wished, that our constant donations: five dollars here, ten there--another hundred ok, two hundred, why not, what could be more important--that our volunteering, knocking on doors, phoning hundreds upon hundreds of people, our rallying, our marches and chanting, our emailing and our passionate urging of those who leaned toward maintaining the awful status quo would have made the difference.
We perched in front of two TVs; we up and wandered back and forth, from room to room, waiting for the various states to be called; we ate nervously; chattered about the countries to which we planned to move if McCain and Palin won, the communes we would set up in Canada, or outside of Barcelona, in Italy perhaps, or Uruguay or Costa Rica or Brazil, or India, where you could find your old job (as Bill Maher suggested), then cleared our heads and cheered over Pennsylvania, groaned over Texas, reassured each other, let out the occasional scream of excitement and finally, finally, yelling, crying, applauding hugging each other, jumping up and down, calling children, brothers and sisters, old best friends on our cell phones, some of us weeping uncontrollably, we settled down and shut up long enough to listen to John McCain make his truly grand speech conceding to our President-elect and calling for unity and support for the new Commander-in-Chief.
We were a group of twenty or so, most of us over the age of fifty. Our hostess was a woman of ninety. We were not young. Not African-American; there was but one black woman in the group. We were gathered in an apartment in Sarasota, Florida, in which area we all live.
I had been a poll watcher on the morning shift, 6:30 to 10:00 a.m. at a precinct near my house, and I had returned to that same precinct to collect the numbers posted--as by law they must be--on the precinct door at 7 p.m., when the polls closed. McCain had won in my neighborhood, by some three-to-one margin, and my heart had provisionally sunk.
So, ecstatic, I, we watched Florida turn blue, all of us amazed, and incidentally relieved that we no longer had to apologize to our friends up north, or to ourselves for that matter, for living here.
As soon as McCain finished speaking, I had the sense that I had to go home, to hear Obama's speech alone, and that if I left immediately and drove fast, I might make it in time. So I grabbed my things and without a word to anyone, fled, it was fifteen minutes before midnight, and I sped home with the radio on, missing only the very beginning. But NPR described Obama, Michelle, and the children so well, I could see them in my mind's eye, through my tears, as I careened down the nearly empty Tamiami Trail.

And as I drove, I had the oddest thought. I thought, Bush made this possible. Bush did this for us. This was his legacy. It was this for which he would be remembered. He had made conditions in this country and relations between this country and others so bad, so unspeakably bad that he had effectively destroyed his own party, made it impossible for a Republican, probably any Republican to carry on.
He had paved the way for someone who truly offered change, change of every sort.
And the coincidence of Bush: this disaster who had been our president, who had brought our country to the brink of its demise in every area and the appearance of Obama: this black man, this brilliant and industrious black man who is elegant, articulate, even-tempered, thoughtful, intellectual, unflappable, who seems to have values and plans for the health and prosperity and growth of our country, well, it was the perfect storm meets the climate of one's dreams.
It suddenly occurred to me that if it weren't for Bush and Cheney, Neo-Cons and company, if it weren't for the disastrous mess they had made of our wonderful country: if it weren't for the lies they told us about everything until nothing whatsoever that Bush said was believable; if it weren't for the unnecessary and unforgivable war that they had determined and convinced us to wage in Iraq, a country that had done us no harm, a war in which so many Americans and Iraqis had been needlessly killed and maimed; if it weren't for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo ; the introduction of torture as a permissible modus operandi for the USA; the editing of our Constitution; unimaginable amounts of money both borrowed and spent, and the debt accrued, and the economic meltdown; and the cavalier and blatant disregard of the needs of our people, for whom they were supposed to be responsible; if it weren't for the inattention to the infrastructure of the country, to the environment, to the future of the planet; if it weren't for the unforgivable treatment of the poor in crisis, and the health care costs both plaguing and impoverishing our citizens, and the housing scams inundating us with foreclosures; and the job losses; the tax breaks for the wealthy while the poor got poorer and rich got obscenely richer; and the pathetic level to which education had sunk in this country, this wondrous election might not have been possible.
I did not like the first president Bush, but I positively loathed W, and it would never have occurred to me that anything good could be attributed to him, but perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps we can thank him for leading us to the launching pad on which we stand today and for his (albeit inadvertently) paving the way for both the deconstruction of the corrupt mess that our "democracy" had become when Katherine Harris and The Supreme Court made him president by fiat and for the upcoming reconstruction of a government of which we can once again be proud.

Comments

[tnader]

Rachel Ben-Avi has helped us see through Alice"s looking glass into an alternate reality where the world is turned upside down only to be righted again.

From 2003 " 2006, we lived in South Africa. In December of 2004, Harry Belafonte attended Midnight Mass at St. George"s Cathedral in Cape Town. Archbishop Desmond Tutu invited Mr. Belafonte to say a few words to the congregation. Harry Belafonte reminded the South African attendees that, for years, Americans had prayed for an end to apartheid. He added that now it was South Africa"s turn to pray for America because our leaders had lost their way.

As I looked at celebratory footage from around the world last week, I was reminded that the whole world has been praying for us to rise up from the deep abyss in which we"ve been buried. In facing the fear which prompted the evil of our circumstances, our collective subconscious has finally awakened to do battle for justice and righteousness. Without darkness, there is no dawn.

Rachel and I met through a portal in the Obama website which linked first time donors. We have consoled each other over several months about the sea of red in which we were both drowning " (I now live in Tennessee.) What a testament to the community building capacity of the Obama campaign, though! Barack Obama strategically encouraged the forging of relationships across state lines so that we could truly be united in America.

[joanton]

Ms. Ben-Avi clearly and with wonderful emotion took us with her on her election day experience. What a beautiful epiphany. Her cadance and writing style kept me totally involved.
While I have trouble giving W any credit at all for anything positive, the thought of his awful presidency preparing us all for the next great period of history is truly exciting.

The perfect storm of the finality of the the Bush years meeting head on with the brilliance of the Obama years and what they will bring, ,is so hopefully described by Ms. Ben-Avi. I look forward to her adding to our collective visions with future beautifully written visions.

[blaqntelligence]

"I did not like the first president Bush, but I positively loathed W, and it would never have occurred to me that anything good could be attributed to him, but perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps we can thank him for leading us to the launching pad on which we stand today and for his (albeit inadvertently) paving the way for both the deconstruction of the corrupt mess that our "democracy" had become when Katherine Harris and The Supreme Court made him president by fiat and for the upcoming reconstruction of a government of which we can once again be proud.

WOW!!
Just absolutely positively WOW!
I've heard many many perspectives of gwb.
This is a first.
Hat tip to you,
It's a rare human being that can find any thread of goodness about these past 7 years and weave a compelling and laudatory case for gwb.

[djpeters]

In "From the Ridiculous to the Sublime" Ms. Ben-Avi brilliantly distills out of Bush's disastrous legacy what has to be the irony of all ironies: but for W's catastrophic, anti-democractic reign we would not be holding the promise of our first African American president and the hope for a more peaceful, equitable future. I don't believe mushroom clouds can ever have silver linings; but, as Ms. Ben-Avi eloquently argues, now that we have nominally survived Bush et al., perhaps it was both necessary and sufficient to have been thrown off the cliff to nowhere in order to gain genuine leadership to somewhere. In any event, the dangerous pill we've been forced to swallow for eight long years has clearly brought about a cure the doctor definitely never intended.

[deke33]

Pundits explain the disparity between the 2004 and 2008 popular vote count leaving out the one possibility that makes sense.

Even more cause for wonder is the fact that this election's total vote count is so abominably low considering the importance of the major issues Americans faced. One can hardly believe the pundits explanations of Republican stay at home ism. Nor can anyone believe that many did not wish to vote for a black candidate. For months those same pundits ballyhooed the massive registration drives conducted by both parties as being lively and fervent indicating a massive turnout. For months we heard the pundits citing the "Battleground States" as the battlefield where there would be more voter participation. Yet only an increase of 1.1% has been noted in the election of the century as compared with the 2004 election. None to my knowledge has thus far made any mention that the difference between the 2004 and 2008 vote may have been that the 2004 vote was gamed. It would be interesting to determine the lack of disparity between the two election year votes. Perhaps a blue ribbon panel with full subpoena power be empaneled and given access to ALL peoples and documents to clear up this conundrum.