stephanie
01-19-2009, 10:14 PM
this whole thing with the little Marxist worshipping is bordering on insane..and it's making me ill..
If the President-elect is not to disappoint us, a coalition of willing must be prepared to rethink entrenched positionsDavid Aaronovitch
Protecting the President | Graphic: inauguration security | The world waits | A new dawn begins | Words to define history | The disadvantaged will go to the ball | Leading article
On Sunday night I had a dream about Barack Obama. Millions of people do. I was at some meeting, in which activists and officials sat around a long rectangular table. Everyone was dressed informally, and people were making presentations to the group about the things we needed to do. Mr Obama was next to me on my left. He was tired. After a while he fell asleep, and his head rested on my shoulder. Naturally: it was my dream, so it was my shoulder.
It's all wine and concerts right now. Then, later today, the inauguration, and after that the presidency. Every lobby one can imagine - and not a few that one can't - is rushing out press releases advocating that the new president do the particular thing it advocates. In an internet version of a medieval petitioners' hall, lobbyists thrust requests and remonstrances in what they hope is the direction of the increasingly iconic Mr Obama.
It is now a cliché to say that he must inevitably disappoint, and one - as with the worst clichés - that covers almost any meaning, from the possibility of minor failure to his certain imprisonment by the Israel lobby, big business, the arms trade or whichever demons you think rule the fallen world. Only in what he represents can Mr Obama fail to disappoint because that cannot be altered by disillusion.
Woodrow Wilson, that great internationalist and one of the few library card-carrying intellectuals to be elected to the highest office, spoke in his first inaugural address in 1913 about the hardly perceived forces that can underlie an election. The American nation, he said, was seeking to use his victory “to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view”.
“Some old things with which we had grown familiar, and which had begun to creep into the very habit of our thought and of our lives, have altered their aspect as we have latterly looked critically upon them,” he said, while some new things have come to look like the “stuff of our own convictions”.
His thoughts were largely domestic and concerned how working-class Americans and American consumers had been denied even the most basic protection from the depradations of unregulated corporations.
But the thought holds good, that one of the marvels of democracy is how it allows old, almost tyrannical ways of thinking to be seen for what they are, and new possibilities to be imagined. The space is suddenly there. Perhaps the old Administration was overcontent with an unfair world, complacent or querulous in the face of possible environmental catastrophe, sometimes unimaginative in dealing with threats to its security.
read the rest..
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article5548846.ece
If the President-elect is not to disappoint us, a coalition of willing must be prepared to rethink entrenched positionsDavid Aaronovitch
Protecting the President | Graphic: inauguration security | The world waits | A new dawn begins | Words to define history | The disadvantaged will go to the ball | Leading article
On Sunday night I had a dream about Barack Obama. Millions of people do. I was at some meeting, in which activists and officials sat around a long rectangular table. Everyone was dressed informally, and people were making presentations to the group about the things we needed to do. Mr Obama was next to me on my left. He was tired. After a while he fell asleep, and his head rested on my shoulder. Naturally: it was my dream, so it was my shoulder.
It's all wine and concerts right now. Then, later today, the inauguration, and after that the presidency. Every lobby one can imagine - and not a few that one can't - is rushing out press releases advocating that the new president do the particular thing it advocates. In an internet version of a medieval petitioners' hall, lobbyists thrust requests and remonstrances in what they hope is the direction of the increasingly iconic Mr Obama.
It is now a cliché to say that he must inevitably disappoint, and one - as with the worst clichés - that covers almost any meaning, from the possibility of minor failure to his certain imprisonment by the Israel lobby, big business, the arms trade or whichever demons you think rule the fallen world. Only in what he represents can Mr Obama fail to disappoint because that cannot be altered by disillusion.
Woodrow Wilson, that great internationalist and one of the few library card-carrying intellectuals to be elected to the highest office, spoke in his first inaugural address in 1913 about the hardly perceived forces that can underlie an election. The American nation, he said, was seeking to use his victory “to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view”.
“Some old things with which we had grown familiar, and which had begun to creep into the very habit of our thought and of our lives, have altered their aspect as we have latterly looked critically upon them,” he said, while some new things have come to look like the “stuff of our own convictions”.
His thoughts were largely domestic and concerned how working-class Americans and American consumers had been denied even the most basic protection from the depradations of unregulated corporations.
But the thought holds good, that one of the marvels of democracy is how it allows old, almost tyrannical ways of thinking to be seen for what they are, and new possibilities to be imagined. The space is suddenly there. Perhaps the old Administration was overcontent with an unfair world, complacent or querulous in the face of possible environmental catastrophe, sometimes unimaginative in dealing with threats to its security.
read the rest..
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article5548846.ece