Wooing young, liberal America is a different matter to dealing with the hard political realities, writes John Waters
FOR A few days I have been receiving messages from people, older and younger than myself, wishing me to join with them in celebrating the election of Barack Obama. Isn't it an amazing moment, they presumptuously prompt. What a time to be alive!
Yes, I say, but no more than Monday last. It is not for me a bah humbug thing, but I don't anymore see hope being delivered in quite this way. I didn't mind who won. I didn't support either candidate, regarding both as decent men offering different qualities, and both, equally, as fragile human beings as prone to failure as myself.
After Hillary Clinton was safely out of the running, I didn't comment much about the election, except to note occasionally the dwindling clear blue water between the respective outlooks of Obama and George Bush. More and more, it seemed, the campaign descended into farce, with, on the one hand, Obama, and on the other, Sarah Palin, increasingly resembling cartoons of, respectively, American liberalism and American conservatism, crudely pressing buttons to deliver "constituencies" that one might be forgiven for imagining to be devoid of human intelligence. But I know, too, that much of this was for the cameras and that, now the results are in, we will encounter a commander-in-chief-elect shifting to reinvent himself for power. Wooing young and/or liberal America, or indeed young and/or liberal Europe, is a different matter to dealing with the hard political realities that now face Obama.
Obama might do worse than consider the fortunes of Tony Blair, who first could do no wrong with the kinds of people who currently think Obama is the answer to everything. Just a little later, having come face-to-face with a couple of unsquarable circles, Blair could do no right by the self-same people.
So, Obama offers hope, will deliver change. As the first coloured president of the US, he's already done most of it. But he should remember that he carries the frustrated hopes of several generations of idealists who have had moments of optimism snatched from them before. And this weight of expectation makes it difficult for him to avoid falling into the same trap as Blair.
There has been a handful of key moments of global liberal optimism in the past half century. First, at the start of the 1960s, was JFK; then, at the end of that decade, his brother Bobby. There followed a quarter-century of waiting before Bill Clinton. Because its notions about idealism are still enveloped in that 1960s haze, the only way our culture knows to imagine the new is to evoke someone from 40 years ago. Obama played these cards adroitly, but now is faced with a set of realities in which cod-idealism has little traction.
Such is the paradox of the conception of hope travelling under the orthodox liberal banner, that the history of the past half-century reveals a pattern quite at variance with the cultural expectations dominating public thought at this moment.
The "hope" offered by the Kennedys and Martin Luther King came to nothing for obvious reasons. Indeed, perhaps precisely because this hope was pre-emptively extinguished, it lived on as a frustrated ideal, a burning desire, right to this very moment. The space between the assassinations of these three icons of youthful idealism was less than five years, and afterwards the world descended into what seemed a kind of torpor. The Vietnam war dragged on, a series of global oil crises followed, and then we entered what for those who clung to the dream were the dark days of Thatcher, Reagan and George Bush snr.
But the oddest of ironies arises from the fact that, while it was to secular messiahs such as Clinton that several of the generations now voting have looked for hope, it was out of the alleged darkness of conservatism that emerged the greatest moment of real hope, symbolised by the 1989 tearing down of the Berlin Wall. And this was the culmination of a process driven not by liberal radicals but by two of the most conservative and elderly leaders in recent world history, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II.
Stranger still is that, whereas these older figures, and latterly Sarah Palin, were perceived by the liberal-secular world as appealing to something called the religious right, the hope that draws us to Obama and Clinton has also been rooted in an essentially Christian view of the world. Cultural memory tells us that Jesus lived and died a young, handsome man, and still, in spite of liberal-secular protestations, we scan the horizon for someone resembling Him.
Leaving aside the self-imposed caricatures of the campaign, Barack Obama emerges as the latest embodiment of this indispensable idea: that it is natural to hope and that this hope is underwritten by the infinitely greater hope we would deny. As Pope Benedict XVI put it in Spe Salvi, the distinguishing mark of Christians is that they know they have a future: they may not know the detail of what awaits them, "but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness".
This, astonishing though it may seem to much of the culture that embraces him, is what elected Barack Obama.