Obama and the return to ideals

Within the context of the “American Concept,” the confirmation of the first African American president on January 20 evoked high emotions and engendered an intense popular sensibility of national pride. It was a manifest nationalism that in the scope of modern American tradition is rare, and, since the turn of the century, limited possibly to the widespread intense and doleful response to the violence of the catastrophe that rocked the Nation in 2001.

The politics of 9-11 would continue to ripple the American fabric through the duration of the near decade of the markedly reactionary Bush era. It was an episode in the theater of American politics whose deliberate policies revealed a reckless abandon: a political-cumcultural movement retrograde to the American ideals that have always been embedded in potential, and bolstered by historical beginnings, not ends.

The evening before the forty-fourth president would be inaugurated, Washington was teeming. The streets, full, loud, and crowded, were like arteries throbbing with the pressure of a heart’s pulse. It seemed that people who had come to celebrate were fulfilling a higher need. They had come, as one man who identified himself as a New Yorker said, to reclaim the country. A college student from Massachusetts explained that he had taken the bus to be there because he wanted to feel American again. An elderly man from Georgia, however, spoke of history. “For the first time in my life,” he said, “we are making history; we are making history and not just a part of it.”

In a way, the Georgian was right. As an American of Syrian descent, I was at the National Mall for similar reasons; I was there so that I could remember the moment. American history is an interesting thing, especially in the way it connects with human experience and how we, as Americans, examine history and resurrect it in political and cultural – and racial – dialogue, but that’s to be discussed some other time.

While his election and inauguration are undoubtedly milestones in American history and testaments to the American dream, they remain stepping stones. His ascent to the White House is historical, no doubt, but that, too, is merely a stepping stone. The anticipation that was directed at President Barack Obama was messianic in dimensions. There is now a lot of pressure for the new president to prove to be the savior of the nation in addition to his record of being the culturally popular national savior.For many Americans, Barack Obama’s promise of change is a lifeline to hope, and for many others he is that very change but, as Americans and citizens of the world, we must ask ourselves this: Have the foundations of historical beginnings been shifted, ignored, or redefined? Has President Obama, in being a cultural and national milestone, been given “carte blanche” to make history? He gave a people back the ideal of their country, and he returned a country to its ideals; let us now hope that the nation and the country are in-line and insync, otherwise, even milestones and stepping-stones can go in circles.