Hans Magnus Enzensberger:
In most democratic countries the campaign season is the time when the gray routine of party politics is transformed into public theater. An election is an exhibition bout, a carnival, a purification rite--a kind of football championship of rhetoric in which pent-up aggressions and suppressed emotions surface. It's an outlet for the frustrations, defeats, and disappointments of everyday politics. And especially when nations feel that their future might be at stake, the election is like a destructive potlach, a national brawl in which what normally is forbidden is briefly permissible: open rivalry, ruthless polarization, the eruption of hatred, dissatisfaction, and ill will.That's from "Swedish Autumn," in Europe, Europe (p. 4).
Except in the United States of the first decade of our shiny new millennium, "open rivalry, ruthless polarization, the eruption of hatred, dissatisfaction, and ill will" never seems to dissipate. Perhaps it's a function of the permanent campaign. I moved to this country in 2004, so I've lived here now through two elections and the whole space in between, and that's all there ever is, it seems. It was different on my first visit after 9/11, in November of that year. When did things change?
I know enough about Obama not to be particularly hopeful about the conduct of his administration over the next 4 or 8 years, though a McCain administration would almost certainly turn out worse. But at least one can still hope that, with an Obama victory, one's friends and neighbors from the metroprovincial "urban archipelago" and the university towns will recover their sanity, at least for a little while. Even if, up top, the "open rivalry" and "ruthless polarization" continue unabated among the competing factions of the American power elite.
