Changing the Metaphor

What impresses me most here in the Post-Election Afterglow is how delighted the rest of the world is with us right now. We are like the challenged kid who struggles heroically, makes slow progress, then finally graduates with a diploma. His efforts are even more meaningful and praiseworthy than the valedictorian's for whom calculus was as easy as sneezing. The odds were so against our graduating that people across the globe are taking time to pat us on our collective shoulder and say, "Well, done America. We knew you'd make it."

I can understand how the African countries would take encouragement from seeing one of their own grandsons make such a big splash. African-American means that at least some of your ethnic roots are, after all, in Africa. But places that don't even have a significant black population, like Asia, are just as tickled. Germany, for example, a nation not really known for embracing diversity in the past, is even pleased.

Not to take away from President-Elect Obama's ability to charm a crowd, but he isn't our first president in the last many years to have some appeal. Reagan was pleasant enough; Clinton gave off the impression that he was good-humored and that he liked people; Carter exuded decency. We've had likeable presidents before.

Yet, we are enjoying a week of stellar popularity that we have not seen, probably, since we liberated Paris. According to Avaaz (an independent, not-for-profit global campaigning organization), The Global Obama Message Wall in D.C. is "becoming a powerful symbol of unity and reconciliation, when the U.S. can finally join with the world community in facing our common challenges together." Implying that this seemed completely out of our capacity to achieve until we finally showed some good judgment and elected Obama.

The world is like our high school counselor who tells us that we always had a lot of potential, and we just needed to apply ourselves. Or maybe the world has the same opinion of us that Mark Twain's Recording Angel had when he wrote his “Letter to the Earth":

"When certain sorts of people do a sizable good deed, we credit them up a thousand-fold more for it than we would in the case of a better man -- on account of the strain."

That is, maybe our planetary brethren never expected much of us given our prior voting record. The international community doesn't take to the streets when Sweden or Denmark makes yet another wise and well considered decision in electing their leaders. Mothers everywhere didn't start naming their babies "Gordon" when England chose a new Prime Minister, but the earth is being populated by new baby Baracks and baby Michelles around the clock. Maybe the act of choosing a president who appears willing to work "together as one world in a spirit of dialogue and cooperation, [to] bring real and lasting change" (Azzaz) is heralded as an astonishing achievement for Americans.

The world didn't know that we had it in us.

The truth is we might feel a bit self-conscious about taking too much credit for igniting the world's approval. Not so many of us went to the voting booth to choose "a powerful symbol of unity." Here in America, while we are sensible to the socially symbolic aspects of the President-Elect's victory, we were, foremost, in the market for an effective leader.

Obama ran a precise campaign and had the advantage of opposing both a sitting president and an opposing candidate who had become something of a national joke.

We are all familiar with the Rise and Fall of No. 43, but McCain started out as a worthy adversary with a distinguished record of service. Yet, somehow, he managed to weld himself to a running mate who stopped just short of announcing to her slavering fan-base that Obama was concealing a set of cloven hooves. In the last days, their campaign appeared willing to try any transparent gimmick that had more in common with the caliber of marketing associated with a Mattress-Factory-Warehouse-Blow-Out-Sale than a national run for the White House.

Making a choice wasn't all that agonizing.

If we are honest with ourselves, however, I think that we, too, are surprised that we have a black president It's new; kind of exciting, really, to turn on the TV or look at the newsstand and see a striking African-American man where once only a parade of jowly pallid guys appeared, each almost indistinguishable from the rest. It's added a lot of visual interest to the news and is bound to cause quite a stir among the portraits in the National Portrait Gallery when the paintings of Obama arrive. Forty-three predictably achromatic visages and then..."Whoa! Look at Forty-four! How did that cat get in here?"

We even got some lively beautiful children in the bargain to replace the twins who didn't do anything much more entertaining than some predictable underage drinking.

And, who can deny the American success story that Obama represents – no one mentions it, but growing up as a bi-racial kid with his white Depression-era grandparents could not have been easy in the 60s and 70s, even in multi-cultural Hawaii. He and I are close to the same age, and I felt inferior just having a German mother with a heavy accent. Those were not decades when everyone in the nation embraced differences, and we're still a bit of a backwater in that regard today.

That Obama had the fortitude to accomplish so much while swimming against a hostile tide is beyond admirable.

But, although we may admire Obama's back-story, we are not so sentimental a nation that we elected him because of his ethnicity. While many of us appreciate that Obama's election represents to the world that we are, finally and at long last, what it says in our tourist brochures…the land of opportunity and equality…that's not why he won. We elected him because he displayed a combination of intellect, talent and temperament that made the majority of us believe that he was the best applicant for the job

We are not so naïve that we do not know that as Obama's presidency progresses beyond the honeymoon stage, we're likely to find out that he doesn't have all the answers. There are problems so complex that thousands of years of human effort haven't solved them yet, and immediate issues that baffle the brightest of us. We did not anoint him All Powerful King or Holy American Emperor, after all…just president. All that said, though, many things can be simultaneously true and the world is not wrong to feel that first rush of a righteous wind. Even if we Americans were more concerned about our health care and our portfolios than electing Obama for the benefit of all Mankind, we may have, in our typically unconscious way, done just that.

Natural and physical laws exist independently of what we call them, or if we even know they exist. The Universe just hums along, happily oblivious to our thoughts or beliefs about it. But the laws that govern our social systems are pure storytelling. We make them up, and animate them. We die and kill to prove that our stories are true.

Joseph Campbell, the mythology scholar, once said that “If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.” He was referring to religion when he said that meaning, I think, that if we change the story that we tell about our gods, the world changes accordingly. One never hears of Zen monks stoning young girls to death, because the stories about compassionate gods tell us that they require loving kindness. Conversely, stories about the vengeful gods teach suicide bombings and revenge.

If the metaphor is compassion, the world will be straining insects out of their water to avoid accidentally swallowing a bug and ending its life. If the metaphor is violent extremism…well, just turn on the news.

Perhaps what we offered the world on the night of November 4th was a new metaphor. America, a nation as torn apart by slavery, genocide and hatred as any place on earth, changed her story. She didn't so much overcome her bigotry, as she demonstrated an astonishing willingness to stop feeding it by conferring her highest office on a black man,

And, as the world witnessed, blood did not run in our streets. The military did not seize control in Chicago or in Phoenix. There was no coup and the current president did not void the entire election or refuse to relinquish his power even though the winner was not his chosen successor. Peacekeepers did not line up tanks on our borders.

The losing candidate graciously conceded and did not raise an army of rebels to topple the President-Elect. The winner told the nation that, among other things, he was shopping for a puppy.

Genocide and persecution are committed all over the world every day because the story is told, convincingly, that other people are not the right sort of human – Kurd or Gypsy or Cherokee or Palestinian or Hutu or Tutsi or Jew or Sunni or Shia or Woman or Gay or Street Child or Low Caste. Then, out of nowhere, the Americans, a people who can be terrifyingly wrong about so many things, democratically elect a leader who undermines all of those stories and the country doesn't implode.

Obama's nimbus of light is bound to dim as he demonstrates that he's not a symbol, just an American president. The thrill will wear off and we'll all come back to earth. But maybe we can pause to bask just a little while and give ourselves some small credit for changing the metaphor.

And, who knows, maybe changing the world.

Read the full text of Twain's "Letter to the Earth" at www.armageddonbuffet.com/

Go to www.avaaz.org/en/million_messages_to_obama to add your message to the Obama Wall.

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Ingrid lives on San Juan Island.

While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

editor@sanjuanislander.com

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