The night we waved goodbye to America... our last best hope on Earth
Last updated at 5:57 PM on 10th November 2009
Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful
replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that
at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.
The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama
as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves
of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an
advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest
equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.
I
really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the
Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted
in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around
Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.
The night America changed: Barack and Michelle Obama in Chicago
It
already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which
recorded Obama’s victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama
picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn’t yet a children’s
picture version of his story, there soon will be.
Proper
books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his
astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his
blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.
If
you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing
machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe
anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC
clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was
what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and
that from now on the easy bit was over.
He needn’t worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America’s
Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton’s stained
and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich
spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is
used to.
Just
look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk
about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’).
He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having
edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means.
He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr
Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was
it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a
better day (Don’t try this at home).
I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.
And
it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring
audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the
brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will
– ‘Yes, we can’. They were supposed to thunder ‘Yes, we can!’ back at
him, but they just wouldn’t join in. No wonder. Yes we can what
exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice.
He’d have been better off bursting into ‘I’d like to teach the world to
sing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and
might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.
Perhaps,
being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent
of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant
of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in
America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a
state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on
fraud and corruption charges.
They also know the US is
just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King – in schools,
streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and
its choice of fast-food joint. The difference is that it is now done by
unspoken agreement rather than by law.
If Mr Obama’s
election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters
would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically
anyone. But it doesn’t. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed
grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial
bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He
did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered
families and gangs which are the lot of so many young black men of his
generation.
If the nonsensical claims made for this
election were true, then every positive discrimination programme aimed
at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn’t get should be
abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary,
there will probably be more of them.
And if those who
voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that
presumably means that those many millions who didn’t vote for him were
proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.
Yes we can what?: Barack Obama ran on the ticket of change
I
was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful
capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city
in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White
House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so
much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in
many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party
in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than
a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as
English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia,
Somalia and Afghanistan.
As I walked, I crossed another
of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people
blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among
the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities,
there was something like ecstasy.
They grasped the real
significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had
finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War,
or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a
deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against
many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.
Suspicious
of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed
to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a
world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global
Warming panic, it was unique.
These strengths had been
fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration
and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened
by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to
fight on the cultural and moral fronts.
They preferred to
posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers
and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be
brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain
before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How
sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?
