America......Fuck Yeah

While trying in vain to find some way to overstate what has just happened (there is none), I wondered what song might best sum up my feelings, which are utterly without precedent. Some weighty and wordy and weary ballads like Bob Dylan's "When the Ship Comes In" sprang to mind, but then I settled on a track from "Team America: World Police" (made by the creators of South Park), a song whose chorus revolves around the line, "America....fuck yeah!"

Sometimes such a crude and unfiltered honesty is called for, and I feel no need to prettify or anesthetize the way I feel about my country this day. America....fuck yeah. We are, in short, the greatest nation in the world once again. We have reclaimed the myth, which many of us never had rationale cause to believe, that anybody, ANYbody, can do anything, ANYthing, in this country.

Let me begin with a profoundly drastic statement which I invite any reader to refute: Tuesday was the greatest day in the history of this nation since the signing of the Constitution. Sound extreme? What other day, what other event can we point to? Surely we should abjure all those turning points which involved bloodshed. Surely we should abjure those turning points which were all heat and no light, rhetorical promises buttressed by lack of action. What then are we left with when picking one day better illustrates our better angels?

What other event in out history serves as such manifest evidence that we, WE, are who we think we are? America has once again turned the world on its head. And it has done so this time not just with words or with technology, but with ACTION. And it is the ownership of this process which makes it so revolutionary.

While I wept for my country on Tuesday (and Wednesday. and today) I wept not just because my country can produce men such as Obama, but because my fellow citizens will CHOOSE men such as Obama.

I wept, and continue to break down without notice, at the thought of millions of Americans who woke up Wednesday and looked upon their sleeping children with a new set of eyes. Rarely if ever has the world changed overnight. Well, it has happened now. And WE did it. Not a meteor strike, not a terrorist attack, not a financial meltdown over which nobody has control, but instead, a CHOICE, made with the world as witness.

I wept for my country in a way I thought I never would. The only two times I had experienced anything resembling such a well of emotion on behalf of my country was on 9/11 (fear, anger) and upon the invasion or Iraq (unmitigated shame). And now, I weep because the myth that I had stubbornly clung to has been proven true.

I weep because scores of millions of white folks lined up throughout the Midwest and even the old Confederacy and did the right thing, with the world watching and with their ancestors shrieking in horror from their graves. The ghosts of history were resurrected only to be driven through and killed again. And it was a good death.

America has achieved the moral equivalent of landing on the moon, and then some. The moon landing is a good example, because it is so illustrative of the schizophrenia so central to the American character. Americans wrote the Declaration of Independence when they weren't busy beating and raping their slaves. Americans walked on the moon when they weren't busy incinerating Vietnamese villages. And Americans, WE, elected Barack Hussein Obama to be OUR president while George W. Bush fell asleep on the silken sheets that we, the same WE, bought for him.

This transcends the moon landing, of course, but the world's reaction is the same. It is something along the lines of, "holy SHIT.....those Americans....they can do anything". And WE can. And WE did.

I find myself feeling almost jingoistic in my viscerally bursting pride in my country. I can say, and DO say, that this is the greatest country in the world. I know that now. I can say, and DO say, that despite all of our sins, we have all just been reminded of why people the world over are inexorably drawn to our land. And I know that there is literally no human being on this Earth who is not profoundly humbled and moved and inspired by the fact that WE, alone among all people, would gladly pick one of THEM to lead us.

I know that conservatives, including some I call friends, are sickened by this type of rhetorical exultation. But I don't care. Because this is necessary. And this is real. The world today is NOT the world of 2 days ago, and that world will never again exist. The world has changed for the better. Mankind perceives fewer barriers between their brothers than ever before. Multicultural democracy is redeemed. And WE did it. America. Fuck Yeah.