I was alone just past 11:00 last night when the networks called the race for Obama right after polls closed in the west. PH was in a cab after having watched the returns with her family; I'd like to have been there, but I was still getting over what Montezuma had done to my stomach in Mexico. I cued up a live version of Joe Walsh's "Rocky Mountain Way" (a dated and borderline cheesy but nonetheless classic and kick-ass stadium rocker not to be confused, please, with "Rocky Mountain High") and turned the volume all the way up on my stereo and pressed "play" with the knowledge that this would probably blow my powerful and rather expensive (but on their last legs) speakers, and the underrated Walsh tore into the opening, echoing chords and I watched CNN and when they showed the Kenyans dancing in the streets, I cried. I can't remember the last time I cried. I've felt such a flood of raw happiness only a few times in my life.
(The speakers are, in fact, ruined. I feel good about this ritual sacrifice. I've owned only two pairs of speakers in my life, both JBLs, which I highly recommend. I bought the first pair in 1984 with mowing-lawns-in-the-summer money, which lasted until 1998; I bought the second pair in 1998, which lasted until last night. I was not drunk when I undertook this ritual sacrifice, btw -- I was, in fact, sober, on account of being an ex-drinker of alcohol.)
I think that the good guys won. I do not think that Republicans are the bad guys. I do think, though, that the people who pulled the lever for McCain and Palin with any enthusiasm ("real Americans," I think they're called) have had their time, and that it's time now for something different. (I also think -- this is a fringy, untra-liberal/socialist idea, but bear with me -- that all Americans are "real Americans," including the ones in Grant Park in Chicago last night; they looked to me like very "real" representation indeed of the America of the twenty-first century.)
I don't know what sort of change Obama will bring, or will be able to bring. I am reasonably sure, though, that the next four or more years will look better than the last eight. I believe that President Bush has done the U.S. an inadvertent favor, a huge one, by showing us how a sole superpower might go about running itself into the ground if that were what it really wanted to do.
I wonder what will happen to the Republican party. Perhaps they'll be back in the White House in 2012; perhaps they'll sweep back into Congress in two years, 1994-style. That seems unlikely to me; the party seems to have gutted itself, made itself unappealing to independents and moderates, and truly appealing only to people who are able to look at a Sarah Palin and see a qualified chief executive. I'm sure they'll be back, the Republicans, and I hope that when they return, they'll look more like the "party of Lincoln" than they do now. Who knows.
For now, I'm happy. I'm not proud to be an American: having been born here, I didn't have to do anything to become one, and I haven't had to lift a finger to remain one. But I'm glad to be an American at the moment. An American who is about to be the owner of a brand-new set of JBL speakers, no less.
