I find myself almost incapable of paying attention to what others are paying attention to now. When it comes to what's going on in the political sphere, it's just wait and see what actually happens. I find I have no interest in commenting on all the preliminaries.
Either Obama is going to rise to the challenge or he is not. There are reasons to be optimistic; there are reasons to worry. We're at slack tide. Nothing's moving one way or the other. Nothing to swim against, nothing to ride with. We can only drift while we wait for the shift.
And so I find myself looking on the scene from a greater distance in the last several weeks. It's been depressing how what we've seen for the last eight years has been so typical of the way humans from time immemorial work the system for their own short-term interests and wreck things for the ordinary person. The whole stupid human story in the political and economic spheres is that of someone wanting more than his share and pushing to get it until someone else gets sick of it and pushes back, and if he gets the upper hand becomes the one who wants more than his share and pushes to get it until someone pushes back at him. And on and on it goes. Is it really any more complicated than that? America is no different on the national scale than any other nation which has gone before us. We have a moment here and there where we might do something surprising, but for the most part we follow the time-honored pattern.
The people who want wealth and power most are the worst kind, but they are the ones who tend to run the show. There are rare exceptions, and sometimes they can make a difference. Normal people don't care enough to be in a position to fight the greedy, vainglorious, and powermad. And most people don't care that the greedy, et al. are running the show unless they can see how it affects them directly. So the inevitable happens: things go from bad to worse until the whole system falls apart, and we start over with high hopes for a better future vowing never again to allow these scoundrels to do what they do, but we soon enough forget, and on it goes as if it never happened before.
So it remains to be seen if Obama is one those rare public personalities who emerge who can make a difference. I don't know if he is. He could be. Whatever he is now, he might rise to be something more later. One would not have such an expectation of anybody else on the scene. But if he isn't, then get out your parachutes--we've got a ways to go before we hit bottom.