We Are All Americans

Never before in the history of this planet has a mixed-race person of African descent been its most powerful inhabitant. No longer. No matter how many surveys had presaged Barack Obama’s victory, it is of such epic and multi-dimensional proportions that it fills us with awe and excitement.

Obama is a global phenomenon, and his victory reflects not only the choice of a majority of Americans, but of a great majority of the human race, giving him even more legitimacy as a leader. And leadership is needed to pull back the world from this recession of still unknown dimension and by all accounts of nastiness. That the United States of America provides this ray of hope for the depressed global scene is so much the better. Among the truly awful inheritances handed down from eight years of Bush, perhaps the worst is such acute and unintelligent anti-Americanism.

As irrational as it is widespread, it feeds and, for some, even justifies dark and dangerous forces such as the Russian neo-tzarist movement, or Chinese absolutism, or the petroleum populism of Chavez, or Iranian nuclear messianism, or Muslim terrorist fascism. Absurd prejudices, like those calling the United States a country of idiots, ignorants and hicks are spat out by the so-called worldwide intelligentsia, even though the country has the best universities on the planet, is the world’s largest producer and consumer of culture, is its greatest and most innovative creator of technology, has the greatest number of Nobel prizes, has invented the Internet and YouTube and is by far the world’s largest economy.

And the old line, “New York is great, but nothing at all like the United States”? That’s like saying “São Paulo is fantastic but nothing at all like Brazil.”

And to those who thought it impossible that the U.S., so “racist and reactionary,” would elect a black, progressive president in such a decisive manner? (Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to what year Brazil, with many more descendants of Africa, will have a black president?) Americans could give no greater response to world (and to Bush’s legacy) than to carry Michelle and Barack Obama to the White House.

Not that his glorious electoral victory, no matter how impacting and transformative, guarantees a happy ending to the sad story of George W. Bush in Washington. The challenges are as great as the triumphs, if not greater.

But the global satisfaction with Obama’s inspiring victory has already given a small push of encouragement to a world that had been slowly grinding to a halt.

Let’s celebrate for Obama and for what his tremendous victory represents. Today, we are all Americans.