The Obama Era

Americans know very well how to illuminate the sky with the stars, although some remain fleeting. The newest is the recently inaugurated president who is going to be granted 100 days credit and some say as much as two years. His speech upon taking oath was impeccable and has been analyzed in great detail. Without promising his fellow citizens, echoing Churchill,”blood, sweat and tears,” he reclaimed sacrifice, work and patriotism. His country fights various military battles, but the ulterior motive of his term in office will be to restrain the ambitions that come undone in a free market. His reforms smell of the patch of the capitalist system with which the neoconservatives have become at ease and has led to a global crisis.

Two days later, it still inspires confidence. Something has changed when a black person becomes president and declares religious coexistence (including Muslims) and human rights as the essence of his country’s liberties. But charismatic presidents (and Obama is one of them) possess an Achilles heal that is left undiscovered. Washington—with the two million people present in the ten degrees below zero temperature–equates to an ancient Roman empire where the republic passed away when the figure of the thunderous Caesar emerged.

Shakespeare made a protagonist out of Brutus in his Julius Caesar. Only he acted with the unselfishness of the defenders of the old republican system, although it was defeated after the civil war. Obama has lent a hand to the founders, especially Lincoln, but he knows all too well that the world that hopes to design and change direction is far from the ideals in which liberty and democracy meet without the complexities we have added. Words also suffer the wear of time. What this matrimony of young college educated individuals brings is enthusiasm, which is understood to be essential to the political agenda.

But, politics in out-of-date Europe are low-spirited, forgetful, demoralized and even dehumanized. It never ceases to be a dialogue through words between leaders and the town. They changed the leaders of the United States, but the town is still the same and its vices are inserted in regularly used speech. To demand more work goes against the announced increase in unemployment. What is left is the symbolic act. Part of the president’s new team, once sworn in, immediately replaced the webmaster of the White House, where the guidelines of the new Administration are displayed, and abandoned the ceremonies to show them to their offices. They proclaimed that there was not a minute to waste. These symbolic acts attempt to restore the sense of transparency of the political language, corrupted by contriving.

Europe possesses a long history, curdled by intestinal wars, although, also by discoveries, of the assembly of a social fabric that Americans should still generate. But it lacks the feeling of patriotism while the other side of the Atlantic glories in its solemnities. We do not even decree a single valid hymn, a common language, symbols that would be able to strengthen the dignity of history, of which we feel scarcely proud. North Americans say that in the last two big wars they came to give us a hand. The presidency of Obama is essential because here in Europe the echoes of social tragedy sounds.