Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities of our being, these still drive us on.
–Herman Melville, Moby Dick, p.163

Things fall apart. Things move on. And the “innermost necessities of our being” make us put our shoulders to the wheel and drive us on and on.
I fundamentally agree with Bernhard: Billmon makes the only viable choice, not just for indulging in a little life-giving hope, but for understanding what the alternative to Obama represents.
Some commenters here, who seem certain that Obama is a fixed political asset, whose decisions are a foregone conclusion, should look a little deeper into the intrinsic character of the person, and consider that he is not some kind of political robot.
What annie and waldo are telling us is that the democrats you saw at the Convention represent this country’s best and perhaps only hope, the nation’s only way out of Hell. They are America’s Humanists; face it. Their tears signify something. There has to be more to their faith than gullibility.
Obama is not Saint Francis. And just to inject an alternate interpretation, I will suggest that he may be something like Odysseus, “a man of wiles”…”a man of twists and turns” a consumate, talented politician.
Just because there are a few tricks and finesses up his sleeve, people should not think him capable of wrecking the world, in contrast to that model of psychopathology, John McCain.
McCain never tried to yoke together an ox and an ass, and plow circles in his field, in order to feign insanity, that he might not be conscripted to an insane war. McCain tells us that there will be war and more wars, and that “we will never surrender”.
McCain is promiscuous when it comes to war.
No one would ever compare McCain to Odysseus! Nor is McCain, with his clenched jaw, anything like Obama. In fact, from where I sit, Old John looks a lot like Ahab, the Captain of the Pequod.

Hark ye yet again–the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event–in the living act, the undoubted deed–there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike–strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy , man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare!…
(ibid, p. 162)

Posted by: Copeland | Aug 29 2008 23:51 utc | 104

Me above.

Posted by: Thrasyboulos | Aug 30 2008 0:09 utc | 106

was that really billmon at 92 ? or an imposter ?

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Aug 30 2008 0:26 utc | 108

beq
me too
to find myself here learning in the midst of life gives me energy & hope in the dark times(this night i am marking the work of entrants into a conservatoire & i had set question to do with exile/virtuosity/technique/interior/exterior/collaboration, to be in the world & to engage it & fear their dread of the future & of time itself) precisely because of the vitality
i’m afraid i don’t see cynicism here but i do read people who have followed brecht in his questioning of even the the things, as john berger says, we hold dear

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 30 2008 0:47 utc | 110

thanks for the response, Thrasyboulos.
full disclosure: i’m a white, privileged, 29 year old product of midwest suburbia with an axe to grind. i’m tired of the lies and the hypocrisies and the soulless materialism i was conditioned to uncritically accept. i’m tired of the pills and the mechanized surrogates that fill the empty spaces corporate parents leave behind in their endless pursuit of more stuff to surround their vacuous existences. this painful process of waking up to the larger realities the world is facing has given me lots of guilt, which turns into anger when i see how many amerikans are still unwilling to acknowledge the scope of the existential crisis we, as humans, are facing.
70 million post WWII beneficiaries of amerikan empire are getting ready to retire. for sixty years it’s been all about them. meanwhile, their kids are killing themselves and their peers like never before because this consumer-driven materialism is a soulless blackhole promising (lying) that happiness is synonymous with purchasing power. fuck that. this country is getting what it deserves. sixty years of war and bloodshed and covert regime changes predicated by the unnecessary genocidal mass murdering that capped off WWII and kick started the cold war is reaping its predictable effects.
I’ll wrap up this little diatribe with a word popular with my generation: whatever.
on with the charade…

Posted by: Lizard | Aug 30 2008 1:00 utc | 112

Ok, no arguments with you re Billmon, comrade alabama. I guess my main point there was that the posts by Bernhard (and occasionally others -especially b real) and all of the comments have a high value all of their own.
And yes, Copeland, that was wonderful.

Posted by: Maxcrat | Aug 30 2008 1:50 utc | 114

& i too have ti tell you the melville post was beautiful. it is posts like that that make me want to go back to read this or that, search out this or that fact – that whilst admitting being lost in these dark times – there are reasons – as simple as rereading a book that construct hope in a concrete way. it is cerebral & it is not. i’m sure a rereading of moby dick would connect with the communities i work with.
the post was sublime & strangely the best posts are not solipsistic – i’m sure we have a physical sense of one another & that is not nothing – in the endless work of communicating in communites. i have not said it well – but the hope is not a word on a screen but it appearance on that screen contextualises the endless circles of self & the powerful & driving impulse to comprehend another
whether it is someone here – or in iraq, or vietnam, or bolivia

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 30 2008 3:19 utc | 116

92 is a jest. I think

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Aug 30 2008 10:46 utc | 118

billmon is known for his id war within. perhaps, hehas somehow forgotten the enormous and indescribable magnitude of the utter and complete betrayal of this country
i find your remarks crude uncle.
the title of his diary says it all. he felt really proud. it doesn’t mean he isn’t cognizant of all the failures of this country. i can perfectly understand his response, i do not think it was in jest jony.
the general mocking tone addressed towards those of us w/the lump in the throat reaction to his nomination, as if the significance of where we have moved as a culture wrt race (this is not to imply everything is hunky dory) could easily be perceived as hurtful.
people respond differently when you attack their emotions as opposed to their ideas. it was an honest emotional diary and his sentiments were decimated. What a let down to see him soften.
what he addressed

My discontents are probably shared by many of you, maybe most of you: The overpowering influence of corporate money, the puerile cluelessness of the Democratic consultant class, the repeated betrayals of those who most need the party to stand and fight for them (Biden, cough, bankruptcy “reform”) And my biggest policy heartache: The party’s reflexive support for a completely deranged “bipartisan” foreign policy agenda — the very parade of folly that landed us in Iraq and is now stumbling on in the general direction of Tehran (or the Russian frontier, or both).

when you begrudge people their honest emotion

there are loyalties that go deeper than policies, deeper than ideas, deeper, even, than folly and cowardice. When I turn on the TV and see the crowd at a Democratic National Convention — black and white and every shade in between, Anglo and Hispanic, gay and straight, old and young, Jew and gentile, I know somewhere deep down in my gut that those are my people, the Americans that I want to be my fellow Americans.
…..
the enormity of what I’d just seen. It may not mean as much to you youngsters (get off my lawn!) but for someone of my age, who grew up in the dying days of segregation, who still remembers the colored and white drinking fountains and the monochrome lunch counters, who saw Washington DC burn the night Martin Luther King was killed — who, in some sense, has essentially spent his whole life living in the shadow of American racism, it was completely mindblowing.

for me, it is completely easy to relate to his experience. but it isn’t enough to simply say, well it isn’t my experience, or i don’t think it will do any good. it turned into a format to bash billmon, obama, the party for all their failings (even tho billmon addressed them in the post), and those w/shared sentiments.
i will be forever grateful to billmon for all the many things he has taught me, shared w/us and his glorious writing style. i find it very easy to absorb what he writes even tho i may not agree w/him about everything.
thank you billmon if you are reading this. thank you for the rawness you shared w/me about how it made you feel deep down in your gut.
i felt it in my gut too. well,mostly in my throat.
i am prepared to be criticized and made light of and mocked for those emotions. but unlike billmon i will not spit out my own reactions to the criticizm.
but if i did, would you think it was in jest, or weak, or a problem w/my id?

Posted by: annie | Aug 30 2008 16:55 utc | 120

on edit: i’m not saying you, annie, are invested in the bullshit. the “everyone else” refers to the other people i tried to talk to last night who told me, in their various ways, to fuck off.

Posted by: Lizard | Aug 30 2008 19:13 utc | 122

@annie, et al…
Well, I wasn’t trying to be crude… nor was it intended to offend you or anyone else annie, however, I wont censor myself either, and see it just that way.
Billmon, –though completely entitled to his feelings and opinion–, has no right what so ever to ask b to remove his links and quit using his history with his readers as a means to gather more readers? What kind of shit is that. He is not a rockstar and I wont put him on a pedestal. And he does have a history of reacting to his readers comments and expressions.
As for billmon watching DC burn, 25 cities in America burned that week, and I didn’t watch it, I was in it, I have my own story that I have shared several times about my personal experience with MLK’s execution and growing up with racism, it was one of the most traumatizing events of my life, and I am still effected by it.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 30 2008 21:43 utc | 124