Only a few short months ago, that's the name many (most!) of my friends shouted -- sometimes textually, sometimes IRL -- as if they were sailors on a 15th century transatlantic voyage who, after long months of enduring filth, rat kabobs and bread as hard as Thor's hammer finally spotted land.
Obama?
That's the name my increasingly disheartened friends whisper as if they're talking about a crazy aunt who lives upstairs with god knows how many cats.
Was it TARP? Or, more precisely, the 'Quickly now! Let's help Wall Street get back to doing exactly what got us in this mess' way TARP was structured? (Mustn't clean house dear; too vigorous a sweeping of the broom might brush away those keen minds we desperately need to help us manage CDOs, SIVs and all the rest of it).
Was it the infusion of new, depleted uranium doped blood into War Plan Afghanistan? Maybe it was seeing young people we know, who were so sure that with Changetron in the captain's chair, they wouldn't have to study war no more, tearfully kissing moms, dads and mates goodbye.
Or maybe it was Gitmo...so complex. What to do, what to do? I know what I said on the campaign trail my beloved changians but, well, it's just so complex. (Speaking of which, much ado was made recently in media circles about the 'dueling speeches' of Pres. Obama and Sith Lord Cheney. The easy baked story was that Obama's 'idealism' was battling Cheney's dark pragmatism. In fact, they both expressed more or less the same policy position -- but one's a nice, young(ish) fellow with a lovely, accomplished wife and two adorable kids and the other looks like someone Batman thought he killed years ago.)
I don't know if it was any one of those entirely predictable moves by President Obama or their collective effect but people who told me to shut up, or get with the 'post politics', 'post racial' program or that I was jealous or any of the other nyah, nyah, nyah I'm not listening things that were said at the dawn of the Age of Change have been coming back to chat.
'How could he break his promises?' They ask. Oh, he hasn't really broken any promises, I reply. You just didn't hear what was being said.
But now that you *are* listening, it's time to learn a few more things about the apparatus your Transformer doll manages and why you need to abandon ersatz hope and cultivate something closer to the real thing (real hope is one part gin, one part vermouth, one part wise melancholia and one part situational awareness).
...
So, the lot of us sat down to dinner and hash it out. Klaxon!, recently arrived in Philly from LA was there (and sweetly slipped me an absurdly big check to help us bridge the unemployment gap) along with old friends Missile Designer, Formula One, The Mentalist, Jesus 2 and Zerdoya: El baron del Terror.
Why, we could have graced the cover of Black and/or Latino Enterprise magazine (or at least, the front page of a website), such a collection of 'clean, articulate' good looking black and brown fellows!
The restaurant was expensive; too expensive for the age of Cashageddon. Good thing Klaxon! was there with his Hollywood blood money.
We talked about Obama and Washington and whether 'nice' people with pretty families can make a difference, or even want to.
But that's a story for another time.
.d.