anaphalaxis

And it looks like as the evenings are darkening the world is, in fact, looking a little brighter. The worlds only remaining superpower is no longer ruled by a man with the emotional maturity of a box of coco pops and the intellect of, well, a coco pop.
Now we've got a guy who doesn't work for the yeehaw/cavalry-over-the-hill/praise-the-lord-and-fuck-you brigade. He works for the other lot. The lot that feel some sort of responsibility towards the people who get screwed by the system (although not enough to actually change it). The Democrats are the left wingers in the US, and often derrided as socialists and even communists. That's how tight a grip the American right has on the conciousness of ordinary people: enough to convince them that a party that are, by the standards of the rest of the world, very much of the right wing, are borderline communists because they dare to suggest provision for the people that fall through the gaps in the gutter grille.
That's pretty rich considering you designed the grille, purposely left very big gaps and to boot regularly sluice gallons of effluence down it.

But anyway, I digress. Will things get better? I bloody hope so. How much faith do I have? Well, a little. The main reason I have any at all is that it's pretty hard to do a worse job. If the world hated America before, by god, hearing the chauvinistic war mongering pap of the Republican senior politicians didn't help one little bit. They did a great job of turning everything they touched to shit. Sort of like the reverse midas touch. That's hard to do if you're trying, apparently very easy to do if you're an arrogant jingoistic moron who's trying to get things right.
I hope that America realizes that they're hated mainly because of the policies of people like Cheyney, Bush, Allbright and Co. I hope it enters in to the national political conscience that charging in to battle blowing a bugle and shouting "USA, USA" while you do so doesn't endear you to the rest of the world. I hope ordinary people wake up to the fact that they need to be vigilant, that it isn't OK to blindly support the acts of your political leader out of some misguided concept of patriotism- that while you wave a flag and cheer them on the rest of the world are judging *you* by their actions, so you better make damned sure their actions are ok.

I don't think we'll be seeing things like Extraordinary Rendition, Waterboarding, Camp X-ray and the like under Obama. I think he's probably a reasonably ok guy.

In a sense though, that's a bad thing. We won't see any of those things because he's a good guy, not because they're considered party political election issues. The democrats didn't campaign along the lines of "how can you vote for a party that condones torture abroad- look what happened while they were in charge, and indeed, look at what they actually consciously sanctioned".

That's a shame. Unfortunately lots of people can be convinced that actually those things don't really matter because, you know, it's just a bunch of foreign people and they're so very far away, and it's war anyway so these things happen".

But I also think ordinary people in the US and abroad, are waking up. I think people are acquiring what Marx would have called "class consciousness", but nowadays I suppose we could call "political cynical intelligence"- the ability to see the powers that be for what they are, understand your relation to them, and hold them responsible for what they do accordingly.
Fact is, most people don't, I think, like the idea of anyone, foreign or not, being tortured. Most people think it's a bad state of affairs when you can't look after the health and education of your own population. Most people think politicians are lying self seeking scumbags.
There are unfortunately enough people in every society who hear someone say something *a little* but not a lot controversial on CNN they go along with it, and sort of forget their natural decency, because their instinct to follow the crowd is stronger than their moral backbone. In a system where the means of dissemination of information are owned by people who's political agenda is other than the welfare of ordinary people, be they at home or abroad, it's hard to make the voice of decency heard. That voice needs to fight against those that sit on TV in a smart suit and feign respectability and say things like "well, a little bit of torture is ok isn't it? After all, they are terrorists". But the voice of decency only really needs to whisper to be effective. Why? Because it appeals to something that's already there- basic decency. Most people have it, they just forget it easily. The slick suited fuckers need to shout that much louder, because they're trying to do something harder- convince people of things which they don't already, instinctively believe.