The Scottish Reviewers

A bullet in the wings?

Bruce Gardner

I am intrigued by Barack Obama. He sounds like an echo of Martin Luther King, the African-American church minister and civil rights leader of the 1960's, whose passion on behalf of decency and freedom was predictably ended by a bullet. Even Obama's rhetorical grandeur recalls King at his height of eloquence. It almost feels like a return to the Kennedy-King era. Sadly, for those of us who lived through the 1960's, that thought has a sombre resonance.
     Obama might make a substantial contribution to the governance of America, but whether he can 'fix Washington' or not is debatable. In my opinion (based on a very brief – but extremely memorable – encounter with the denizens of that alien world), there exists a profound spiritual issue in Washington DC that partakes of the dark side. Indeed, were it not for Abe Lincoln, Dr Martin Luther King, John and Bobby Kennedy, and Barack Obama, the US might seem hopelessly dark. The fact that my list of heroes – all but the last – is a series of assassination victims, also, is the cloud on Obama's horizon. Does he ever wonder if some grassy knoll or theatre box is being measured up for him by agents of some invisible stratum of America?
     Corporate power-play can make predators look benign. However, the bête noire of the Hard Right has felt significant body blows: first, the credit crunch blew away any claim to universal cash-competence; second, the gradual exposures of the bogus motives – and incompetent handling – of the Iraq war (including its mind-boggling premise that destroying a non-Islamic state in the Middle East would weaken Islamic terror), has permanently undermined the Hard Right in the political wisdom stakes. Mere fantasies of power and greed came crashing down.
     America is a constitutionally secular-humanist country, establishing no religion, and yet it has an annoying habit of strong-arming God in, to endorse various political aims and mistakes. In reality, its actions do not serve Christian interests. I heard an English bishop preach, in 2002, that another Iraq war would decimate the Iraqi church through Islamic reaction. And so it did.
     Just the year before I led a memorial service for victims of 9/11, on behalf of the diplomatic community in Colombo, Sri Lanka. I reminded those present that many victims, before dying, had used mobile phones to tell someone they loved them. I said that 9/11 was a violation of love. Yet the Iraq war has not helped love to win. It is still heart-breaking to see lives wasted under the cynical delusion that this most misdirected of foreign-policy disasters – perhaps the worst ever conceived – is 'payback' for 9/11. That our government misled Britain into support such a specious lie is a stain that will never remove, although none of it besmirches the dead.
     The thing I like about Obama is that he seems believable. Time will tell what he makes of it. If he can lead us to believe the America of Lincoln, Truman and Kennedy exists, well and good, but one spin-off is already assured: the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) illusion has passed, and with it the vain dream of white supremacy which was never realistic. Now there is only one world that counts – the real one in which the human race will have to learn to grow up in peace and try to sort out what being human means to us. There's a challenging thought.
     If anyone could help in such a world-wide debate it could well be some wiser President of the United States. So I wish Barack Obama well. It might be good to see an America president go back to some Kennedy recovery-point, before Iraq and Vietnam. It has been a very long wait. My only prayer is that no bullet waits in the wings. Or under one wing of the American Eagle.