R D Kernohan

Best of 2008

With many reservations, and though I'd probably have voted for McCain, I'll accept Barack Obama's election as the best event of 2008. He has style and may soon have substance, even if his policies seem confused and he emerges from the miry pit of Illinois Democratic politics. He showed his potential even more in robbing Hillary Clinton of the nomination than in winning an election where events and Bush’s unpopularity worked in his favour.
     In politics there are perceptions which matter and needs to be met. Obama is seen by much of the world to offer a new start (which may bring some reaction when he maintains much continuity) and he is a living symbol of America as land of opportunity and assimilation. America had not just to show but to feel its capacity for change. It also needed sooner or later a symbolic act to show that there were no racial or ethnic barriers to the presidency. Obama seized the opportunity, helped by his mixed race but electable on merit.
     I'd like to think his election will make racial and ethnic sensitivity far less evident in American life but I have my doubts. We still have sensitive feminists here nearly 30 years after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. But there's much in Obama to reassure those of us who loved the older America (with all its faults) and to help others to see a great country in a new light.                                                                         

Worst of 2008
What a range of maladies and disasters to choose from. But Robert Mugabe gets my vote, thanks to the hairsbreadth by which he allegedly survived the first ballot in the Zimbabwean presidential election. (The one where 'counting' took several weeks.) It's only a matter of time before things change there but his mixture of nastiness and obstinacy, encouraged by the thuggish junta around him, ensures that change will not necessarily mean improvement either easily or instantly.
     The opposition may be not be an especially saintly crew either, and at times haven't looked a very effective one, but I don't doubt that the fall of the Mugabe regime could bring Zimbabwe an unprecedented flow of good will, support, and practical assistance. It would also allow a new start for the country and draw on the support of many able Zimbabweans beyond the party cadres.
     It was once such a promising country, despite its troubles in the last phase of Rhodesia. It had developing industries as well as natural resources and there was land enough for the thriving and mainly white commercial agricultural sector to survive while subsistence farming diversified and improved. I don't know what will emerge from the wreckage after Mugabe but despair over 2008 ought to go with continuing hope for 2009 and after. 

Book of 2008
 
When Alexander Solzhenitsyn died I re-read The Gulag Archipelago and The First Circle, the most complex of his semi-autobiographical novels. The old power was there, even though he may not translate easily, but my emotional reactions were inevitably more complex. He still commands awe and honour, for this is some of the great historical art of the 20th-century. But what further complexities of human nature are revealed when old KGB men hold power but ostentatiously cross themselves at funerals in restored cathedrals of Holy Russia!.
     The obituaries made much of these enigmas in the new Russia and Solzhenitsyn's reluctance to endorse liberal democracy, and when they mentioned his rediscovery of Russia's Orthodox faith they presented this as an alienation from the West. They did not make enough of the broad Christian humanism evident in his books and his solidarity in captivity with many sorts of conditions of victims, whether of Stalin’s cruelty or Lenin's legacy.

R D Kernohan is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and Conservative thinker

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