The Great O-What-if-Bama

Wednesday night, we strivers and strugglers with our water and our wine and tuna fell to discussion the gobal tragedy that is Africa. Darfur. Zimbawe. Niger. Ruanda. Kenya. Sierra Leone. The countries of the continent where humanity began is not getting it together. In fact it is going down. In flames.

One woman had taught in African countries for 15 years. She left for the last time when gunfire was exchanged between embassy and insurgents while she huddled away from the windows of her home which was located between them on the street. She refused to get under the bed as her husband suggested. She knew that if they fell into the clutches of the rebels, she wouldn't just be killed like her husband. They would rape her first. Better to be meet your fate standing.

Then someone wondered out loud--in a voice so tentative that it didn't qualify as suggesting--if a different US government would make a difference. If the unilateral U.S. only-ers who have so far not only to managed to avoid jail were tossed out (if not into the garbage where they belong), and we had decent government? What if the policy of the strongest country in the world were...oh say the words softly in anticipation of being mocked...wise and compassionate and moral?

"I assume you mean with the election of Barack Obama?" asked one particularly clear eyed conversant.

"Yeah," the tentative talker said. "Yeah, I do..."

The tenor of the conversation changed. Frustration, despair, impatience faltered. It wasn't like long ago when a doctor named Mugabe became the first black leader of a country formerly called Rhodesia and its team of white females sang a triumphant zulu song at the Olympics and the whole world trembled at the possibility of rightness making an important in-road, of decency scoring a victory as white rule over the country that was called the breadbasket of Africa finally evaporated. We couldn't know then what would happened, and our hope raged.

Not Wednesday night. Wednesday night hope barely flickered. But hope was there. We're American after all by birth, residence, adoption, habit. don't know what difference Obama will make. We do know that we've been let down before.

Thursday was reminder of other leaders who let down their nation to the blood and tears of humanity. This time they were ours. David Addington, whose ignorance is only exceeded by his arrogance, and John Yoo, who like the Nazis seems to think that what's done on federal typewriters has no relation to the blood that flows in the fields, indulged in a bit of verbal play that Congress and the rest of the world called "hearings," and c-span carried their unforgivable pompous inanity into rooms around the world. Addington, who first denied knowing what it meant and then denied that he believed the congressmen knew what it meant, authored the "unitary theory" of the presidency that says that the pres can do anything anything anything anything ("torture a child?" he was asked; he wouldn't say no). Yoo wrote the famous memo that defined torture in such a way things like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, arm twisting, kicking, threats of death to loved ones, would be okay provided there was no permanent harm (huh???) I'm scribing here. Scribes don't comment even when the words they type make them sick. Both men were ugly and rude and made former President Clinton's "depends on what the meaning of "is" is..." circumluction sound friendly and funny.

My dear friend says it isn't enough to banish these Addington, Yoo and the junta that is the W's administration. It isn't even enough to jail them, she says. Hell. Maybe that's enough. If not all eternity at least the next 200 years. My friend is right.

The Obama may not be enough to undo the destruction that men like these have effected. I can't sing no zulu victory song. But hope is creeping in. O-What-i-Obama?

I want my country back.