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Et sus av forventning

Foto: CartoonArts International/The New York Times Syndicate

Amerikanske velgere har høye forventninger før årets valg – men mange er redde for å bli skuffet.

Kommentaren er en del av Dagsavisens dekning av USA-valget og presenteres som en følge av samarbeidet mellom Dagsavisen og The New York Times:

Don't Worry, Be Happy

«We have a record of getting excited, then being disappointed,» Monica Albertie, a health care executive in Jacksonville, Fla., said, heartbreakingly, to The Times this week, channeling the inability of many black Floridians to feel anything like joy or triumph as Election Day approaches, bringing with it the very real prospect of our country's first African American president.

Black voters in Florida have particularly good reason to temper their hopes with caution. In 2000, it was they who were most grossly and disproportionately disenfranchised in the state's election debacle.

Yet the trepidation they feel at what should be a moment of pleasurable anticipation isn't unique. All around the country, would-be jubilant Democrats are poised in a defensive crouch, voicing way more anxiety than hope about what polls are predicting will be a solid victory for Barack Obama.

«I'm more twitchy than a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs,» Democratic blogger Cynthia Liu put it this month in a post called «Post-Traumatic Election Anxiety Disorder.»

«DO NOT pay attention to the polls,» Kim Gandy, the chairwoman of the National Organization for Women Political Action Committee, wrote in an online column this week. «OK, for a few precious moments you can revel Now stop – that's long enough!»

The excitement/disappointment cycle of the past two elections has taken a toll on many Democrats. Some have undergone a kind of progressive self-numbing. Their brains could register only so much outrage before they became desensitized and began to rewire themselves to adapt. Oliver Stone's bizarrely inert new movie «W» exhibits just that kind of circuits-overloaded mental compromise.

Philip Roth, on the other hand, in last year's novel «Exit Ghost,» painted a brilliant portrait of the fallout of too much political heartbreak. Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, a near shut-in, decides, post Bush v. Gore, (an election he describes as «perfectly calculated to quash the last shameful vestige of a law-abiding citizen's naivete») to cut himself off from all awareness of politics, precisely in order to shut out any future glimmers of hope.

«Having lived enthralled by America for nearly three-quarters of a century,» Zuckerman says, «I had decided no longer to be overtaken every four years by the emotions of a child – the emotions of a child and the pain of an adult.»

This aversion to joyful anticipation is a feeling I know very well, and not just in relation to politics. Anticipating the worst – from birthdays, other holidays, vacations – is kind of my modus vivendi.

It is a habit of mind so natural and ingrained – and seemingly self-protective – that I've never thought to change it. Until this week, when a friend pointed out that, if one were to think like a realist instead of a knee-jerk pessimist, enjoying the moments in life when good things might be about to happen makes sense.

«You may as well enjoy the anticipation,» she said, «Because it may be all that you'll get.»

There are, of course, sensible reasons to resist the pull of happiness right now: reports of touch-screen voting machines in West Virginia, Tennessee, Texas and Missouri «flipping» votes from one party to the other; a confusing ballot design in North Carolina that could result in tens of thousands of invalid votes; the Bradley effect; the Wilder effect; and that one Associated Press poll last week showing McCain and Obama in a dead heat.

But there are also good reasons to consider throwing off our evil-eye-repelling negativity and taking a moment to smell the roses.

The Bush years are almost over.

The era that began with police roadblocks keeping black voters from the polls in Florida is ending with the first African American almost-president.

The long, wretched period bookmarked by the Florida recount and the Wall Street bailout, encompassing, for starters, 9/11, anthrax (and the run on duct tape), Iraq, the Medicare prescription drug sellout, Katrina and such loony White House extremism that even the naked-statue-draping John Ashcroft emerged as a voice of moderation, is about to pass into the history books.

And while we're destined to live with its consequences for years to come – and with the fallout of Bush's judicial choices, in particular, for another generation – there's a fair sense that the truly rabid conservatism that gripped the Republican party after the 1994 Gingrich revolution has run its course.

The arrogance that led to torture abroad and tax cuts for the wealthy at home has been repudiated by the electorate – even at Republican rallies, where John McCain dares not speak Bush's name.

The anti-government religion that brought the deregulation and privatization of just about everything is in a process of reformation. A period of endless, unreflective free market triumphalism – launched, it must be said, in the Clinton years – has given way to a moment of reckoning.

It is unattractive, perhaps unacceptable, to feel any kind of satisfaction in these dark days of credit crunches and a bipolar Dow. But you have the sense that, as a nation, we've collectively hit rock bottom after a long-term binge of self-destruction, and have been greatly improved by the pain.

What follows may be better or (hard though it is to imagine) it may be worse. But whatever happens, those of us who are tired of experiencing the «despising without remission» that Zuckerman was moved to flee in the Bush years are entitled now to a tiny moment of elation.

And we'd better grab it.

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