Michael Chabon: Obama vs. the Phobocracy

Michael Chabon just may be among the finest writers of our time, right up there with the likes of Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavio Paz, Zadie Smith, Yukio Mishima, Michel Houellebecq & Cormac McCarthy.

In a piece in yesterday's WaPo, he captures in a powerful way where America finds itself  coming into the 2008 election:

The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.

That just about sums it up - a form of government premised on the unifying concept of fear.

On the day of a primaries across America, I could never communicate with better clarity than Chabon why I support Barack Obama:

To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope, to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation to be more than merely secure or predominant. We must allow ourselves to believe in Obama, not blindly or unquestioningly as we might believe in some demagogue or figurehead but as we believe in the comfort we take in our families, in the pleasure of good company, in the blessings of peace and liberty, in any thing that requires us to put our trust in the best part of ourselves and others. That kind of belief is a revolutionary act. It holds the power, in time, to overturn and repair all the damage that our fear has driven us to inflict on ourselves and the world.

And when we all wake up on Nov. 5, 2008, to find that we have made Barack Obama the president of the United States, the world is already going to feel, to all of us, a little different, a little truer to its, and our, better nature. It is part of the world's nature and of our own to break, ruin and destroy; but it is also our nature and the world's to find ways to mend what has been broken.

We can do that. Come on. Don't be afraid.

Comments

[Rick]

I think one of the things that drew me to Obama is that I wouldn't be afraid to have him in the White House. Certain stances and vocabulary from every other candidate across all lines scared the bejeebers out of me, but not him.