This was just highlightedby David Kurtz over at TPM, so I'm sure some of you saw it, but for those who didn't, I thought it was worth a diary. Maybe especially because there have been so many horrendous things in the news.
This is troubadour Bob Dylan taking a stab at our historical moment -- as crystalized in the parentage and trajectory of one Barack Hussein Obama.
He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage - cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.
It's the end that gets me. An Odyssey in reverse. Took me a moment to fill that in. What does it mean to reverse the narrative of the Odyssey? The Odyssey is the story of a man who endures years of hardship and unexpected diversions in a journey to return to his home from a long war. Setting aside the million ways in which the analogy breaks down, I'm grateful to Dylan for helping me see that take on how our president has taken his long, almost inexplicable journey: from a birth in Hawaii, to the center of the maelstrom, where he now lives.
Obama pisses me off sometimes. He's real, he's fallible. But despite his at times overly-cautious, long game (especially in the realm of finance, unless he really is just keeping the reactor from going critical while he slowly cools it down), he is an extraordinary man. We are lucky to have him in these treacherous times.
If you don't want to talk about Obama, who would you like to celebrate? Who has risen to the occasion of this moment in history? Leaders, movements, whatever.
I'll start with the good doctor: thank you Howard!
And the left blogosphere (yay us!).
But I'm not quite the storyteller Dylan is. Would-be lyricists and historians of the present, how would you frame our trajectory over the last ten or twelve years?