Anne Bitsch

Det er ikke så ofte jeg lar andre slippe til på sidene her, men i dag fikk jeg denne mailen fra sosiologen og mannsforskeren Michael Kimmel som kommer med følgende kommentar til resultatet av det amerikanske presidentvalget:

Friends:
All day and all night yesterday I was getting e-mails from my friends around the world — probably 50 total — reminding me how the world stood with us, hoped for us, believed in us.  And today I can honestly say that I’m proud again to be an American, that I no longer have to begin all me speeches in Europe apologizing for my government, and reminding friends that the administration and the people were different.  I have not felt that I truly believed in my country in some time.

It is hard to imagine that a black man will be our president.  When I was 13, my family took a car trip through the south to visit my grandparents in Florida.  In 1964, I saw public water fountains that were labeled “white only” or “colored only.”  Public toilets that were labeled.  Being from the north I had no mental framework for this, no way to really understand it.  That was just over 40 years ago, just over 40 years since people were murdered trying to help people register and vote.  Yet for the past 40 years, that was a world that felt familiar, that I could still recognize in America.  It feels now, finally, like an eternity.  Like another world.  Just as I grew up believing I would never see Nelson Mandela walk out of prison, I confess I never believed I would see a black man become our President.

As you all have your own theories of the election, I will share only two thoughts I have on this happy morning.  First, the election represents a repuidiation of sexism.  The choice of Sarah Palin, an unqualified anti-feminist, was a cynical choice, designed to drive a wedge in between the Democratic voters who had supported Hillary Clinton and those who had supported Obama in the primary.  The Republicans believed that women could be kept away from a “feminist” agenda by simply nominating one for the Vice-Presidency.  They believed that women would come over to a party that opposes everything that women believed in because a female mouth was saying them.  It was the essence of essentialist politics, a gynceological politics.  And women rejected it entirely.  Women showed they were too smart to be seduced by someone simply because she was a woman.  The cynically sexist assumption that women were too stupid to vote their interests, and would instead vote for fashionable clothing was utterly repudiated.

But this, even, speaks to a deeper way the campaign was run.  McCain, like Bush and like BOTH Clintons, saw the electorate as a collection of identifiable parcels — race, ethnicity, age, gender, religion, region.  And so they approached the election  with messages crafted to appeal to this group or that group, hoping to aggregate these parcels into a winning combination (and never mind that it might erode instantly after the election).  It was the essence of interest-group politics.  Subdivide and conquer.

Obama ran his campaign like a community organizer — it’s just that his community was the entire country.  He never seemed to parcellize his message, he was always speaking to the nation as a whole.  He was intuitively, genuinely, multicultural — but emphasizing similarities rarther than differences.  He spoke to us as Americans.  This morning I felt like an American.  And I felt like that was a good thing to be.  And that is a rare and precious feeling.

And it is a monumental generational change.  In 1960, John F,. Kennedy said at his inauguration that “a torch has been passed to a new generation, born in this century…”  (I can still hear him say that, and I wrote it just now from memory because it remains so indelibly clear in my head).  I was 9 at the time.  It was to me that he spoke.  I was that “new generation.”

Obama is the first president born AFTER 1960, the first president for whom the Vietnam War did not define his youth or young manhood.  The first non-baby-boomer president.  Zachary (Kimmel’s son, ed.) is 9.  Obama is Zachary’s president.

And it makes me happier than I can say to write those words.

Thanks to you all for your words of encouragement and support over the past 8 dark years.

Love,
Michael