Sound The Retreat

*




"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

Mad Girl's Love Song.

"To annihilate the world by annihilation of one's self is the deluded height of desperate egoism. The simple way out of all the little brick dead ends we scratch our nails against.... I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb."
Sylthia Plath, Diaries.



In shadows and in health, across flying dreams, these were the times when he was full of life, could see the entire city stretched before him. Horizons were far off. Satellite views resembled his dreams. Far off, far off, the network of houses, the tiny streets, the flagrant call to arms, the fragrance of rotting garbage. He could see them far below, going about their daily activities. The children playing with dog and ball. The December weather. The lonely times. These insights into normal lives. This desire for a fantasy world, cosy, touching, comforting, safe.

That was why he was there. To propel himself into a different state of consciousness. To be an adventurer. To call forth the angels. To batten down and raise a family, to be a decent being inside a human shell, to see the village laid out neatly beneath. Now Sydney had become unlivable. The world had turned against its own citizens. Poor behaviour was rewarded. No one was happy any more. The politicians, driven by university derived ideologies and a chronic inability to think outside the square, led us away from our own true selves, led the culture a merry dance.

Crushed on the pavement, these hyper-real moments were all that was left. Fabricated. Their heads full of lies. He had come, bitterly, not to believe any of them. His old soft left maunders still fragile, still caught in a faith betrayed, still angry at the double cross. He had done everything he had been asked. He had gone to work each day. He had pursued his talents, exploited his own gifts. And the faithful village, the fabric of things where God lay, the substance of not just his dreams but his life and the city which had grown around him, all were retreating against a barbaric tide of self interest. The yuppies had won. Sound the retreat. Who can blame them?

We were shadowed, even up here, flying high in the night, Bat Man without wings, spreading arms in victory, embracing the dark. He could see these shadows and be rewarded. He could see across millions. The towers below housed thousands, but appeared little more than match box toys. They grew up in fear. Laser intelligence denied. Shelter, seek shelter, the warning came. Don't believe these people. There's no safety high up here in the air; where he kept his balance in the night sky, where all was below as he flapped across the sky and disappeared.

The air was cold, he knew that. The freezing night penetrated his pyjamas, shook him awake. But even awake, he was flying high, expanding across the suburb, looking down on his own house and his own misery and declaring: you can be free. There's no need for this suffering. In the shivering, shaking darkness, in the snaking belts, in the brutal beatings, all was not lost. He would never forgive. Never forget. But he could escape, up here in the night sky, way up, travelling, mind spreading.

You can't get me here, you bastard, he thought. But it was difficult to hold his balance, high up here. He was frightened of falling, but equally frightened of waking up; of suddenly discovering this omniscience was nothing but a dream. Stay balanced, stay focused, stay high in the sky above the world, cold star light illumination, shattered suns, freezing cold. He was sure now there would be another day. And his own clairvoyance would be rewarded, part of his destiny. He could hear the shouts coming from the house below. He swooped to see, and saw only himself being beaten by his father, a fragile, skinny, distressed little kid; and all he wanted to do was fly.





THE BIGGER STORY:

The first NY Times story declaring an Obama victory

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/us/politics/05campaign.html?hp

Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.

Mr. Obama’s election amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.

Mr. Obama, 47, a first-term Democratic senator from Illinois, defeated Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, a former prisoner of war who was making his second bid for the presidency.

Mr. McCain offered a gracious concession speech at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix shortly after 11:15 p.m. Eastern time, quieting his booing supporters more than once when he mentioned Mr. Obama’s name. “Senator Obama has achieved a great thing for himself, and for his country,” he said, adding that he was sorry that Mr. Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who helped raise him during his teenage years, had not lived to see the day; she died on Sunday.

“These are difficult times for our country, and I pledged to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face,” Mr. McCain said. “I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our goodwill and earnest effort to find ways to come together.”

To the very end, Mr. McCain’s campaign was eclipsed by an opponent who was nothing short of a phenomenon, drawing huge crowds epitomized by the tens of thousands of people who turned out to hear Mr. Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago.

Mr. McCain also fought the headwinds of a relentlessly hostile political environment, weighted down with the baggage left to him by President Bush and an economic collapse that took place in the middle of the general election campaign.

The day shimmered with history as voters began lining up before dark — hours before polls opened — to take part in the culmination of a campaign that, over the course of two years, commanded an extraordinary amount of attention from the American public.

As the returns became known, and Mr. Obama passed milestone after milestone, winning Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Iowa and New Mexico — many Americans rolled into the streets to celebrate what many described, with perhaps overstated if understandable exhilaration, a new era in a country where just 143 years ago, Mr. Obama, as a black man, could have been owned as a slave.

For Republicans, especially the conservatives who have dominated the party for nearly three decades, the night represented a bitter setback and left them contemplating where they now stand in American politics.

Mr. Obama led his party in a decisive sweep of Congress, putting Democrats in control of both the House and the Senate — by overwhelming numbers — and the White House for the first time since 1995, when Bill Clinton was president. The president-elect and his expanded Democratic majority now faces the task of governing the country through a difficult period: the likelihood of a deep and prolonged recession.

The roster of defeated Republicans included some notable party moderates — including Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire and Rep. Chris Shays of Connecticut— signaling that the Republican conference that convenes in Washington next January will not only be smaller, but more conservative.

Mr. Obama will come into office after an election in which he laid out a number of clear promises: to cut taxes for most Americans, to get the United States out of Iraq in a fast ifand? orderly fashion, and to expand health care. In a recognition of the difficult transition he faces, given the economic crisis, Mr. Obama is expected to begin filling White House jobs as early as this week.

The Democratic sweep took down some well-known Republican senators, including Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina and John E. Sununu of New Hampshire. But Democrats failed to achieve the 60-seat majority required to prevent Republican filibusters.

Mr. Obama defeated Mr. McCain in Ohio, a central battleground in American politics, despite a huge effort that brought Mr. McCain and his running-mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, back there repeatedly. Ohio was a state Mr. Obama lost decisively to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York in the Democratic primary.

Mr. McCain failed to take from Mr. Obama the two Democratic states that were at the top of his target list: New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. And in addition to Ohio, Democrats captured two other Republican states, Iowa and New Mexico.

Mr. Obama comes into office with Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, his vice-presidential running mate. Even before the final results were called, there were indications that Mr. McCain’s advisers were in fact unhappy with their vice-presidential candidate, Ms. Palin, who was announced by Mr. McCain to an explosion of enthusiasm and interest by conservatives and since caused a series of embarrassments for Mr. McCain.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/opinion/05wed1.html?hp

This is one of those moments in history when it is worth pausing to reflect on the basic facts:

An American with the name Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white woman and a black man he barely knew, raised by his grandparents far outside the stream of American power and wealth, has been elected the 44th president of the United States.

Showing extraordinary focus and quiet certainty, Mr. Obama swept away one political presumption after another to defeat first Hillary Clinton, who wanted to be president so badly that she lost her bearings, and then John McCain, who forsook his principles for a campaign built on anger and fear.

His triumph was decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country: the utter failure of government to protect its citizens. He offered a government that does not try to solve every problem but will do those things beyond the power of individual citizens: to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world.

Mr. Obama spoke candidly of the failure of Republican economic policies that promised to lift all Americans but left so many millions far behind. He committed himself to ending a bloody and pointless war. He promised to restore Americans’ civil liberties and their tattered reputation around the world.

With a message of hope and competence, he drew in legions of voters who had been disengaged and voiceless. The scenes Tuesday night of young men and women, black and white, weeping and cheering in Chicago and New York and in Atlanta’s storied Ebenezer Baptist Church were powerful and deeply moving.

Mr. Obama inherits a terrible legacy. The nation is embroiled in two wars — one of necessity in Afghanistan and one of folly in Iraq. Mr. Obama’s challenge will be to manage an orderly withdrawal from Iraq without igniting new conflicts so the Pentagon can focus its resources on the real front in the war on terror, Afghanistan.

The campaign began with the war as its central focus. By Election Day, Americans were deeply anguished about their futures and the government’s failure to prevent an economic collapse fed by greed and an orgy of deregulation. Mr. Obama will have to move quickly to impose control, coherence, transparency and fairness on the Bush administration’s jumbled bailout plan.

His administration will also have to identify all of the ways that Americans’ basic rights and fundamental values have been violated and rein that dark work back in. Climate change is a global threat, and after years of denial and inaction, this country must take the lead on addressing it. The nation must develop new, cleaner energy technologies, to reduce greenhouse gases and its dependence on foreign oil.

Mr. Obama also will have to rally sensible people to come up with immigration reform consistent with the values of a nation built by immigrants and refugees.

There are many other urgent problems that must be addressed. Tens of millions of Americans lack health insurance, including some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens — children of the working poor. Other Americans can barely pay for their insurance or are in danger of losing it along with their jobs. They must be protected.

Mr. Obama will now need the support of all Americans. Mr. McCain made an elegant concession speech Tuesday night in which he called on his followers not just to honor the vote, but to stand behind Mr. Obama. After a nasty, dispiriting campaign, he seemed on that stage to be the senator we long respected for his service to this country and his willingness to compromise.

That is a start. The nation’s many challenges are beyond the reach of any one man, or any one political party.