By Hannes Artens

Enchanting the world for one day will not be enough (Source: Der Spiegel)

"America has elected her future," "Hello world! America's back!," "Obama, President of the Global Village," and "Baracking the world" were just a few of the headlines around the globe frenetically celebrating the election of Barack Obama as the US' 44th president. And rightly so. The historic dimension of this victory is impossible to underestimate. Every comparison to the great eras of transition heralded at the polls in 1964 and 1980, arguably even to the end of apartheid in South Africa, seems appropriate. The fundamental difference this year, however, is that the phenomenon Barack Obama is not limited to one single country, to one people making history by ushering in change, but that the Democratic presidential candidate has been adopted by the whole world as its savior, as its hope for a better future, for a more just and egalitarian society. Obama has become the personification of the America we want to see, the antipode of all we came to see for far too long.

Smiling faces and beaming eyes from Calcutta to Caracas prayed for him to not only let America be again the dream it used to be, pictured by Langston Hughes, the mighty, benevolent Miss Liberty lifting her lamp beside the golden door, Emma Lazarus idolized, but to reach out a helping hand to those left behind, in fact being doomed to obliviousness or even abused by the compassionate conservatism and American exceptionalism of the past eight years. It takes me a while and quite a mental effort to recall the Stars and Stripes being waved in ecstatic buzz in the streets of foreign lands instead of being soaked in gasoline and torched. On Tuesday night it happened, in the tens of thousands. And rightly so.
__________________________

 Buzzflash     Digg     NewsHeat
__________________________

These elated celebrations, however, were soon tempered by words of caution, by understandable and justified monitions that such high expectations inevitably will be disappointed, that back down from cloud nine and dealing with the intricacies of everyday life will follow sooner than wished. The Christian Science Monitor, as many others, presented the president-elect with a global to-do list that would have had even Hercules shouting for the towel in despair, The Economist tries for months to put us in the right, sober mood for the challenges ahead, and Simon Tisdall from The Guardian even goes so far in his gloominess to allege that Obama's reign will come down to "hegemony with a happy face" only, that in sum it will differ more in appearance and rhetoric than substance from the lamentable past.

This pessimism might be as exaggerated as the veneration of Barack Obama as the global messiah who, after eight years in the desert of "who's not with us is against us" will guide us all into promised land of postmodernism, where Kantian Peace will flow like milk and honey. Admitted, the America of Guantanamo and "extraordinary rendition" hopefully will soon belong to the past, but that doesn't mean that the Age of Aquarius is upon us. Barack Obama faces the worst legacy any successor to the White House since James Buchanan's has had to beard, the global standing of the United States is at its absolute nadir - a stocktaking of an inevitable decline I attempted a month ago, which you are free to juxtapose with Sean Paul's encounters and observations from the road - and the IMF just made global recession for 2009 official. Let there be no doubt that President Obama will not only have to shoulder the heaviest burden but also face the most formidable challenges of any president since FDR succeeded Herbert Hoover. None of these dares will be met by enchanting the world for just one single day. The gauntlet will have to be taken up, American exceptionalism will have to be proven by the good it can deliver and not the destruction it can bring, and the world's respect and cooperation will have to be earned every single day anew from now until January 20, 2017.

We here at The Agonist will act as a constant reminder, the slave in ancient Rome who whispered Memento mori, "Remember, that you're mortal!", into the victorious general's ear during his triumph march through the streets, to President Obama. In this spirit, I will start a series next week addressing the three, as I see it, most important challenges President Obama will have to tackle - transatlantic cooperation and Russia on Monday, Iran together with Israel/Palestine on Wednesday, and the trickiest and most pressing front, Afghanistan/Pakistan, to conclude on Friday - and invite you all to put your two cents in then. Let next week be dedicated to analysis, this week deserves to be for celebration only.

--
Hannes Artens is the author of The Writing on the Wall, the first anti-Iran-war novel.