Today, we are all Americans!
On September 20, 2001, nine days after the WTC bombing, French President Jacques Chirac, alighting from the chopper that overflew ground zero, muttered these memorable and unforgettable words.
Today we are all Americans.
Not since 9/11, has so much of the world’s population been so connected with America; have so many people from diverse backgrounds been so keyed into things American!
Eight years after Florida, American elections again dominate world news; this time for the right reasons.
Barrack Obama is the 44th President of the United States.
Pause for a moment – freeze this statement; etch it on history’s frieze alongside other momentous statements such as: Veni, vidi, vici - Ich bin ein Berliner- L’etat, c’est moi – etc.
Think of how much meaning and history is packed into that simple sentence, reflect on how 400 years of slavery brought the world to this point and you will understand why everyone feels a sense of the moment.
Years ago, celebrating another momentous happening – when De Klerk and Mandela stood shoulder to shoulder to receive the Nobel Peace Prize- Lance Morrow, one of my all-time favourites, wrote: ‘the ascent from the basement (of the brain) where the crocodile lives, above tribal memory and hatred, to the upper chambers of the brain, is the most impressive climb man has made.’
As one part of the world went to bed on November 4, 2008, America rose out of the basement of racial doubt; above a 200 year history of shame, of lynchings, of Jim Crow laws, of the Ku Klux Klan; above a past where there was such a thing as the Mann Act; where just 40 years ago, schools and buses were segregated.
Americans, mostly young, rose up, and in one bold stroke of history swept all that away, renewing their country in the process and remaking its covenant with the rest of the world.
After today, we would dare call this the American century; we may declare that world peace may yet be Pax Americana.
No-one this side of heaven has ever doubted America’s strength or seriously believed it was in decline – it was still the world’ richest and (in Kissinger terms – ‘a nuclear bomb under your pillow’) most powerful country.
What it had lost was its moral ‘majority’ – its right to be the world’s conscience.
For years, to paraphrase Ed Murrow; America was like a bull in a darkened house, kicking down door after door in search of light; in the process breaking a heck of a lot of crockery.
It wielded a big stick when talking softly would have helped – from Vietnam, Iran and Iraq to Afghanistan; America became a parody of itself – a ‘benevolent superpower’ that was starting and losing war after war.
Just 72 hours ago, America had egg on its face from its foreign misadventures.
Not anymore.
Today, no American need feel shame again.
America can truly stand up and talk to the rest of the world –about human rights, about democracy – because once again there is something called an American dream.
The Star Spangled Banner may now truly wave over the land of the free and home of the brave.
It took real courage to look into the twilight and walk the walk of faith.
The long walk to freedom is not over. Not by a long shot.
As one commentator wrote after the primaries, Obama has proved he can walk on water, now where are the loaves and fishes?
The messy economy still has to be straightened out – the unpopular wars ended – but one thing that has defined America of the past is that elusive compound of hope and self-belief.
And hope, if nothing else, is what Barrack Hussein Obama – 44th President of United States, embodies.
What happened yesterday was not really such a momentous shift – America has always been the land of the possible – the place where misfits and castaways come to make good.
Most people forget – and of course 200 years can create selective amnesia – that the people who sailed to America with the Mayflower, were mostly fugitives and poor folk from Europe. The founders of America were not from the Aristocracy of the old world (whatever the pretensions of the latter-day Brahmins of New England).
So it is not inconceivable that in a country where a wrestler and a body builder (turned actor) all became Governors (and even President) –a Harvard-educated, black lawyer would one day tenant the ‘white’ house.
As Winston Churchill said after the fall of Berlin, this is the end of a beginning.
It's been a season of great symbolism – the latest being the platform where the man of the moment delivered his acceptance speech.
Chicago (immortalized in Candy Staton’s stark song ‘the Ghetto’) where a decade ago another black man defied gravity on the basketball court; in the windy city, 10 years after Michael Jordan won his last ring; Barrack Obama stood and reached for the skies.
In this blue-collar city, so truly African-American, the baton of change was conclusively handed over to a new generation.
There was a final poignant moment for me, when the cameras panned to a face in the crowd.
A man who had been there, seen it all and borne witness, even to the assassination of the first black hope –was standing, alone in the crowd.
It seemed to me just appropriate - that this man, largely perceived as the bridge between that not-so-distant part and the once ‘unattainable’ future; a man who came to embody all the hopes and inconsistencies of the old generation, their great dreams and personal failures (remember his rather grudging un-support for Obama), would be here too, standing at this watershed of history.
Hemmed in by the surging crowd, witness to a ‘dream’ he never really believed feasible, under the wash of lights, Jesse Jackson wept.