Being Right from the Left

The purpose of this blog has always been to write what the big boys would not write.

It was a task born of media obsequiousness during the deepest darkest days of the Bush administration when no one dared point out the emperor's nakedness.

highwayscribery was a way for one angry leftist scribe to find catharsis while using the leveling and democratic graces of the Internet to disseminate a counter-message.

So with the whole world spewing ink about Barack Obama, we abandon our mission by doing the same.

Forgive us.

highwayscribery's particular stake in the Obama candidacy is obvious and the few regular readers we have accumulated during three-plus years of blogging will come looking for the particular flavor we sell here.

Obama has been a favorite since "Dreams of My Father," was reviewed circa June 2006, wherein we expressed our pleasure at the excellence of the writing and subtle thought that curious book proffers.

We correctly foresaw new American realities that would reveal themselves throughout the election year in "Considering Barack Obama."

We wrote with urgency about the need for the change then-Sen. Obama represented in "highwayscribery on Super Tuesday."

Blogging's promise was fulfilled with "Kristol's Ball," which involved a single-handed, successful campaign to get a crucial "correction," announced in the conservative columnist's "New York Times" piece, applied to other newspapers where it had been syndicated.

In the campaign's most perilous moment, the overblown "Jeremiah Wright controversy," the scribe wrote with passion, desperation even, against the concerted effort to bring down this uncommon man in "Damning Ourselves."

One hundred dollars were given in dribs and drabs thanks to the campaign's unique technology that took any size contribution, through the Internet, especially when the news seemed bleak and the cause needed a bucking-up.

Eyes on the prize of real change, we criticized the Illinois senator's vote to expand domestic spying as a form of counterterrorism in, "Obama: Wrong of FISA," as no change at all.

But in the end, it seemed the country was lucky enough, for once - all cultural considerations aside - to have the smartest guy in the room offering his unique services.

And we think that is what swayed the election.

But the economy, or Iraq, large as they are, seem mundane before the size of our nation's accomplishment.

It is an accomplishment rooted in self-correction. A demonstration to the rest of the world that we agree with them; that we recognize how our country has been a rogue idiot and how they have paid the higher price.

It is an accomplishment as demonstration; demonstration of the ways in which we have changed, matured, and evolved as a nation.

We do not wave the flag often here, but we do so today. There is hardly a country on this planet that has force-fed itself the consideration of ugly issues associated with native racism and come out smelling quite so good as the Unites States of America.

Yes world, our president is your president, and for once we have synchronized your interests with our own. We have imprinted a new American icon.

Relate to us through him.

Most touching of all is the immeasurable effect upon the black community, which has been, unwillingly at first, a part of the American story for over 400 years.

"Immeasurable" because there was no black citizen, asked following Obama's victory, who did not begin their remarks with, "It's hard to find the words..." "Words escape me..." "It's hard for me to explain what I'm feeling..."

Words, of course, were not necessary where faces glowed, eyes shimmered with tears, and shoulders slumped as if relaxing from a centuries-long struggle.

Finally, and back down on the cold, hard ground, there is the satisfaction of having been right.

Twenty-eight years ago, in a college dorm room at Old Dominion University, this budding scribe watched America make a philosophical decision that had its apotheosis in George W. Bush's unfortunate 2004 reelection.

The ensuing era saw the likes of worthwhile public servants with names like Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry, and two future Nobel Prize winners Gore and Carter, skewered upon the altar of anti-intellectualism and a politics that stopped at the border between the individual and everybody else surrounding.

It was an era in which government pulled out of a handshake first offered the common man by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It was an era that redistributed income upward as if it were morally correct. An era which decimated unionization and that crucial element to industrial democracy - the most relevant kind of democracy - collective bargaining.

It was an era that tore the country apart with its support for war over talk in every instance, in its elevation of the rural over the urban, in its consecration of base emotion against reasoned logic.

An era that is over.

Congratulations America, congratulations world.