Building a Green Bubble: The Beautiful Project

I think it would be irresponsible to answer the question "what is society's most pressing problem" by pointing to anything other than the economic crisis. It is a relatively non-controversial statement to suggest that there are very few people in the media worlds of political reporting and cultural commentary who completely grasp the severity and depths of the crisis we are debating in the public discourse. Indeed, the economy is a complicated field to understand, and I certainly make no pretense to authority herein. But I am very concerned that while much of the recent news stories and punditry seem to be concerned with political warfare—whether or not Republicans and Democrats can get together on an economic stimulus legislation—there are plenty of signs that there is little that can be done to rescue the economy from a severe depression.
 

In a prescient article from the February 2008 issue of Harper's magazine, Eric Janszen warned that what we are now experiencing—the economic effects of the collapse of the housing bubble—are the consequences of what has become the normal ebb and flow of the macroeconomic mechanism that supports the American, and world, economy. Chronicling the evolution of bubble markets since World War I to the present moment, Janszen argues quite persuasively that the cycle of the bubble economy—the alternating "booms and busts" most recently manifest as the dot-com/dot-bomb and the current home-ownership-society cum foreclosure-auction-society—is now inextricably fundamental to the economic flow. Janszen notes: "That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle."
 

Janszen wasn't alone is his foresight. NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini and contrarian Nassim Nicholas Taleb are two of the few more visible commentators who cried early warnings of the pending doom. And all three worry we are looking at a bigger problem than is commonly understood. While there are plenty of Pollyannas suggesting that fears of "Depression 2.0" are the product of undue cynicism, Taleb warns that globalization not only threatens to expand the scope of the disaster, but also the speed at which it might escalate. Employing a somewhat hyperbolic metaphor to illustrate his point, he notes that in a globalized world, "you cancel an order, a Christmas order here [in the USA], a factory in China closes hours later!" Contrary to previous recessions, this one is an instantaneous worldwide phenomenon.
 

Another sobering outlook comes from Martin Feldstein, Harvard professor and chief economics advisor during the Reagan administration. Recently named to the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, Feldstein echoes all of these concerns, noting that even if a stimulus makes its way into the hands of American taxpayers and businesses, the regular functioning of the broader economy may not be strong enough without a surrogate engine that keeps it afloat. Feldstein noted in an interview on Charlie Rose that one of his greatest fears is that: "we can prop up the economy, replace the lost consumer spending by having government programs and temporary tax cuts, but then at the end of two years, if we turn all that off, there's nothing to guarantee that the economy will continue to go forward."
 

Although this boom and bust prophecy puts Feldstein and Janszen on the economics team labeled by Robert Reich as "cyclists," even Reich's "structuralist" alternative acknowledges that some basic infrastructural changes are necessary to solve the economic riddle. Pointing to structural flaws in the economy that have worsened since the 1970s, Reich is quick to point out that American dependence on fossil fuels is one area that is sucking resources of American wealth dry.
 

While all of these commentators will have various degrees of confluence on any number of issues, it seems pretty clear that all would agree that the economy is in serious trouble. While not as clear, I would argue also that they would all also agree that one robust solution to this crisis might be the development of a green technology economy.
 

At the end of the Harper's article, Eric Janszen suggests that a Green Bubble is the only viable solution to the current debacle. Not only does he agree, Tom Friedman has been beating this war drum for awhile. Echoing Janszen in his NYT column in September, Friedman notes:

The late 20th century saw an Internet boom, bubble and bust. Some people made money; many people lost money, but that dot-com bubble left us with an Internet highway system that helped Microsoft, I.B.M. and Google to spearhead the I.T. revolution.

The early 21st century saw a boom, bubble and now a bust around financial services. But I fear all it will leave behind are a bunch of empty Florida condos that never should have been built, used private jets that the wealthy can no longer afford and dead derivative contracts that no one can understand.

Many of the economists cited above might disagree with Janszen's call for a new bubble. After all, what happens at the end of that cycle? What would we do when the Green Bubble pops? But if we take Friedman's point to heart, that a Green Bubble would leave behind a cleaner, more affordable, more efficient and more effective international society, we might be able to finally escape the boom and bust cycle of the bubble economy model. Because energy is the lynchpin of all economic activity, if we can develop an energy infrastructure that allows us to tap into the clean, abundant and persistent energy resources of the natural world, we might not need a new economic cycle to take up the slack. And rebuilding the world's energy infrastructure would be such a monumental and all encompassing project that, even though millions of jobs would be lost in the change, we would generate millions of jobs and hundreds of trillions of dollars of economic vitality in the process of transition.
 

So in conclusion, if we're lucky, if we can work hard and build enough innovation into the decision making process, and if we can successfully appeal to common sense—if not also profit motives—perhaps society's greatest problem since the Great Depression is really a moment of opportunity to finally move the world in the right direction.

 

More articles in this vein:
Secretary Chu

Obama campaigns for green in LA

On the return of assimilation as an American ideal

Having had the luxury of growing up and having been educated in California -- a state where identity is notoriously in perpetual flux -- I have spent a lifetime in curious examination of the complex cultural constructions of race, ethnicity and identity in America.

CNN recently ran a piece about my high school -- Mission San Jose in Fremont California -- posing the sort of question that perfectly marks a sensationalist trend in "serious" journalism: Are Asian American students naturally more intelligent than their counterparts? Of course, this is an old debate that rings of bells and slippery curves, but the story was also based on a somewhat interesting bit of news: my former high school now enjoys a 75% Asian American populace and some of the highest test scores in the country. Correlation or causation, CNN asks pointedly. Sensitive to this emerging trend, and being the teenage makers-of-cool innovators we were in the adolescent world of the post-boomer American generation, my friends and I developed a conference workshop in the mid 1990s called "Melting Pot? My Ass!" Designed with sincerity and carried out with respect and dignity, if not also with rebellious teenage angst and fury, we carefully indicted and exposed that sinister American colloquialism for all of its conspiratorial insidiousness and its colonizing of our minds.

Having the last name Simpson, I grew up before the main cultural icon bearing my namesake was a cartoon, and turned my imagination instead toward a black man who enjoyed status as a celebrity athlete. I wore his jersey as my own, figuratively if not literally, and grew up with ambitions to become a famous football player. This meant, of course, carrying a notion of myself as "other" for most of my formative years -- a trend which is by now a commonplace in American society; one which, no doubt, adds to the agonizing beauty and complexity of our national character. Indeed, by the time OJ had gained a new version of celebrity, I had already reinvented myself a thousand times, and found myself protesting in solidarity with my classmates in Berkeley against Proposition 209.

Today, having been through the long existential matrix that leads through these kaleidoscopic and chameleonic modes and to the present moment, I now find myself increasingly drawn to the notion that part of the problem we face as a nation is not our lack of "sensitivity to and understanding of the diverse academic, socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds" of our neighbors, but instead is based on our inability to think of everyone under the national umbrella as complete and whole American citizens. This is a problem of language. With our words, our doctrines and catechisms of celebrated difference, we continue to slice and dice ourselves into increasingly separate corners. And then we wonder why we always end up glove to glove in the arena of cultural affairs.

Intellectual honesty begs one question: How can we be both hyphenated and united as one nation? This inquiry is as much a rebuke to the bigots and rednecks that seem increasingly to be constructs of our collective cultural imagination as it is to a generation of baby booming rebels who continue to refuse to let us become a melting pot of Americans separated not by the diversity of our ancestry, but by the differences of our ideas. What if we could live in a world where it was socially acceptable to disagree with one another? Now that would be change I could believe in!

I am a post-boomer/post-race American. I grew up embedded in the real world experience of an America that my parent's generation could only hope would exist. And due in large part to the generation of people I grew up with, a man named Barack Hussein Obama is now my President. And I think that says it all.

Obamoderate

In the latest sign that Obama is a moderate Democrat, find this week's announcement that he is willing to compromise with the GOP on the offshore drilling problem in order to gain some support for developments in alternative energy policy. Call it flip flopping if you like - and it certainly is flip flopping when you phrase your original appeal around the staunch protection of certain issues - politics is ultimately about making complex compromise. In the long view, this is what governors in a republic are supposed to do. This is the way the American democracy was designed to function. It's the reason why the Founding genius of James Madison is honored in contemporary conversation by a meaningful phrase: Madisonian compromise. Sadly and finally, it is going to take a constitutional scholar cum president of the USA to rid the Democrats of their ideologues.

Let Obama's presidency be a warning shot across the bow of all the crackpot pols and pundits in the world, both amateurs and professionals. The era of big mouthed/small minded politics is drawing to a swift close. Your warning goes as follows: When it comes to the history and machinery of American politics and government, best to find yourself in the know before your find yourself left out.

Race Isn't Over

First off, let's get something straight: Barack Obama is not a leftist pandering to the center, he is a centrist pandering to the left.

As a brief and crude history, let's look back to see how the long Democratic primary season leaves Obama in a rather unsavory position. With astute political calculations, Obama knew from jump street that he would be battling senator Clinton for the nod. Because of her unfavorables among middle American voters, and knowing quite well that her only route to the nomination was via this middle road, Obama had no choice but to play to the left of the party. And while the primary contests could have been an all out and ugly melee pitting demographic computations against one another, playing out a dark battle between identity politics and politics of victimhood, (and admitting that the primaries were ugly enough as they were because these issue boiled up from time to time), Obama owned these contests from the start because he came out early in opposition to the war.

Clinton's viability as a serious contender for the presidency, she thought, would hinge on her ability to appeal to the center and right side of American polity. Her husband had become so synonymous with doublespeak and disgrace among independent Americans, she knew that to sidestep the metonymic correlation of her candidacy with his presidency, she would have to find a way to make nice with moderate America. Her vote in favor of the war was only one major component in a long list of moderate to right leaning policy positions undertaken by the senator during the years leading up to the primary contests.

Clinton rightfully assumed that her gender would automatically guarantee the support of the leftist half of her party. She could not have guessed that a more interesting candidate with identity qualities that trumped her gender card would emerge as a serious competitor to the throne.

But team Obama knew he had a shot. Looking at the way Clinton was positioning herself on major issues, Obama knew he could outflank the first lady on the left. His problem then, as it remains today, will be convincing middle America that a black man can be trusted with the store.

The media would have us believe that the election is over and that we will skate right on through November as a mere pit stop on the way to January 20th's inauguration. But the race isn't over. Just as the primary contests are complicated by electoral politics that rank regional strategy above popular vote, so goes the national election. While polls seem to indicate that the nation as a whole favors a President Obama, the media storm raising in presumption of King Obama has all the makings of a monumental national tragedy. What would be the national mood if, given the current climate of commentary, we are all forced to watch as our hero falls short of his goal. Particularly if he loses despite a popular vote majority, the self-hatred that is manifest as naive skepticism and embraced by the Democratic party could ignite and burst in all sorts of ways. I worry that in some ways we are being set up by the media for the kind of national disappointment that can only be compared to traumas like the Civil War and Vietnam.

If Obama's troupe has all their lines memorized, we will begin to see some more nuanced policy positions rise in the next few months. At the moment, Obama knows that his "stay the course" strategy on his Iraq position has become untenable. What they are struggling with is how - in light of the fact that the primary campaign won on that issue - they can move the debate to new ground.

Using Afghanistan to reframe the debate was a deft move, and a nice try, but it didn't catch on they way they had hoped. While we learned that senator Obama is not going to shy away from using American force to bring stability (and democratic authority) to foreign soil, the American people are not going to so quickly forget that that Iraq is still the big issue. As tempting as it is to pretend it would go away if we would just look harder at the mounting problems in Afghanistan, in the end we know that Iraq must come to some sort of resolution.

Drawing our troops out before the Iraqi state is stable is not an option. At this point, anyone who is participating in the debate concedes this point. The facts on the ground will continue to lead the campaigning strategy, but I'm guessing that Obama's long tail still has a few wags left in store for the good old American dog.

Award Tour

A couple predictions about the consequences and aftermath of Barack's world tour.

First, in light of the fact that the Senator has the Democratic nomination under wraps, and in light of the fact that he has been moving back to the middle ground from which his heroic ascent began, we will see the final turn towards the center. Obama's public opposition to the war in Iraq was a political masterpiece. His choice to oppose the war was also the beginning of his campaign. There's little doubt that he was intending to run for president at the time, and the gamble he took by siding against popular convention then is the single most intelligent political move in the past, oh, let's say 30 years. It will single handedly earn him the presidency.

The problem is that, if you look at Obama's political demeanor, especially his demeanor before his candidacy was taken seriously, you find a man who is not a liberal goo goo. In fact, if you listen closely and pick apart some of his remarks on many foreign policy issues, it's possible to see his inner liberal hawk peaking through his dovish campaign costume. I predict that this will be more clearly echoed by his choice of Senator Joseph Biden as his Vice President. IMHO, Biden makes a smarter choice for president at this point in history. His mastery of foreign policy makes him the most supremely qualified democrat to assume the Oval Office. But his counsel as Veep (or Secretary of State) will have to suffice, and there's no reason to suspect that it will not.

If Biden was the smartest choice, Obama will be the wisest choice. Indeed, the wisdom the American people will speak with their votes this November will be measured throughout the rest of time as the moment the world began to finally live up to the promises of modernity. A President Obama will usher in the beginning of the rest of history.

As much of a symbolic shift as his election will signal, much work must still be done to procure the natural rights of mankind across the global board. A President Obama will have the single greatest opportunity to usher in an era of blooming human rights for the greatest amount of under-served and neglected populations in the history of the project of civilization. And judging by my sense of his inner liberal hawk, he intuitively knows this to be true.

Obama is a true believer. I can say this firmly, and only, as a kindred spirit; they say it takes one to know one. There is no questioning that this naturally confident approach to the world is what has gotten so many people riled up about his candidacy (and about his rolling around in the mud). When it comes down to it, there is something inherent to his character that people are responding to, something spiritual that can not be expressed in policy positions and political analysis. He has the kind of charisma that can not be learned, although it must be worked out and perfected over teh course of a young life if it is to be worth any value to the general welfare.

And it seems that Obama has done this work. He gets it. He sees the big picture. And this is why he will return from this trip with renewed vigor.

Our efforts in Iraq have paid off. It may still be a bit too early to tempt the wrath of a cynical God with that kind of statement, but the facts on the ground increasingly seem to indicate that America's boldest, most brazen and most bellicose attempt to spread democracy and human rights is going to yield some kind of fruit. As we begin to fructify human rights in Iraq, the pill that will have to be swallowed by the skeptical camps in American public opinion is going to grow more and more bitter, as well as more jagged.

But the cynicism that has become a modern disease and cultural dysfunction has to die somehow if we are to build the kind of optimistic momentum that will be necessary to carry out the challenges ahead. The post-racial society, the post-fossil feuls society, the hyper-modern/hyper-efficient communications and mass transit society, the growing league of democracies/global law and order society, these feats will not be accomplished without a heavy dose of good old American "can-do" spirit.

It is this spirit that has disappeared from American life in the past 40 years. The boomercrats stole it from the world. and like I have said before, probably rightfully so, for without their disillusionment we would never have reoriented ourselves back towards the original goals. And no candidate for president has ever understood this as much as Barack Obama.

So we he returns and tells us all that we are on the verge of really making some monumental progress in Iraq and that his position on managing the situations soiunds less like 16 month timetable and more like a "whatever it takes" to get the job done approach, don't shed a tear nor look to see if the sky is falling. If you find yourself having rooted for a big loss in Iraq, you need some therapy. But don't take that too hard because most of your neighbors are in the same boat.

If you caught the silver lining and avoided the cynical approach, congratulations. Your eternal wisdom, the wisdom of optimism, is going to pay off once again. And without accusing our brethren of being unpatriotic, it is becoming increasingly clear that optimism is the national religion and to really embrace the American identity, it's a creed you have to swear your life to.

When Barack gets home, I think we will all finally begin to see that for the first time in a long time, we now have a leader who makes that easier to do.

A Vision in Purple

The night that Barack Obama won the Democratic primary contests, his wife came on stage with him wearing a beautiful dress in a style that the fashionistas have been comparing to Jackie Onassis. Others still have suggested she looked more like Wilma Flinstone. You will remember, this historic night was also the occasion of the famous fist bumping incident that roused a public debate that definitively marked - depending on where you stood on the issue - whether or not you have been living under a rock for the past 20 years.

But what wasn't oft discussed was the fact that she was wearing purple. This, it seems to me, was a clear reference to the thrust of Obama's primary appeal: his promise of a post-partisan sensibility that merges blue state and red state sensibilities; his blunt defiance of contemporary political ideology; his embrace of a nuanced politics that is not so much moderate as it is idiosyncratic and well thought out.

As someone who has been watching the Senator since his days in Illinois, what is sad to see in his presidential campaign is not that he has "flip-flopped" his way across the ideological spectrum, but rather that, like a fish out of water, he has breathlessly flopped his way back into orthodox political maneuvering. You can tell that it hurts him to do so, his contortions and hollow proclamations painfully visible as he speaks from both sides of his mouth (the mass podcast of his switch on public financing that landed in my inbox comes most starkly to mind). But sadly, it seems more and more that these are the moves of a political expediency that are a necessary part of national politics. One person can't possibly be intellectually consistent and, at the same time, run for president of the United States. We are too diverse of a people to allow it.

Or maybe not. Maybe this was the golden opportunity to put that political commonplace to rest. In fact, much of what enthralled me so much about Obama was that he threatened to test this idea. It would have been risky, it would have defied convention, and it would have changed the country for the better. Of course, polls show that the old notion that you have to "play to the middle" to be true: you can't win an election without posing identity appeal to a majority of the population. The polling primer "Shares my values" is the key figure political operatives use to determine a candidates viability. Apparently it shows a correlation to positive electoral results. The measure of "shares my values" is another way of saying "someone like me." And this seems to be the bottom line for determining whether or not voters will punch a candidates name at the ballot box. But is that true in practice?

As a brief tangent, consider all of the online dating companies that have sprouted out of the internet, especially in the web 2.0 movement. Yes, I do come from a generation of people who meet their romantic interests through the internet. This is besides the point, but that's fine. By now, we've overcome the stigma, for the most part. But these sites - eHarmony, Match.com, OKCupid - each has some sort of internal algorithm that calculates your degree of fit with a potential lover. Based on your answers to a series of questions - sometimes a quite long series of questions - the computer drags your information across a database and spits out a list of people that you might like.

Maybe that's straightforward to you, but it baffles me! Have they really figured out how my answers to banal questions about my interests and preferences match with other people in the world? If so, what's the secret? It can't possibly be so simple as to match one person up with another person based on how many times both parties came up with the EXACT SAME answer, can it? Frankly, as much as I'd like to think that a magic formula has been devised to calculate how different answers fit together like a complicated social jigsaw puzzle, I'm forced to conclude that they haven't quite figured this out. Nor, I think, will they ever. The truth must be that there is no magic formula. Sure, we can see the big principles at hand: he likes girls with small noses and short hair, she likes guys with big feet and a hairy chest, he likes a gal who can cook a mean meal, she likes a guy who isn't afraid to change a diaper. And, of course, hormones, pheromones, and the libidinous need we all feel to be jumping someone's bones, all of these things are part of the delicate interplay of romance, lust and love. But what alchemy produces this unique chemistry? What really makes love stick? That, I'm afraid to say, is something we will never know.

Politics, following the allegory, works in the same way. Are we really such simple creatures that we won't vote for someone with whom we disagree? So what if Barack Obama shares my values? I mean, the big principles are here too: I can be quite confident that Obama will not staff the West Wing with a brigade of puppy-kickers. In the end, there's always going to be some simple common ground to stand on when dealing with basic human principles. But do I really need Obama to be just like me? Are we really that feckless of a people that we can't vote someone into office who has some different ideas about some important issues?

I like to think we're not. I like to think we have more self respect than that. I like to think that the national psychology isn't hanging onto every last piece of detail as we arrange our political preferences in a kind of identity Tetris. I really hope, at least, that we're not that lame.

And I was hoping against hope that Obama might try to show us how sensible we are. That he was going to avoid playing a politics of identity and lead us all back to an acceptable middle ground where we could all be friends again, regardless of our political leanings on various issues. I was really hoping he might test this populist conclusion about America's ability to deal with anomalies, that we need everything to fit so perfectly, because more than anything else, it is this stupid expectation that is deteriorating our social fabric.

As much as he has turned out to be an orthodox politician during this campaign, I am still hoping that once he has taken his seat behind the Resolute desk, he will lead us to a new place, that purple place he promised all those years ago.

The End of Politics of Identity

The era of politics of identity that has defined American culture for the past 40 years can now officially be considered to be over. The fact that we will be electing a black president is not proof that racism is gone from the midst of our borders. No such day will ever come. But the fact that we will elect a black man to be President of the USA means unflinchingly and without a doubt that what it means to be black in America (and consequently what it means to be white, or any other color) will cease to have any locutionary force. We are experiencing the official end of the semiotics of skin color.

This moment has been in the works for awhile. If you look at popular American culture, you can see the various forms trying to make sense of a post-racial mentality throughout the past 15 years or so. In the world of music, we have witnessed the disassociation of race and genre. Beginning with a few artists in the middle and late 1990's, the stereotypical model of who and what a b-boy looked like (or what a rock guitarist looked like) began to break down. The identity models previously concretized by musical genre have opened up and dissolved into a more thoroughgoing equality of identity opportunity. This can be traced out with more detailed research, but you would be hard pressed to find knowledgeable commentators who would disagree with this premise. While the same integration is more difficult to trace in other cultural forms, there is now a widespread presence of non-white American citizens performing on mainstream television and film. This is true to such an extent that, while there are still quite a few stragglers and anachronistic holders on, the multiculturalists who pine after the days of a whiny disempowerment no longer hold any sway in the academic journals and stuffy seminar rooms across the nation. As a nation, we have moved on.

But where are we going? The dizzying array of intellectually inconsistent policy positions that have characterized American polemics of the past half century have almost annihilated any semblance of political reason. Our coalitions and associations of convenience and political expediency have obliterated the Enlightenment philosophies that characterized intelligent debate over the past few centuries. As a result, we have arrived here, steadily, with a more perfect Union in post-race America, but also without any kind of language for thinking about who and what we ought to be.

We need a return to a politics of ideas. And we need it quick. There are too many pressing concerns for us to founder too long in mystery.

Dear Boomercrat:

Is it fair to say that the cat is out of the bag? Last week's announcement that he would forgo public financing for his presidential campaign pretty boldly revealed Barack Obama to the nation as an orthodox politician. If you have been paying close attention, this is not news to you. Obama has been pandering to all sides and interests on many policy items as long as he has been running for office. This is politics, after all. But his unique genius, as cited by David Brooks in a provocative column last week, is the fact that he has molded a political campaign of anti-politics. If you take the paradigm offered by contemporary pundits, one of the pillars of the Obama campaign has been the literal message of "change" that underlies all the campaign rhetoric. Brooks and others are now and will continue to hold Obama to his assertions that his campaign represents a turn away from politics of the past, pointing out how his history of maneuvering and shifting between political positions pulls the rug out from underneath his idealistic posturing. The sometime design of this analysis, and the conservative hopes pinned to it, seems to hinge on the public's supposed renunciation of Obama after the grand reveal. As if there were some sort of momentum building towards a tipping point when the movement that supports Barack Obama's candidacy will somehow turn against its hero; but it can be safely guaranteed that no such moment is going to take place, and this guarantee rests on a few important points.

The first flaw in the syllogism is the assumed premise that the Obama crowd holds more dearly onto political idealism than to winning a presidency. We do not. What is more important to a new generation of American pols is the presence of someone who more accurately reflects our sense of national identity. Just as a more thoroughly researched analysis of the psychological state more commonly referred to as "Bush Derangement Syndrome" might be developed and applied to come to a deeper understanding of American public opinion in the last five years, so too might a more academic model of "Obamamania" be used to describe its next two or three. What's refreshing about the latter is that the blindness of its hero worship is much more optimistic than the fervent hatred and ignorance that characterized the former, more cynical counterpart. But, alas, it is blindness nonetheless.

As a nation, we are a politically ignorant lot. I would guess that only a small fraction of Americans could associate various ideas with the political philosophies that found them. And while there is truth to the fact that you could make the argument that this is not their fault -- that the parties who are supposed to represent their interests sold intellectual honesty down the river decades ago -- the truth is that life is too complicated to pay attention to (or, much less, apply) the intellectual consistency of the patterns present in contemporary politics.

At best, Americans paint an impressionistic image of political ideology in their electoral preferences. As a result, syllogisms will always inevitably fall flat in their explanation of American politics. What is required, instead, is a kind of art history, a rhetorical interpretation that pays attention to the subtle details and contours of American life. Sure, all the clues we need to understand voters in America exist more broadly in our culture, but they can not be pieced together in a scientific way. Regardless of how many degrees in "political science" we award to students each year, you can't do science on people.

Obamamaniacs are relatively easy to understand. We want someone to be president who looks more like what we want our nation to look like. Of course, we want to elect a black man for president, but not because we're invested in the catharsis of unresolved adolescent angst about racial disparity that motivates our parents (although this is probably a factor somehow). We are more likely to want to elect a black man for president because he speaks our language. His intonations and inflections, his walk, his gestures, his wife's fist bump, his cool calmness in the face of tremendously stressful situations, his matter of fact manner, his honest style, and most importantly, his permanent contradictions of identity: these are the traits of a new American character.

To the extent that these moves reflect origins in black America, so be it. The organic process of cultural assimilation in America does not discriminate on a basis of ethnic origins; a cultural resource is a cultural resource, and we are all owners and beneficiaries of the legacy. What's important is that the product of this process helps us be more culturally buoyant and more autonomously human. Our culture, more than any other on the planet, is very successful in its achievement of these goals.

What the Civil Rights generation did give this country was a slate of new ideas about what this nation should look like. They stirred the melting pot. And this was a phenomenal accomplishment. But they were a transitional society, perpetually conflicted by the infelicity between their hopes and dreams on the one hand, and their realities on the other. The multicultural movement that they brought to bear on our childhood must have made them feel great about themselves, certainly good enough to help them forget about how comfortable they remained in the old systems of social identity that forged their senses of self and society.

But we did the hard work. We squirmed and struggled in awkwardness and embarrassment. We swam underwater through the murkiness that has been America for the past 40 years. And we've carved out real-life identities from the hard surfaces supplied; and we have done so quite successfully, despite having had to sift through all the tangled baggage that they left for us, untied and untidy. They gave us multiculturalism because, armed with nothing more than who they were, they figured we all wanted to feel empowered in our differences, that what we needed was a strong dose of self-esteem about who we were. But really, when we figured it out on our own, it was pretty clear that we all wanted to be the same. We don't want hyphens. We don't want to embrace our diversity in difference. We all want to be Americans, Americans only, with our ways of being kaleidoscopically permutated in all their idiosyncratic glory. But still we want only to be Americans. We want to express our diverse individuality as a unified whole. Multicultural diversity to young Americans isn't a rainbow coalition, it's a collection of rainbow people, each of us as multifaceted and diverse as the next, interesting amalgamations of varying cultural resources, and none of us belonging to any single category of character. We are a burgeoning nation of diverse individuals, connected in community by the fact of our uniqueness. Yes, indeed, we're all so unique that we're also the same.

Barack Obama gets this. He just plain gets it. And if you're well over 40, you probably don't. Or, to paraphrase a friend: you probably believe that you understand what you think we are, but we're pretty sure you don't realize that what you think you understand is not what we have become.

For you, Mr. and Mrs. Boomercrat, Barack Obama represents your achievements, a total rebuke of the historical past: slavery, Jim Crow, the grand failures of modern America. And let me join in the chorus when I sing: good riddance! But for us, Obama crystallizes our rebuke of the recent past, of which your lessons are a necessary part. For while you gave us the raw ore from which we've struck our new American alchemy, you've also left us with a full spectrum of more intractable dilemmas. The failures of contemporary American culture are much more difficult to pick apart. These are failures of ideas, failures of imagination, failures of wider public perception - a perceptual process which your own outlook precipitates. The basic fact that we're a generation defined by politics of identity and not a politics of ideas is undeniably due to your generation's nihilistic dismantling of the American way of life. One wonders how much of it was born of idealism and how much of it was just the product of your rebelliousness. If only your parents hadn't lost their souls at war, if only you hadn't thrown out so much of the baby with the bathwater, we might now have less work to do.

But you taught us how to do work. And that's what we're up to. So get on board, prepare the retirement nest, and hand the reigns over this fall. And buckle up, it's gonna be quite a ride now that we're finally at the helm.

America post-Obama

I have been thinking a lot about what happens in America after we have elected our first black president. Not that this is an inevitability with Senator Obama. But I suspect it is an inevitability generally. And the fact that a major American political party will nominate a black man for a presidential candidacy seems substantial enough to take up this conversation as one which is intellectually due.

First of all, I think it's especially gratifying as a big FUCK YOU and I TOLD YOU SO to all the cynics and skeptics who have long mischaracterized and, frankly, plain misunderstood American culture. America, like any nation, is constantly involved in a process of competitive folk psychology. But the prevalence of frontloaded discourse depicting America as a nation so racist and bigoted that a majority of its people would never choose a non-white or non-male American as a felicitous representation of the American identity is particularly despicable. It is quite clear today that those who have taken part in that process should not only render themselves mistaken and feckless but must now accept the mediocrity of their punditry. You know who you are.

Aside from the long overdue death of hermeneutical skepticism, what happens to the American identity after we've elected a black president? It seems undeniable that this somehow gives birth to a new American sense of self, one which will raise with all the excruciating pangs of growth that any fledgling sense of self endures.

In the post-Obama world, what happens to the concept of black America? Identity politics in general - the baggage of baby boomerism - can summarily be pronounced DOA. But its spirit will haunt us and ask us to consider, quite baldly, what happens to the groups shaped and formed by its politics of division? How does a black person , previously over-identified by a discourse of belonging to blackness, come to conceive of self and group in a society which has now publicly affirmed full citizenship regardless of the color of skin? While this paradox has been grappled with since its inception at the nascence of the American frontier, much comfort and shelter from its incessant pressing on the minds of its existential itinerants has come in the shape of community. But when the borders that drew our internal communities swing open and bleed beyond what we've been formerly able to grasp, how will we manage the preposterous and boundless space of identity there opened?

I have the sense that what America is voting for with Barack Obama, and black America specifically, is the death blow to the notion of black America. The high rate of support amongst black Americans suggests to me that, consciously or not, black America is as tired of subgroup identity as the rest of subgrouped America.

What happens within black America now that a member of the group has achieved the highest rank of American citizenship, but has done so by participating in a grand process of identity integration. For example, the figure of Editor in Chief at the Harvard Law Review does not have a long history within the folk psychology of what it means to be black in America. But it will be permanently etched within the narrative and it will now occupy a space of grand gesture, as all finales should. A million boys in America will own the name Barack by the end of my lifetime and how many of them will plot the route of their namesake. And how many of them will be white and black, or both, and to what degree will it matter anymore when they've grown up knowing that one of the greatest men in their world had brown skin?

Barack Obama is a symbolic figure in American history because his story intertwines so much of the divided narrative of American identity. He serves - his presidency serves - as a transliteral bridge, connecting all of the American histories in a sweeping embrace of commonality and brotherhood. His presidency is the final riposte to the shameful past, but how long and in what form will its legacy decay?

It strikes me that this shedding of skin will be painful and wearisome. With the death of our folk psychological concepts will come deep seated mourning and sorrow. Despite the fact that this evolution will likely yield a golden age in America, a Renaissance unmatched in contemporary history, the immediate stages of this transformation will be marred by the struggle of a society without a coherent language. It will require a kind of creativity of national definition that we have not experienced in American life in a long, long time; not in my generation, maybe in my grandfather's but perhaps not since the Founding. But we are a nation defined by our vernacular, and I suspect we will not have too hard of a time in the forthcoming.

Where do we go from here?

With Hillary Clinton's failure to accede the presidency, American society has expressed its final reprobation for the culture of political correctness. The Clintons are the American symbolic figures of the 1990's paradigm of atonement for America's shortcomings and worrisome transgressions. And, indeed, they were many and the decade long.

What Barack Obama offers the nation is a confirmation that we have accepted our sins and are now ready to begin, if we have not yet already begun, the processes of self-forgiveness that are the first signs of a transformation of consciousness. President Barack Obama will usher in a new era not only of American generational history but also a time of transcendence that leads us far beyond the legacy of slavery and persistent quagmires of race into an unknown mode of identity that will truly call the world's attention to the profound force and impenetrable reality of the American experiment.