LET THE WORD GO OUT

(Ed note: This article was submitted by Wendy Lohse)
Following the Iowa caucus win of Barack Obama, Deval Patrick outlines in the Boston Globe, the reasons America needs Obama.
Whilst looking up Obama on the internet yesterday I came upon the titles of his books and other written works. On the morning of the 3rd of June here in Tasmania, Australia I listened to a repeat radio airing of Andrew O'Hagan's The very first title Dreams From My Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance reminded me immediately of the one hour address I had listened to only days earlier. The Dreams and the Hope that is in all of Obama's words, the posture of his body and seeing him on his website with his family gives me an excitement and hope that I have not felt for the world, since JFK. God I was a farm kid milking cows on the morning he was shot. My brother and I. We worked the last hour in silence with the radio repeating the news over and over.
Crazy? Maybe. I've found American politics difficult to comprehend. But I suspect I'm possibly more aware than the average Flo Citizen on American streets across the country.
This is not Flo's fault. Nor is it my smarts. It is simply that I am in a situation to have the time to answer my questions. I have the facilities to find out all I want to know, at my fingertips. Flo possibly has one or two poorly paid jobs which, in this time of mortgage crisis and ever higher fuel prices and follow on goods and services, don't quite meet her costs to survive. Flo has neither the time nor the resources to search for the person who would best attend to at least some of her greatest concerns when she chooses a president. Anyway, she really doesn't believe that she's important enough to vote for anyone. Ever. She does everything she can to keep her children fed and hopefully healthy. But presidents and politicians aren't interested in her. She knows that. From experience.
Perhaps we can take Andrew O'hagan's advice and "get the word out". >>>cont

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sparrow said:
Woz,
Thank you for writing this article.
I discovered as I read it, and thought about it, and tried to figure out a meaningful comment to make to it, that I just didn't know enough about O'Hagan.
So since Google is our friend, I googled him. Wikipedia's article on him is short and sweet but really didn't give me enough information about him. Ok. So he he was born in Glasgow, won awards, and lives in London now.
But what makes him that powerful of an author, they didn't say. Luckily, they have links to additional articles at the bottom so I started clicking through those.
The first one that struck me was the one O'Hagan wrote about at the RNC called, "The God Squad." Through this article I have come to see how O'Hagan views the world or rather views America through the eyes of the RNC in 2004.
I will post some excerpts below but I highly recommend reading the whole article.
He starts it out with one heck of an opening statement about America.
America is now offering lessons in what little wisdom it takes to govern the world. Confounded in Iraq, isolated from its traditional allies, shamed over Abu Ghraib, soaked in corporate corruption and the backwash of environmental harm, sustaining an uninherited budget deficit while preparing more tax rewards for the rich, as dismissive of the unhealthy as the foreign, as terrified of the unfolding truth as of mailed anthrax, it is a society made menacing by a notion of God’s great plan. America is tolerance-challenged, integrity-poor, frightened to death, and yet, beneath its patriotic hosannahs, a country in delirium before the recognition that it might have spent the last three years not only squandering the sympathy of the world but hot-housing hatreds more ferocious than those it had wished to banish for ever from the clear blue skies.
Can you say, "Holy sh*t!"? That is one powerful paragraph right there! (bolded words are mine.)
Then he compares it to E.B. White from 1949. It's a stark comparison and one that proves exactly how awful America (NY) has become. >>>cont
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