Yesterday I was in San Francisco. Not just any part of SF but the most touristy part of Fisherman's Wharf. There are certain parts of Fisherman's Wharf where you can pretend to be sophisticated, but there are other parts which are so self-consciously touristy that it becomes unbearable for urbanites of any white collar pretension. Since I happen to be something beyond that, or at least clearly apart from that I can tell you with all honesty that I perceived a moment of clarity.
Barack Obama has single-handedly erased black guilt.
You know the drill. You are in a supermarket and you are a young college student with nothing but bright promise ahead of you. You are slim and attractive and generally speaking, on the make at all times, because you are the kind of human that everybody wants to be. So you see her, that overweight woman. And you hear him, that bratty child. And you watch the drama that happens when the kid embarrasses his mother and she retaliates in clear view of you. You realize the social coup. She see you in you relative perfection and she is beyond reconciliation - all she can do is beat it into the child that they should behave in your presence. You look at them with pity if not contempt. They are, sadly, beneath you. You register their look as dowdy. You monitor their accent as ethnic and downscale. You know the type - cousins and in-laws you avoid.
Only when you are drunk and watch them watch NASCAR. Only when you are bored to tears and watch them play dominoes. Only when you are stuck with nowhere to go and watch them drive tractors are you ever slightly self-conscious about their possible superiority. You hear their countrified ass-backwards laugh and chuckle to yourself. Ha ha. Laugh now you think. You wouldn't be laughing if you knew the way of the world you think contemptuously. Laugh because somebody else has walked under a ladder or crossed the path of a black cat. You idiot. What do you know about how the world operates?
Most of the time you can seditty yourself into a sense of superiority. These are the occasions when you can't . And so you begrudge them their very entertainments, and denigrate them as airheaded foolishness. But not today, because today, their racial view of America has been turned upside down - the significance of a black victory in the Democrat party is beyond belief.
When the black eating grits and greens signifies unity with the black of Barack Obama, you sit in the restaurant next to the crowd, and know they will not be shut up. When their rumors and consipiracy are justified by the impossible, the democratic nomination, You know they will not be shut up. That now is today, and there is nowhere else to turn. Nowhere else to go - only to devastation and final resting.
The immovable object has had its day.
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