Obama's Magic Kingdom

Barack Obama's victory was less a triumph of color than it was a triumph of the American donkey, that pack animal tired of laboring under the heavy load of political mismanagement, corruption, and greed.

Obama now holds the keys to a crumbled kingdom that often seems as if it can only be transformed by magic. We have regressed--through desperation--to the fantasies and fairy tales of childhood, where pumpkins become coaches, straw turns into gold, and Dick Cheney wakes up as a frog. Yet how many of our dreams are illusory? Much like a vacation to Disneyland, we have now bought a ticket to a destination that will bear a near-crippling weight of expectation and demand.

America has pinned so much hope upon Obama that he now seems fictionalized, as if invented to answer an overwhelming need for niceness and equanimity. Will we allow him error? Will we allow him human qualities beyond the acquisition of a dog? Will we will allow him failure?

What were we really voting for? I think we were voting for happiness, as if we were ten years old and were immeasurably satisfied with Saturday morning cartoons. Or fifty years old and disgusted with torture and civilian murder. We weren't voting for more scary monsters, and we certainly weren't voting for the strange and terrifying thing America has become: the country where you can't afford the cost of the ride. Obama's election is a family event, G-rated, presumed safe, and assumed to bring a smile to your face. Or so goes hope.