The Filtnib’s Progress

Are we there yet? Last week Obama finally clinched the Democratic nomination. For observers, entrenched in the daily wranglings of pre-election coverage, where even a candidate’s choice of reading matter or style of dancing can take on a sun-shadow significance, it was hard to take in just how epochal the moment was. And how dramatic the shift will be, if Obama takes George Bush’s place in five months time. No-one summarized the potential for change better – nor, admittedly, more slushily – than Obama himself:

generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image…”

Obama is the first to admit the audacity of such hope. That doesn’t make it less blindingly exciting. It put a line from King Lear into my head.

In the last scene of that play, the aged, beaten-down Lear carries his beloved daughter Cordelia onto the stage. Shakespeare has already stretched the tragic genre to its most desolate reach (with on-stage torture, familial betrayal, jealousy, madness and suicide the norm) yet he has allowed Lear’s youngest daughter to be a deviant carrier of hope; a cure to her demented father and the character most capable of bringing redemption to the “dark and comfortless” world these characters inhabit.

But this is tragedy. So just when we think Cordelia and Lear might get to live in relative peace and sanity for a while, old Shakey pulls the rug from under our feet and has the angelic girl brought on dead, the mark of a noose still fresh on her neck. Leaning over his child, Lear strains to hear her breathing. He knows she’s gone. But, maddened with loss, he momentarily imagines resurrection: “This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so,/ It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows/ That ever I have felt”.

Those words express not only the overwhelming desire that Cordelia not be dead, but also a more general human bent: a willingness to suspend the scepticism learnt from what’s already been; to grasp at hope even when experience tells us we should know better.

My intention is not to draw comparison between Cordelia and Obama. Cordelia stands for something far less tangible than any particular politician. Instead she represents the concept of political integrity. At his best, that is what Obama represents. Meanwhile the world has become like Lear, cradling an object most of us had assumed dead. As the FT’s Philip Stephens notes: “the election is being more closely watched beyond America’s shores than any I can think of. The world would dearly love a vote”. An Ipsos Mori survey of 22,605 people across the world found only 14% supporting John McCain while 55% would most like to see Obama win. Whatever he did with it, an Obama Presidency would signal the same incredible resurrection of hope that Lear imagines in the restoration of his child.

Shakespeare has King Lear say that if Cordelia turns out not to be dead, it would “redeem all sorrows” – i.e. the miracle of her resurrection – the chance of something so extraordinarily good – would make up for everything else that has gone so terribly wrong. Perhaps, post-the worst President America has ever seen, (according to CNN, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, and innumerable bloggers) the world has never been so ready for a politician with integrity. In King Lear, Cordelia turns out to be dead. But we knew that; it’s a tragedy. Real life is less predictable. Could a President Obama redeem some of the sorrows engendered by George Bush and Blair and their ill-fated axis of no-good? We can only hope. And pray that American voters come to believe “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for… We are the change that we seek“.

With thanks to Matthew C. Wright on Creative Commons for the B/W photo of Obama.