MELANIE PHILLIPS: Sorry to be a party pooper, but I can’t share this swooning Obama hysteria
Has everyone lost their marbles? The inauguration of President Obama is being treated like the Second Coming.
The coverage is so gushing we might all drown. Of course it’s a great thing that America, with its history of slavery and segregation still a shockingly recent memory, now has a black President; the palpable joy of African-Americans is entirely understandable and deeply touching. And there’s no doubt that Obama is a highly charismatic and attractive personality.
But what’s more than a wee bit troubling is that the swooning hysteria reflects the fact that people appear to believe that as of today the world will be saved. Swords will be beaten into ploughshares, peace will be brought to the Middle East, Iran will be pacified, every American will have health insurance, poverty will be eliminated and utopia will have arrived.
Sorry to be a party pooper but I’m afraid I must register a small note of dissent. It’s not just that people have projected onto the person of Obama expectations that - especially given the world financial crisis - cannot possibly be met.
I think that the desperate dangerousness and complexity of our world and a profound terror of what properly facing up to its problems would entail have led people to believe a cartoon version of why we’re in such a state - and to have invested their hopes similarly in a fantasy figure of hope, to such an extent that they have shut their ears to some very loud warning bells ringing from his past history.