Sunday’s Obama-commemorating special edition of The Washington Post Magazine featured a goopy essay by Style section writer Wil Haygood, spread preciously across many pages of evocative hope-and-change photographs, culminating implausibly in an image of a supposedly psychic two-year-old:
So here, 10 days before the election, stands a boy, D'Andre Little, of Las Vegas. His mom hovers nearby. Maybe that thumb poking out is the thumb he sucks in the middle of the night. He's only 2, but he looks as if he knows something important is happening. He rests a tired arm on the poster-board image of the politician who stands before him. Not just another politician -- but the man who this week will become the 44th president of the United States. The very first who looks like him.
A two-year-old boy often isn’t even toilet-trained yet, but the Post has him contemplating the historic wonder of Obama. Haygood insisted "Obama stirred the bones of the dead -- of Frederick Douglass and Abe Lincoln and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks and the young preacher from Georgia [Martin Luther King] and the four little Birmingham girls and JFK and LBJ and A. Philip Randolph."
Haygood’s essay began by contrasting Obama’s promise with previous presidents (ahem) who led us into sex scandals or some "rocking and rolling hell of a war." Italics are his:
Just another politician.
All over America, the phrase rolls out and hangs there with fiery contempt. There goes just another politician dragging us all down some financial sinkhole, through some sex scandal, into some rocking-and-rolling hell of a war where the math doesn't add up and the living keep dying.
So what happens when a significant portion of the populace decides that someone isn't just another politician? It has happened before, often in times of desperation. The whirl of emotion can be so strong, so sudden, that it seems to almost magically magnify both the hunger of the electorate and the gifts of the politician.
Even potential opponents, or those who watch the ever-growing crowds without finding the magic, don't see just another politician. They see a sorcerer who has the unnerving ability to lift folk up out of their sleep and send them marching, probably to no good end.
But savior or pretender or something in between, his appearances fill the hollow valleys and crowd the city squares. Neither the ice in Iowa nor the heat in Florida comes to bother. The hills of West Virginia pose no challenge, nor the infinite landscape of Montana. The devoted and the curious will stand through drifting snow, pelting rain, wilting heat, as season becomes season, and history nears....
They will all talk about these moments in the years to come, of how the auditoriums felt, of how the rain slashed, the cold numbed, the heat burned. But mostly they will talk about the amazing texture of it all, the sense that with every chant, every cheer and every tear the country, their country, moved closer to something almost unimaginable.
"We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote," said Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, 45 years to the day before Obama accepted the nomination. Always the meaning of the moment -- reflected in the faces of so many -- seemed chased by the past, even as it projected the future.
That paragraph launched into the two-year-old-who-knows conclusion.
[Hat tip to Mrs. Graham, who remembers her two-year-olds.]
