Pessimistic? Optomistic?

If you want to feed your nightmares about where the United States of America is going, you can do no better than to read two recent posts by Driftglass, this one and this one. I keep coming back to Driftglass because he sees American reality with a terrifying clearness; he recently summed up the lessons of the last eight years in a phrase so pungent -- not crude but horrifying in its accuracy -- that I have yet to quote it in print. The posts linked to above will be quite enough for most readers.

Then on the hopeful side there is a recent diary posted to the DailyKos site by Billmon, who at the beginning of this seemingly endless American crisis, became famous on the Internet (sorry about that, billmon) for his analysis and alarm expressed in admirable prose. His blog has been closed for a while, but recently he has been posting on other people's blogs, perhaps because he feels that things aren't completely hopeless now. Here's what he had to say today.

I have been pretty pessimistic myself, and there's still lots to be pessimistic about. But the one sign that makes me think that you can't count the Americans out yet, no matter how much they ask for it, is just this: Barack Obama. Not the man, but the name.

Who could think that seven years after a man named Osama bin Laden destroyed the World Trade Center that someone with a name like Barack Obama could make any impact on the American consciousness at all?

Not to mention that he's black.

I don't know what I think of Obama, but I think the fact that he has been enthusiastically nominated by a major American political party says something quite amazing about the United States and its continuing flexibility.

Image: From Driftglass; read the post.