The vibe in Sweden

I just thought that I'd write a few words to describe the vibe here in Malmö, Sweden after Obama's election. It's pretty amazing that it's had such a big effect on people over here. It's another country's election after all, but both yesterday and today Obama's been pretty much all that anybody's talking about. Everybody who knows that I'm American stops me to congratulate me and ask me how I feel. A few people that I've spoken to have been overcome by emotion and started weeping when talking to me about the election. One of my son's teachers, an immigrant from Chile, wept and said that her father who died in August would have been overjoyed at Obama's election. A colleague from Germany wrote that she stayed awake until six in the morning to watch Obama's speech. She also wept.

Part of the joy that people are feeling is because they realize how significant it is that the US elected a black man as president. But that's really only part of it. A lot of it is actually a sort of envy that we have such a charismatic president elect. Many politicians in Europe are very talented and efficient, but they're rarely exciting. They all kind of remind you of Mike Dukakis or Gerald Ford. Europeans are excited by a politician who could give a speech like the one Obama gave on Tuseday night, a speech intended to inspire a people to achieve greatness. My German colleague joked that Angela Merkel, arguably Europe's most effective leader, could never make a speech like that, could never inspire like that. Obama inspires faith in the American style of democracy, even makes it seem attractive to Europeans who frequently deride American democracy as too individualistic. It's not just that he's made the US seem acceptable, he's made the US seem like an example to be followed. People here seem genuinely relieved to admire America. It's as if they really want to, but haven't been able to for some time now. I think that many of the tears come from that.

Finally, here's a kind of double post-script. David Foster Wallace wrote a fantastic essay for Rolling Stone about John McCain's campaign in 2000. David linked to it a couple of months ago, shortly after DFW died. So what happened? It seems like sometime this summer we lost both the author and the subject of this article. Where was this John McCain this past year? He seemed to make a reappearance in Phoenix on Tuesday night. It would have been exciting if he had shown up earlier. Here's a link to Wallace's article, The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub. I promise that it'll be worth your while if you take the time to read it. It's a classic.