What tomorrow means

Over at Baroque in Hackney is an ex-pat's thoughts on tomorrow - or, rather, on the man becoming a myth before our eyes.

Of course we knew this already. Obama, with one day to go, is becoming all things to all people. He’s not just a guy any more. If you think the message is simple, I guess you’re right. Even the crowds at the concert yesterday - We Are One - represented something monolithic, something that doesn’t admit of much private reflection. But then, this is a public moment. Some of these images reflect that, and others are more private - well, more personal anyway. There is depth in some of the commentary of course, and there will be more over the next four years.

The myth has one more day to gestate. As the scholar Joseph Campbell told us in his book, the hero has a thousand faces. Obama - the man who has been reduced to a sound, to three unusual syllables which sound, perhaps symbolically - homeopathically - magically - Jungianly - like the name of the greatest enemy of all - who by this means alone can be invested with the power to defeat that enemy, other enemies and evil itself - is adopting many of those faces in the eyes of people up and down and across America. And the world, I guess. Our need is so great that he must fill it.

I can tell that because I can feel it, even though I know Obama isn’t going to fill the bottomless void… I mean my God, we’d have played kick the can together if he’d been in Hartford CT or I’d been in Hawaii. In his private school. Which probably means I’d have had to be a boy. And I’d have had to be outside playing kick the can, not inside reading books about clever little kids who grow up to do amazing things. So okay, I probably wouldn’t have played kick the can with him… but, like everyone else, I was sitting there waiting for this to happen.

Our generation has ever experienced anything like this.

Go, read it, look at the pictures, and reflect on what tomorrow means.