This will be brief, a mental health break, a return to hope and poetry - if only for an instant - after the hard knuckle negative politics of the last month. Yesterday I reread the opening of TS Eliot's The Wasteland.
"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain..."
A lot of people knew April would be cruel. You may have though it was cruel to Obama supporters, but actually it was much crueler to his opponents. Forgive the grim analogy, bu the last weekend felt, in my opinion, like the preternatural moment of reprieve for a terminally ill patient before the onset of the end. That terminal patient was not Hillary of course, but her sick and dysfunctional campaign.
I shouldn't need to alert you to the rec'd diaries showing the superdelegate trickle becoming a rush. I'm not claiming, like Hamlet, that I have aprophetic soul, but I had this feeling of optimism yesterday, oddly enough because of the despair here on DKos, and the harping triumph on other sites.
Forget the cliches about darkness before dawn. It was something more dramatic, a glimpse into the abyss of a stolen nomination perhaps, which made me realise that these narrative twists and turns were all part of acting out the scenarios, and then resolving on the only possible way forward. Politics isn't a science, it's a narrative: and politicians aren't just wonks, they're human, with frailties and allegiances, needing mentors and father figures, and then having the courage to break - albeit painfully - with the past.
Obama and Wright: Hal and Falstaff or even more, the classic American moment of fighting the father, becoming author of your own destiny.
So this diary is a little mental health break. Poetry doesn't have much place in politics these days - except in the speeches of Barack Obama. And when the next attack comes, like the current attacks on the Kentucky SD who declared for Obama, here's another bit of poetry from Shelley to help us all get through
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable NUMBER!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fall'n on you:
YE ARE MANY-THEY ARE FEW.