The Fountain of Youth: History is Not a Cage

From the Washington Post -

For much of the world, Sen. Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic primaries was a moment to admire the United States, at a time when the nation's image abroad is in tatters.

How big is this?

"This is close to a miracle. I was certain that some things will not happen in my lifetime," said Sunila Patel, 62, a widow encountered on the streets of New Delhi. "A black president of the U.S. will mean that there will be more American tolerance for people around the world who are different."

"The primaries showed that the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be...," said Minoru Morita, a Tokyo political analyst.

I am drawn to this and repelled to this, but not exactly in equal measure. After so much nastiness, disorder and hope in the dark, it's beautiful to see hope back out in the light. And yet...

I interviewed the author Russell Banks on Your Call on June 3rd for his new book Dreaming Up America. Banks' believes that the American Dream is actually three dreams, interconnected, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes opposed. The three are:

El Dorado- The dream of Paradise through material acquisition.

The City on the Hill- We can create a society where all people are free.

The Fountain of Youth- History is not a limit on what you can become. You can always be reborn.

Our dream since at least Ronald Reagan has been an intoxicating combination of the Fountain of Youth and El Dorado. Our fantasy is that we will all one day be rich, so one day we will be happy because we are good.

Banks traces that combination of dreams - freeing ourselves from history and the search for material wealth - to the mindset of the Conquistadors, who wanted nothing but gold from our shores and time enough to enjoy it.

The result is well documented in the sanguinary pages of our history books. When you read them, or just look outside your window, it is easy to see that an individual may leave their history behind, but it doesn't just sit where you left it.

We can say 9-11 had nothing to do with American policy. We can believe and even act on that. But there it will be.

So it is appealing to read this:

"Obama is the exciting image of what we always hoped America was," said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a London think tank.

It is appealing to see the Fountain of Youth appear again to challenge us, not simply to comfort us. Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream Speech, after all, was about transcending a racist past. But not forgetting it. bringing it with us, but not letting it doom us.

Much of the interest simply reflects hunger for change from President Bush, who is deeply unpopular in much of the world. At the same time, many people abroad seemed impressed -- sometimes even shocked -- by the wide-open nature of U.S. democracy, and the history-making race between a woman and a black man

.

Many people here too. And here is that dream again.