By Phil Jarratt
Chilling out in wet and steamy Sengiggi Beach, Lombok, last weekend, I watched for a second time on Youtube President Barack Obama’s deeply moving and frequently poetic farewell address.
My first thought was that however we may feel about the president-elect, and however we may feel about the performance of the two Obama administrations, no person of goodwill can feel anything but gratitude that this intelligent, sensitive, passionate and caring man graced the world stage during our lifetimes.
This is not to say that he was the greatest president to ever sit in the Oval Office – I don’t believe he was – but it has been a long time since anyone held that position with such dignity and grace, and it may be an even longer time before it happens again.
I remember discovering the new and fresh-faced Senator from Illinois in 2004, when we had just moved to California, and acquainting myself with his ideas and his gift for expressing them through reading his wonderful memoir, Dreams From My Father. Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein described it as “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician”. I still regard it as one of the best memoirs by anyone! In a rare burst of prescience, I told my wife: “This guy is going to be America’s first black president.”
As the first real wet season rains came tumbling down on the West Lombok coast last weekend, I trolled on line and social media to catch up with what the world was saying about Obama’s departure. My American friend David Rensin – a gifted writer himself – posted this from Marc Cooper: “Here’s what I know: the US dropped something like 25,000 bombs on the Middle East in the last eight years. We still have troops in Iraq and Syria. Obamacare is a teetering Rube Goldberg contraption. Gitmo is still open…. His policies do not fundamentally stray from dead ended Democratic orthodoxy. He can be overly cautious and so on and so on … Nevertheless, he is by far the greatest, most admirable US President in my lifetime … I have no shame whatsoever that I will deeply miss this cautious neoliberal centrist. He’s the best we, collectively, have produced to date.”
At the New Yorker, editor David Remnick reflected that the election result had somewhat rained on Obama’s exit parade: “Obama’s approval ratings (had) reached a new high. Clinton’s election as the first female President would complete the narrative, and Obama, his aides suggested, would be free to sit in the healing sun of Oahu and contemplate nothing more rigorous than the unrushed composition of a high-priced memoir.”
Remnick closed by recalling Obama’s 2008 victory speech: “I couldn’t help remembering how he began eight years ago. ‘If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,’ he said, ‘tonight is your answer.’ A very different answer arrived this Election Day. America is indeed a place where all things are possible: that is its greatest promise and, perhaps, its gravest peril.”
Finally I found the last word from Time’s Joe Klein, in my view the finest writer on American politics since Dr Hunter S Thompson went off to raise hell in writers’ heaven: “His most perfect moment came at the funeral of the Charleston, SC, churchgoers who had been killed by a sick white man. The families of the dead had already forgiven the shooter – a stupendous act, but not uncommon in the black church … How to respond to that? Words couldn’t cover it … so he sang “Amazing Grace”, a moment of bravado, humility and passion entwined.”
Indeed. Friends who live in the Kailua area of windward Oahu complain that there is traffic havoc whenever Obama’s security detachment shuts down the grid while he enjoys a body surf on the beaches where he grew up.
Well, it won’t be so bad now, and I hope he gets plenty of opportunities to perfect his corkscrew roll and backstroke take-off in the months and years ahead.
Well played, Mr President.
Stop the presses!
This just in – Men of Wood & Foam, the documentary film that Panga Productions’ Shaun Cairns and I put together about the pioneers of the Australian surfboard industry, has been accepted into the prestigious Santa Barbara International Film Festival next month. More about this next week, but we’re stoked!
California here we come!
