AUIEG** Diary - Day 5

Dear Diary:

Still no sign.

I was reading Pravda on the Potomac today. The Opinion section featured a big color photo of a poster featuring The One in a Superman suit, slapped on a wall somewhere or other. The poster was already ratty and torn at the edges, and I must confess that this gave me pause for a moment. Just a moment, though.

Anyhoo, the Op-Eds featured commentary by all sorts of national and international voices about The One. Of particular interest was the article by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Let me quote just a bit:

I am rubbing my eyes in disbelief and wonder. It can't be true that Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan, is the next president of the United States.

But it is true, exhilaratingly true. An unbelievable turnaround. I want to jump and dance and shout, as I did after voting for the first time in my native South Africa on April 27, 1994.

We owe our glorious victory over the awfulness of apartheid in South Africa in large part to the support we received from the international community, including the United States, and we will always be deeply grateful. But for those of us who have lookd to America for inspiration as we struggled for democracy and human rights, these past seven years have been lean ones.

A few days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, we had our first shock, hearing your president respond not with the statesmanlike demeanor we had come to expect from a U.S. head of state but like a Western gunslinger. Later, it seemd that much of American society followed his lead.

[Snip]

To the outgoing administration's record on torture we must add a string of other policies that have damaged the standing of the United States in the world: its hostility to the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases; its refusal to assent to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, establishing the ICC's role in prosecuting war crimes; its restrictions on the use of U.S. funding to fight AIDS; and the arrogant unilateralism it has employed in declaring to be enemies any country it deemed "against us" because they were not "for us."

The Bush administration has riled people everywhere. Its bully-boy attitude has sadly polarized our world.

Against all this, the election of Barack Obama has turned America's image on its head.

[Snip]

Today Africans walk taller than they did a week ago - just as they did when Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president in 1994. Not only Africans, but people everywhere who have been victims of discrimination at the hands of white Westerners, have a new pride in who they are. If a dark-skinned person can become the leader of the world's most powerful nation, what is to stop children everywhere from aiming for the stars? The fact that Obama's Kenyan grandfather was a convert to Islam may - shamefully - have been controversial in parts of the United States, but elsewhere in teh world, Obama's multi-fiath feritage is an inspiration.

And the president-elect has one additional key quality: He is not George W. Bush.

As I read the rest of the article it occurred to me: Archbishop Tutu wants a Unicorn, too! And so, apparently, does everyone else in the world. That mean ol' Dubya - keeping them from teh love all those years!

On a practical note, the population of Earth is, what, about 6 trillion or so? That's a lot of Unicorns. Where is The One going to get all of them? I hope he doesn't decide he has to take Dreamy B away from me in order to give him to Bishop Tutu or somebody somewhere else in the world.

But of course, The One will know best.

(**A Unicorn In Every Garage)