Thank God for Romney

What sad irony! That no matter the political brand on offer in any human aggregate the ‘few’ always seem to weigh more than the ‘many.’

The hypocrisy peaks in those polities (worse in poor countries), that pride themselves a ‘one man, one vote’ democracy when in reality, the moneyed few always find a way to buy out the process and shade it into anything but democracy. Too often, an oligocracy; resulting from a monolithic ruling class, is perpetuated from cycle to cycle. America was no exception. No exception until Romney popped on the scene.

Romney, by his combination of the spoken and unspoken, in his many platform and private poly-glossalisms, unwittingly served to nudge the ‘many’ into the self- preservatory epiphany; that it was time to see bridges rather than wedges.

That in the last United States’ election they could gravimetrically come to weigh more than the ‘few’ on the democratic scale is both impressive and game-changer. A coalition of otherwise sabre-rattling ethnicities came wise enough to bury hatchets and coalesce enough not to inhale the rhetorical smoke billowing from the overheated Romney machine; poisons to all but its privileged constituencies of the rich and opportune.

Romney seems to be a man, who has known hard work and robust opportunities. That he demands similar hard work of other people is not illogical, rather it is a virtuous and commendable longing. However, that he is unable to quantify the immense role opportunities and luck (being in the right place at the right time) do have to play in the overall quadratics of success in anybody’s life, is the problematic conundrum for someone seeking a role as powerful and as all-encompassing as the American presidency.

When he fratricides his own people to a 47 per cent and ‘other per cent’, then goes to the Middle East to label the Palestinian culture essentially a ‘failure’ culture, compared to the Israeli’s and conceives of the Chinese and the Russians in such belligerent monotones, finishing off by threatening all illegal immigrants in the US with deportation (unless self-deporting before hand) and Iran with uncompromising militarisation, one has to stop and wonder if this prince has any conceptual grasp of the more subtle and multivariate factors that go into individual success and global harmony.

Only those with inordinate view of the world will risk such a man in such a post as he asked.

Without Romney’s threatening rhetorics, however, it is conceivable that the minorities in the US might not have had enough to coalesce into the vanquishing machine it turned out to be in the race. And so for Barrack Obama to have won with such great margin, in spite of the fact that only 39 per cent of whites voted for him, is a pointer to the new electoral asset that polychromatism has afforded American minorities; but only if there continues to prevail a purpose-built demographic fusion, not fission that excludes none.

It is not as easy to come across catalysts for fusion as one for fission but Romney showed up at the right time in the right place.

Showing up at the right time and in the right place has always been responsible for most of Romney and the event of Nov. 6 is ironically just one more of such luck for him. Luck, only if he truly loves America. Any country, where the few always weigh more than the many, whether self-professed democracy or not, is no more than a time bomb ticking ceaselessly towards an apocalypse. All around the world, particularly my birth continent of Africa, the socio-political restlessness that constantly fouls the air has so little to do with God’s wish, so much with entrenched geopolitical lopsidedness in which the few constantly seek (with cruel success) to lord themselves over the many, often using the latter’s gullibility as bargaining chips. And these ‘few’ would rather go through the furnace in a gasoline suit than to voluntarily champion the cause of righteousness in which the many can become part of a dignifying existential equation.

The few hold on tenaciously to that branch of the tree dripping the honey whilst the rest are addled within the shriveling lustreless arbor. American polychromatism has now whipped up new electoral realities; one in which connectedness, not selfish aloofness becomes a survival necessity far more utilitarian than disparateness and self-destruct disengagement. It is good for America because the immense potential in the components of the many can now be unleashed, less covertly and when brewed with the obvious energies of the ‘insider few’, can work wonders because of strengthened impulse and a better mix of de facto and de jure patriotism.

Hopefully, that message can come to spread around the world such that minorities all over that would normally wrestle one another to the ground to the advantage of selfish and demagogue oligarchs.

Romney would have been an inadvertent catalyst and Obama, the God-given agonist in a global fusion reaction chamber where centrifugality is otherwise more the natural drift than centripetality. I couldn’t therefore be more distressed when I read an editorial opinion in a local newspaper here (The Sun), “Dominicans can see the clear differentiation between the two major parties and they must have compared it to the very narrow philosophical differences that exist between the two major parties in Dominica where the emphasis is on personalities rather than policy or philosophy.” It goes on in a subsequent paragraph, “As we argued in earlier editorial from the perspective of the Caribbean, it makes very little difference whether Romney or Obama wins tomorrow’s election because a democratic or republican president is likely to focus first and foremost on the US economic recovery.” Gosh! With regards to logic, these are disturbingly irreconcilable positions. … lacking rhythm. With such “clear” policy and philosophical “differentiation” as the editorial admits on a party led by Obama and one by Romney, even the most geopolitically and economically inert country must expect a difference for good or bad based on who the victor is between such policy and philosophical polarities. A Caribbean flat-footedness, the paper wishes to imply, can only be judged either untrue or inappropriate. But even with regards to the facts; there is an equal conceptual, perhaps even intellectual emptiness, in the editorial assumption.

For every Caribbean immigrant legally living in the US, there is probably one or two illegally present, studying or working, Romney’s presidency will demand deportation either by self-effort of illegal immigrant or by Romney’s hounds while Obama will assist as many of such as can demonstrate “a dream” to integrate and have their dreams actualised leaving deportation only a resort for the unmotivated dreamless malingerers.

Thank God for Romney; he spells it all out more clearly than anyone else could possibly have done; not even Jesse Jackson and his rainbow coalition came close. Romney did it so clearly that the voters with dreams at stake couldn’t but act; and decisively so too.

•Fadipe wrote in via fadipeb@cwdom.dm