Barack Obama for President

I started writing "Una Carta Abierta a Barack Obama" about a week ago. It was at the same time I wrote my love letter to John Edwards and my pointed rant to the junior Senator of New York about Billary. Yet I had a heck of a lot of trouble putting my words down.

First, it was my ambivalence between writing in English and Spanish. Whenever I started in English, I'd have to stop. Words failed me in my adopted language, like they always do when I am working through a profound realization.

What was most interesting is that words in prose failed me.

My area of expertise in Latin American Studies is not only history but aesthetics. More exactly, neobaroque aesthetics in contemporary Latin American poetry. I know it's a mouthful, but I have a reason to invoke them : poetic language is considered not just revolutionary, but mind altering and conscious raising. Poetic language for the likes of a Jose Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy or David Huerta, is a tool for altering consciousness, for exploring the multiplicity inherent in identity and for exposing the duplicity in "what you see is what you get".

I am not a poet by any stretch of the imagination. I just find it really interesting that the only way I could work through my ambivalence about Obama was through poetic prose and that I could only do so in Spanish.

Why have I been ambivalent? I actually believe he is going to be a great President, even better than what Hillary Clinton could be. I am just cautious because, he will be after all the first black president, and I do believe in such a thing as "the curse of the first one out".

I came across the idea in a Wired.com article a long time ago. I can't remember either the title of the article nor the author. I do remember that the term was within the context of innovators. Netscape was meant to flame out because it was the first successful commercial browser. Microsoft had a culture of paranoid innovation because they knew that they could tank any minute for being the first successful software company. The Apple Newton was doomed from the get go because as computer tablets go, it was way ahead of the times.

So even though I have succumbed to the flourishes of enthusiasm that accompany Obama wherever he goes, I haven't succumbed blindly. I know his presidency will not be easy, that he will be the target of the mainstreams ill will; that he may even succumb to the hatred of those who see his message of hope and change as a repudiation of their definition of the American Dream.

So I guess I needed Spanish and some poetry to work through and ponder a reality check.

So after that poetic reality check, I am glad to say I still support him and that I still believe he can beat McCain.

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