some guy in lebanon

I was the second person to arrive at the Captain’s Cabin at 7:30 PM yesterday, a bar here in Hamra where I’m staying in Beirut. I had been assured by several people that this particular bar had sworn to stay open until an American President was selected, many thousands of miles away…

Doug Mills/The New York Times

And so it did. Surrounded by expats, Lebanese Americans, and Lebanese of all religious and ethnic shades, I drank profusely and watched CNN as my country seemingly came to its senses and pulled itself from the brink of self-destruction. Indeed, for my generation, this is the first time in our modern lives that we can be proud of our executive leadership, and of the voters who selected it. I was in awe as the cynicism of the Americans with me in Beirut this evening washed away. Trust me, no American is more cynical than a young American in Beirut. Here we see first hand the disaster that is American foreign policy, and many moved clear across the world to escape the America represented by the only Executive they truly knew: That of George W. Bush.

It was said on BBC World tonight that President Bush told President-Elect Obama that the election day was “awesome,” in his congratulatory call. Such are the times and the years and trials we have lived through, and God Willing, somehow survived, since 2000.

My new boss Marc remarked to me today, with excitement, trepidation, and the cynicism of a westerner towards the United States of this past decade, of the irony of my arrival the day before  the most important American election of the modern era, and that I would begin to work on the day after. He dared not even suggest that Obama could pull it off.

This morning, Nick, myself, and Nick’s flat-mate made our guesses for what the electoral votes would look like in the evening, when the dust settled. I am amazed at how far our cynicism had taken us, and how beaten and deflated a generation we belong to.  For though we all agreed that Obama would win, even in the face of  every poll declaring Obama the likely winner, even in the face of 100,000 person crowds and an enormous financial advantage, we mustered only the slightest confidence in an Obama victory:

I believed that Obama would receive 283 points. Nick believed that Obama would receive 336 points. Andrew went with 325.

So now, I am a believer, and feel perhaps that “Yes We Can” is a striking motto for my time here in Beirut. I have to believe that if we have come this far, if the American people, so complicit as we are in the re-election (and clear mandate) of President Bush in 2004, so complicit as we are in our acceptance of a horrendous war and unprecedented Republican cronyism on Wall Street, so complicit even in the many declarations that Obama surrounded himself with terrorists and was a Communist and everything else, if WE of all people, we as a nation, can elect a man of such stature, so dissimilar from the politics of the past 8 years, the first African American President-Elect in our country’s history, than I believe we can do anything.

Congratulations, America, you didn’t blow it, even without me there to supervise. I thank you for that, more than I can say.

The Dao that can be experienced is not true;
The world that can be constructed is not true.
The Dao manifests all that happens and may happen;
The world represents all that exists and may exist.
-Dao De Jing