The Fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and the election of President Obama in November 2008, shared the sense that an era had come to an end, that profound and sudden change had taken place, even that something had been overthrown. Germans wept that cold November night because they had at last overcome their history and were unified again as a people and a nation. The tears of Americans in balmy Harlem, understood by people around the world, said that it was not an impertinence to compare the outcome of that election night with the dramatic news that the cold war was over.

Of course, one could not say that racism in America had come to an end, certainly white supremacy and the lawlessness associated with it had been repudiated; some said that they had been made to depart from power.

For the first time in the memory of many a major political party was moving in the direction of nominating a demonstrably superior candidate—a genuinely literate man in a culture that does not prize literacy, an actually cosmopolitan man in an arena that deems tolerance of the world suspect by definition. A civil man.A politically adroit man. Enthusiasm was high. Participation was up.-Ron Price with thanks to Darryl Pinckney and Joan Didion, “Obama: In the Irony-Free Zone,” 18/12/’08, in The New York Review of Books.

@ NathanJ

<<I watched on SBS this year was called "The Great Divide"...The discussion after the program was bland, predictable >>

SBS across the board is bland & predictable --its advertorials (aka documentataries) about Oz, run with a typical lefty theme about Anglo racism and injustice--what a farce that it should be taxpayer funded.