rabble.ca has published my piece about the Obama phenomenon. Here are the first few paragraphs.

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Who will write the United States’ next great poem?

>by Bernadette L. Wagner
October 24, 2008

I watched a couple of YouTube videos the other night. One featured angry Palin supporters on their way into a Palin rally. The other was an interview with McCarthyesque Michelle Bachmann, a Republican senator calling for “liberals” to be investigated for anti-Americanism. Ugly. I quickly clicked on to a photo of the 100,000 supporters at an Obama rally in Missouri.

And then I cried. The juxtaposition was too much.

Some say Obama’s followers are cult-like, cheerleaders for a good sales pitch. I don’t think so. One hundred thousand people do not show up to a political rally for a sales pitch or cheerleading duty. Obama touches something deeper within than any salesperson could ever hope to reach. He reflects to the American people a sense of their own power and they respond with a willingness to write a new narrative, a new poem, for their country.

In declaring his support for Obama, Republican Colin Powell called him “transformative.” Obama is definitely transforming the face of American politics, the poem for which much of America has dug deeply into its psyche to uncover. Sadly, Hillary Clinton would not have accomplished this. Misogyny lies still deeper within.

Racism is bubbling up, however. Many fear for Obama’s life. Will there be a fair election in the U.S.?

Read the full piece.