Columbus voyaged across the Atlantic to discover India. He found the Americas instead. Half a millennium later, Joe Biden sought to rediscover America. He and his band of liberals have found an Indian. If Biden is a bit long in the tooth, Kamala Harris is still young in political years, yet ready enough to step into his shoes and walk his talk
Narendra Jha | Special to Clarion India
WHO says poetry does not exist in politics? It can and it does. When there is no rhyme, there is always a good reason, as we have just seen in the United States of America. The story of the American way of life, the American understanding of democracy, began in Philadelphia in 1787 when a 4000-word constitution for a “more perfect union” came to be written. Today, it seems to have been reinstated in Philadelphia again, when its denizens joined the rest of the state of Pennsylvania in mailing Joe Biden to the White House, extricating with 70 million more Americans an ideal driven underground since 2016: democracy is not autocracy, demagoguery is not electioneering, slogan is not policy and, importantly, lie is not perceived truth. It did not have to be Philadelphia.
The president-elect had other routes and he will tread them triumphantly too—very shortly but surely—with the states of Nevada, Arizona and Georgia poised to reinforce the electoral returns at the time of this writing. But is it not poetic that Philadelphia, urbs prima in Pennsylvania, took a decisive lead in removing the brutal executive knee that sought to gag a proud nation spreadeagled on a fractured pavement?
Donald Trump is out.
There were 50 routes to this pass. But the road ahead is singular. And it is hard. One of the biggest enemies in recorded history—aerosolized and invisible, efficient and insidious—looms larger than ever. Covid-19 is infecting record numbers by the day in the US, north of 120,000 in the last two days alone, and there is no saying when people can come out to work as before.
However, they did come out to vote, and it is reassuring that they did. To repair the damage you must cleanse the site first. It is not an easy road that the Biden-Harris combine have inherited. At some point, the two will be asked: “What have you done?” We have only to remember that voters in ‘herds’ of tens of millions, perhaps immune to science and reason, said at the hustings that doing nothing was the right way forward and that shame no longer be felt in remaining divided; in fact, it could even be enshrined and celebrated.
But the states were not born in a day.
It did not happen immediately upon a singular declaration in 1787 in Philadelphia: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect UNION, establish JUSTICE, insure domestic TRANQUILLITY, provide for common DEFENSE, promote the general WELFARE, and secure the BLESSINGS of LIBERTY to ourselves and to our POSTERITY, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” It took two years to sign and adopt it alone. Admission or ratification is another matter. Delaware, from which president-elect Joe Biden hails, and Pennsylvania, to which Biden went and has proved decisive today, might have been the first two. But it was already the 20th Century before Oklahoma (1907), New Mexico (1912), Arizona (1912), Alaska (1959) and, finally, Hawaii (1959) officially entered the perfect union. So, not decades but centuries stand between subjugation under the Crown—or CORONA in Spanish, the country’s 2nd language—to the federation that the USA is today.
Biden gets four years to make it whole again.
Mark each capitalized word in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States quoted above: Union, Justice, Tranquillity, Defense, Welfare and Liberty. How many, if not all, have we seen the death of in the Trump dispensation? Union has been replaced with Division, Justice for All now means Justice for One, Defense is for Suckers, Welfare is for Big Corporations, and Liberty is about the Right to Bear Assault Rifles. Where does that leave Tranquillity? This is the inheritance of the Biden-Harris combine. Their only choice—and first task—is to repeat the words of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now: “Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror… horror and moral terror. If they are not your friends, they must be your enemies.”
If anyone needs two terms, it is Biden-Harris.
Christopher Columbus voyaged across the Atlantic to discover India. He found the Americas instead. True or not, many like to believe in the irony of this legend. Half-a-millennium later, Joe Biden sought to rediscover America. Interestingly, he and his band of liberals have found an Indian. If Biden is a bit long in the tooth, Kamala Harris is still young in political years, yet ready enough to step into his shoes and walk his talk. Importantly, the nation agrees that he has been wise to make the doubly-wise choice of a running mate: first woman, first woman of colour. It does not matter that she will never be the First Lady of the United States of America. POTUS is better than FLOTUS.
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Narendra Jha is a veteran Indian journalist and editor who has worked with Indian Express and Khaleej Times, Dubai, among others.
