So Obama took a battering in the mid-terms, and the Republicans who had so royally f**ked up the world prior to the Democratic parties sweep to the white house in 2008, now have the House of Representatives.  So after 10 years of war mongering, over spending on military budgets etc, 2 years were all the US people were prepared to give Obama.

How short term of the US population, to expect a party to fix the decade long series of mistakes by the GOP. maybe Obama was too fool hardy, too idealistic. He should have realised that although his ideas were well received, they wanted some security before they pushed through with all his reforms.  It reminds me of a quote from Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections:

How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes

This result probably means that anything the Democrats try to pass will be blocked, and their other passed bills will be slowly picked apart like some Zoroastrian corpse. How sad an ethos for those in the Tea Party, whose sole aim is to block these changes Obama is trying for. 

But does this make any difference to us in the rest of the world? Is the US as much of a force as say China on the global stage? Does the obvious shift to the right mean anything? The US were always a fairly right wing nation. Any country where people can openly persecute atheists has some serious issues.

http://www.rationalatheist.com/Discrimination/atheist_discrimination.html

Also, I still don’t understand a country which has the largest amount of philanthropy in the entire world, but is so averse to the idea of universal health care. And why is any socialist idea so repugnant to them?

I will never understand America, and I don’t think they know themselves, probably why there will never be a truly, all encompassing ‘GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL’. It is too diverse, too malleable, and too idiosyncratic to sum up the experience of the country. Which brings me back to Franzen and his novel Freedom (and The Corrections to a certain extent), I don’t believe these were candidates for the Great American Novel, for they weren’t about a zeitgeist that encompassed America. Just Middle America, and Middle Class Middle America at that. I think he wrote TGMAN (The Great Middle American Novel).

- Anand