jurnal.eidotomic

Public image wise, the outcome of this year’s presidential election is naturally a big historic hit: a devastatingly powerful national untimely oldie, if you will.

But – here comes the “but” part that the legions of commentators (black and white alike), and generally accepted public figures have decidedly turned into the butt section of national contemporary history of which I’m not shy to admit I was afraid  even before this shameful transformation took the form of today’s – and yesterday’s, too, for that matter – positively negative racism.

What I’m actually talking about, in plainer terms now, is my personal discomfort with seeing how race is once again the issue at stake in everything that has been said for the past almost 100 or so hours.

Race used to be a bad thing in the pseudo-scientific ismed clothes of racism. Race, in the ismed overalls of racism, used to be something everybody avoided in public, but no one (or the vast majority of the “no one” social category) really dismissed from private thought. Racism was thus doubly polarised, pretty much like the planet it used to thrive on: for racism is a planet in itself, with the good and the bad at work in the manifold illustrations of its gravitational pull toward either pole of social attitude.

Of course, I’m only metaphorising this much and so unnecessarily often because it is out of my metaphorising this recent event ushered in the robe of a seemingly new epoch that comes the spite I have been accumulating on the tip of my tongue and in the chasms of my mind for this, in my own sense, planetary hypocritical double-talk triumphant fashion in which the 44th American President’s personal and public achievement has been gossiped about, rather than neutrally commented upon.

When I was this close to feeling fully proud of being co-American (I’m not thoroughly socially and politically: institutionally American), disgust with this idea gripped me again with all the might of its declamatory talons. I did not know that the (final) victory of race over racism had to be spoiled into the (perpetual) conquest of racism over race. I did not know that such a big deal had to be made, on every possible prime-time televised occasion, out of the complexion of this 44th President’s chromatic disposition. I was not aware that America was a nation of painters that voted, if at all, solely on the pictorial impression whatever candidate was making to the artistically refined eye of its body politic. It seems to me that America has for too long been its own National Gallery of incorrect mentality paintings, rather than a colour-blind painter’s studio, whose canvases only consist of lines (political directions, that is) and dots (namely, equally political halts at either success or failure), drawn in the singular chromatic penchant for humane fairness.

I didn’t know all this and now, on the threshold of the new achromatic administration (or multi-chromatic, if one thinks it best to assimilate the absence in chromatist hues with its potentially countless groups of presence), I stand corrected, and, equally so, rebuked for not having taken sides on the best colour mixing with lesser ones on the national maître peintre’s media-suffocated palette.