As someone who agrees with the broad strokes of the argument that Wright was treated as an unacceptable radical for - the sentiment that the vicious inequity that America spent centuries promoting were a shame on us all, evidently only acceptable to believe if that inequity involves people enjoying their sex lives - I’m not that personally attached to America in and of itself. I find its ideals admirable and am often impressed with its people’s basic benevolence; what impresses me about the outcome of this election is the profound spirit of general amity.

As we sometimes have cause to remember - almost sadly, now that we have been made to swallow the bitter harvest sown by the blood-lusting Republicans - the reaction to 9/11 internationally was extremely similar to the reaction to 9/11 internally. While there were certainly some people who reacted with a sort of nasty, unwelcome, and almost always vicarious fury (I have never met among the ‘nuke Mecca’ crowd a man or woman closer than six degrees to a WTC casualty), the predominant reaction to the day’s tragedy was sorrow and support. It’s worthwhile to compare it to the London tube bombings - the right had so fully coopted the basic idea of suffering that to express sympathy for the day’s victims of al Qaeda had been drummed and massaged into an informal referendum on murdering wholly unrelated people in Iraq.

We have, for the last six years, been convinced for the exclusive benefit of the wealthy military-industrial fuckwads surrounding Cheney that the world hates America, that we’re fundamentally incompatible with the people and values of Europe and England, and that there exists a foreign contingent that reflexively sneers at us and wishes us failure. Of course, the latter is only a simple case of misidentification; there is such a foreign continent. The problem is, they are - like Mark “The Human Jizz” Steyn and Christopher “Intefatigable Doughty Socialist Fag” Hitchens - cheerleaders for the current vile administration, eager to provide philosophical or psychological fig-leaves to the American neoconservatives’ comprehensive contempt for the Constitution, international law, and human dignity. Whether you’re a jack-ass whose contribution to socialist theory revolves around how awesome you are and how awful darkies are or a vile, race-baiting neo-Nazi who gleefully mocked the American victims of his intellectual cousins in Oklahoma, the Bush Administration had a warm spot in its heart and a soft spot in its brain for you.

The farthest fringes of the right have been conscripted to project a sort of gleeful, shit-eating hate to foreigners. The cowboy stereotype is a kind one compared to the one presented by Broder, Rice, and all the fuck-the-world gang - our cultural, political, and economic leadership has spent the last six years screaming hate at the world, insisting that we’re ignorant, bellicose monsters whose firepower entitles us to anything we want, consistently presenting the bare basics of humanity as limp-wristed Foreignese gibberish.

And the same people who had spent those six years in a desperate struggle to preserve civilization from our government - who have seen terrorism, global warming, and diplomatic tension spiral out of control as a direct consequence of us - have erupted over the last few days in joy.

Of course, the totalitarian freeper goons - and their beloved America-hating dancing monkeys - have all erupted into passionate hate, wishing death and destruction on Obama and the country and shrieking in impotent rage at a country in the throes of collective triumph, cursing at a people who would not put another of their angry, rotten old men in power.

It’s not sufficient to spoil it, though - the sense, among Democrats and Republicans, the left and right, and the great majority of Americans and people of the world, that we’ve stepped back from the brink. We told a pair of candidates - who shrilly berated us for liking a man who had not only grown up in Chicago but was clearly a ni, who called us Communists for favoring a tax policy common to the entire first world, and whose sole agenda consisted of a long, unbreaking stream of hate-objects up to and including the Earth itself - to fuck right off, and we elected the country’s first black President in the process, an intelligent and genuinely decent man.

After all this time, the world - and we - didn’t know and couldn’t but hope that we still had it in us, that we were even in the loosest sense the same country that destroyed fascism and tamed the atom. The Republicans figured we didn’t - and we weren’t - and in front of the entire world we showed them just how wrong they were.

And that is why the world wept for joy - in the words of Tim Krieder, like a happy 9/11. Not just our allies - but friends throughout humanity, people happy to see us prosper without seething in desperate eagerness to see our enemies destroyed.

There will be a time for cynicism - the inside-baseball stuff, like the high-level appointment of Rahm Emanuel, has been all too disappointing so far - but after eight years of Bush I suspect we’re all happy just to enjoy these high days’ international comity, and rest secure in the knowledge that none of the usual thugs is in a position to exploit it.