The current New Yorker has a long piece on Barack Obama which is of interest in this context of sea change. Time will tell, of course, but if its characterization of Obama is even half true, one has to wonder how such a person managed to appear at just this juncture in our history.

What I mean is that I've been predicting the appearance of someone like this for some time -- only to myself, of course, and maybe predicting is too strong a word. Hoping, or thinking wishfully, or imagining are probably more accurate. Still, I don't think this mental foreshadowing is as silly as it sounds. Glenn, for example, appeared just when the need for such a person, with exactly his agenda and exactly his talents had started to become almost painfully evident.

No, I don't think Obama is the Messiah, or necessarily the best candidate around. I don't think so yet, anyway, but he is saying things we haven't heard in a while, and he may actually believe them. Of course, the New Yorker has its own agenda, and writers good enough to conjure as well as any magus of legend, but as I say, the article is interesting.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/07/070507fa_fact_macfarquhar

A car bird is mocking outside and telling me to get back to basic gardening.

On the farm is a one eyed yellow tabby, named "one eye." There is a grey and white cat some goat people left behind. The goat people raised Guernsey cows that give 13% more milk fat. They were losing the goat and cow cheese farm operation on a lost profit share arrangement. The goat folk were really exploited as care taker, pruners, manicurist for a couple plush properties. Oh ah! "we" picked cotton all day.!? Translated, 'the slaves picked cotton and the absent land lord was blogging at the Salon all day long? At least, the time was well spent.

The goat people left the plumb cat behind when we put them up for a winter. That goat raising experience was a ball. But not when the utters got sore and needed a daily milking. The goat's foot, never failed, to get a emery hoof in the mild bucket, every damn time. I should have washed her foot with lemon balm and water. Stumping veg-eta-table garnish harvesters got lots to learn.

The names that were seriously considered for the left behind liberal cat: Computer mouse eater, butter ball cheese, Mocking Bird, and then, the unanimous name is: "Goat People's Cat!"

I love to say, "Here you cute, kitty kitty kitty, you scroungy fat old goat peoples, you left behind meow cat, scat!

I got to go see someone about a horse and check out a horse's teeth. I hope I can remember my back here. Whoever led us to Earth, must have had a wry (not glass) sense of bad humor? Who ever led me 'here', I ponder, 'it's not always funny, and we have listened to every lie in the Roaming Strays, crooked, politicians book. They need Nature to send them to where the sun don't shine...Hell. Well, just look at them, they are there now. See the absent look on CIA Tenant? Sea monsters?

Whoever knows the way to an earthen paradise, take each others hands so we can all together cancan...and run them critters out of DC-Dodge.

Now, if I can remember to slow down at yellow, sleep at green, and speed via Stop and Go red electric lights, maybe it will be fun to make it via another day. Let's see-saw or if I need to find my way home, I go go 'Dada way', or is it the other way <~~>?

You say your BR piece was written 20 years ago? How's this excerpt for relevance:

"We Americans are the inventors of the twentieth century, but we still haven't found a home in it. Despite our history, and our pretensions to technological superiority over the rest of the world, we are a lot like the victims of the Chinese curse -- fated, no matter what our individual desires, to live in times which are a lot more interesting than we would prefer.

Perhaps that is why, in philosophical terms, the second half of the twentieth century has been so devastatingly quiet. The testimony of Heisenberg and Freud is on record in every library, and incidents like Chernobyl or urban gridlock are reported daily in the media, yet the ruling orthodoxy of the post-war era remains unswervingly Newtonian. It understands only cause and effect, problem and solution, and it recognizes only one heresy: anyone who dallies, even for a moment, with the notion that uncertainty might be a permanent feature of human enterprise is automatically persona non grata. Like Socrates, he may be tolerated, but he is never left alone with the children.

The price of this attitude, especially among the orthodox themselves, is a profound and chronic restlessness. The hope that we can find solutions is tempered always by the fear, largely unexpressed, that we may ourselves be part of the problem. We sense that we are facing not one, but two futures: the future of our public allegiances, and that darker future of moral decay, terrorism and nuclear holocaust which occasionally decorates our private nightmares."

(Emphasis added)

Well done.

I, too, want to believe that Obama is some sort of freshness, a new wave, a sign of hope. But last October's Harper's article about him keeps healthy skepticism afloat. They all have to play the political games -- question is, are they smart enough to play on the side of angels and still win?

Good point about the Q trial (and subsequent Q episodes, since he sticks with that theme). My point is that ST envisions a future where humanity has made a conscious choice to change, to improve, to humbly acknowledge the failings of our character. BR is a future where we make the opposite choice, or fail to choose at all -- it could be argued that the moral awakening of one man is representative of a change, but he runs away from that reality at the end.