From 9/11 to 11/9…

Fifteen years between these two dates. Seventy eight years since Kristallnacht…. Landmarks on the path to disillusionment. A road we’ve not seen the end of…. A road from complacency and an unearned certainty to humility. A humility we may feel we don’t deserve. A humility that brings us no where we wanted to go.

Our Gorbachev, The politics of disillusionment.

It was June of 2009 when I first realized that Obama was to be our Gorbachev. June 2010 when I first wrote about it. We are now living through what that means. What happens when the apparatchiks themselves no longer believe their own propaganda? If a people are lucky, and Russia was, to some extent,

my legitimate strangeness

This is an essential point. We will never reach an apotheosis in which we will have transcended ourselves and our predicaments. If disillusion is to mean anything concrete, this is what it should point to; not a Utopia enshrined in other terms, not some worldly Nirvana; but a shift in accommodation; along with modes of thought and behavior that tend to support humility, kindness, and a sense of our vulnerability; as capacities we cannot live without.