The blogosphere is a-twitter with Barack’s unlooked-for win in Iowa last night. Obama may not be as progressive as Edwards, and on certain positions he is definitely to the right of where I stand, but symbolically speaking, he is ideal.

Bruce Sterling, one of the founding fathers of cyberpunk gives us a little snippet of Rolling Stone’s coverage of Barack’s victory.

Some choice quotes:

[The next president must be] a symbol of the best possible future for twenty-first-century multicultural America and an antidote to both the callous reactionary idiocy of the Bush administration and the shrewd but soulless corporatism of the Clinton machine.

[Iraq, New Orleans, and other debacles/scandals] exposed much of Congress and the Cabinet as a low-rent crime family hired to collect protection money for the likes of Halliburton and Pfizer.

Obama is a dynamic, handsome, virile presence, a stark contrast to the bloated hairy shitbags we usually elect to positions of power in this country. Moreover, he completely lacks that air of grasping, gutter-scraping ambition sickness that follows most presidential hopefuls around like a rain cloud.

(The last one is my favorite.)

I know that every politician clamors for change and rarely ever delivers, but it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a shittier job of running the country than W has. Even I could do better while doped up on Valium and drunk off my ass. (At least I’d know not to get involved in a fucking land war in Asia!)

Seriously, though. W has shown us how low our country can go. Unless we do something batshit crazy like elect Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, it’s hard to imagine doing much worse for the next four to eight years. I mean, seriously, eventually we’ll have depopulated so much of Iraq that the insurgents won’t have anyone to hide behind. And while places like the Eastern seaboard and parts of California are likely to be underwater in the next decade or so, it’s not going to be under the next president’s watch. The immigration problem will work itself out because soon American citizens will be just as uneducated and as challenged by the English language as the average undocumented worker, making the pay differential negligible. Spanish-speaking America (Mexico, Central America, South America) is likely to experience a renaissance as the dollar continues its downward spiral, making it even less favorable to try to get to the U.S.

It almost doesn’t matter, really. If Obama gets elected president, it will repudiate the current thinking of the DLC, that mealy-mouthed, spine-less, slimy, scummy branch of the Democratic party that has been promising center-right, Republicanesque policies all these long years. It will show all those fucking racists out there what’s what. (And don’t pretend that there aren’t a lot of closet racists out there.) It will show the rest of the world that we aren’t all a bunch of ignorant fuckwits who are out to destroy the world.

C’mon. We all know that Obama has at least 15-30 IQ points over W. Even if he were to start another hopeless war somewhere, and lose yet another entire American city to climate change, things would still probably go better than anything monkey-boy and his feces-hurling minions could cook up.

But it would change American forever. It would be a big “fuck you” to all the reactionary elements of our society. We want an America that is ready for the future, not an America that is forever looking backwards to a pre-1960’s, pre-Social Security/Title XIX, pre-free speech, pre-civil rights movement, pre-New Deal, even pre-abolition era (Just remember Trent Lott’s not-so-long-ago affirmation of Strom Thurmond’s straight-up segregationist/regressivist platform, may the motherfucker burn in hell.)

Welcome, once and for all, to the 21st century.