The spooking of America

I was standing on a lawn at Nasa Space Centre in Houston in January 1986, soon after the Challenger space disaster in which the Shuttle had exploded on take off, killing the seven person crew including the first teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe. Ronald Reagan, as President, was coaxing the nation’s grief. The explosion was a morale breaking body blow to this pioneer nation. Nothing so drastic had afflicted the space programme of this pioneer nation eternally bent on reaching the next horizon.

I was watching in Oklahoma City as Bill Clinton did much the same after the domestic bombing by a white supremacist in which 168 people died. By that year, 1995, the President was using terms like “purge ourselves of the dark forces” to speak of what had afflicted America.

Today, Barack Obama sets forth on yet another mission by an American President to heal his nation. How much more divided, more vitriolic, poisonous an atmosphere he confronts now than those who went before him. Add to the horror of Tucson’s killings and maiming, whose victims he will be there to remember, the state of America and this represents another dark milestone for the US.

For America, mired in a failing warfare abroad, emotionally and economically in fear of China, this is a country rapidly talking itself into decline. A rash of books is appearing questioning whether the once lone global Super Power has peaked.

Even Fox News’ boss, Roger Ailes has told his anchors to tone down the “bombast”.

If Obama is himself the master of awe inspiring rhetoric that we believed during his run for the White House, his verbal skills have never been needed more than now. This is a landmark day in America’s immediate struggle for identity.

We may ourselves have suffered the loss of a senior politician as recently as 1979 to an assassins’ hand (Airey Neave MP). But though it in no way excuses it, that was in the context of the dramatic civil strife then gripping Northern Ireland (Neave was the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary).

For America, Congresswoman Giffords’ shooting, the Federal judge’s murder, represent the crazed action of a man with a legal semi-automatic pistol. The context is not actual civil war, but bitter political strife amid violent rhetoric in which the constitutional legality of the gun is itself part of the argument.

Yes, make no mistake this is a vastly challenging day both for Obama himself and his nation. Ultimately for us too. For if, in the long term, America pitches for decline, it will affect all of us more than we can hazard.