Wow

After that list this morning, and a day in the car going to visits and flipping back and forth between talk radio channels, I'd been immersed with the idea that not much had changed. Oh, there were some shimmers of light - listening to Maya Angelou discuss her reaction to the election (can't find a link, sorry), hearing Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards discuss thoughts about how the conservative movement has changed which echo some of my earlier musings and made me think that someone on the right gets it. But these were cancelled out in large part by Limbaugh's insistence that only by becoming more radical can the Republicans win again, and that everyone who "abandoned" McCain should just stay gone, Hannity's never-ending diatribes about middle-class tax cuts being communist in nature in the old slippery-slope fallacies, and general predictions that the American way of life as we (we?) know it is over.

But . . . Professor Nicholas Johnson over at from DC to Iowa had a wonderful link up to this NY Times piece discussing the reaction to the election from around the world. I read it, and was amazed. People in Berlin getting up at 5:00 to see what happened. People in the middle east glued to grainy television screens, waiting for the next result. The entire country of Kenya calling a national holiday. Wow.

And it made me think. When's the last time I stayed up to see who won an election in some other country? I can name many of the world leaders, but do I know who they ran against and why they were elected? Do we really mean this freaking much to the rest of the world? It's been a long, long while since I've lived outside this country, and I think I've forgotten the big picture of our place in the world. Shame on me. Let the remedial education begin.