A PRESIDENT FOR MANY REASONS
JOE BIDEN : PROMISES TO KEEP
Joseph Robinette Biden will become the 46th President of the United States of America on January 20, 2021.
The inauguration will bring relief, hope and joy to millions within America, and many more beyond her national borders.
This last week has been exhilarating, exciting and exhausting. Even excruciating with great expectations. I never thought I would be that involved in the outcome of an election so far away in a place called America of which one of my favourite writers wrote: ‘It should have remained undiscovered!’
In fact I’d given up any plan to visit my academic and writer-friends from the East to the West coasts of that sprawling landmass.
I don’t know about you, but I never feel like visiting a country unless I like its politics and Government. People are, of course, always the same – ordinary and extraordinary, heroic and unheroic, caught up in the web of the dailiness of life: living ,loving, creating and killing.
A web can be easily destroyed, but we scarcely pay attention to the artistry and labour in its making. Often the artist remains invisible.
That is the human condition; and our very complex human destiny. Suddenly I feel more than the fog of coronavirus has lifted and we can all breathe a bit more freely.
And perhaps see a bit more clearly: Whither we’re going?
Battle for the soul of America
President-elect Joe Biden’s stirring battle cry has been ‘Battle for the Soul of the Nation’.
Many had perceived him as too feeble a voice compared to the bluff, bluster and bombast of the incumbent President. But you and I are unlikely to hear a more soaring and sincere speech than Mr Biden’s soon after he was certain of his victory.
It was delivered with great grace and dignity with an embracing empathy. What moved me most was that here was a man of almost 78 – in fact, he’ll be 78 on November 20 – exactly a month later he’d hold the highest
office in the land and elevated to the leadership of the most extraordinary experiment in democracy on earth. Normally one would be a little awed by such ascension. But Joe Biden, unlike any recent President, fills me with hope and a sense of decency.
Not even Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, in my opinion, have had the quiet stature, extensive experience, and hopeful vision of healing not only of the divided United States, but of so many parts of the world menaced by climate catastrophes, the pandemic of COVID-19 and a million others ills of our shared, seared world.
The presidential candidate’s slogan was ‘Battle for the Soul of the Nation’. It was a huge call to the hearts of American citizens who witnessed the corrupt decline of something deeper in their society for which generations had given their best and the brightest and created a civilisation of great generosity, if often tainted by racial brutality and brutal inequality. It produced some remarkable Presidents from Abe Lincoln to Barack Obama. Men who not only campaigned in poetry but appealed to an intrinsic poetic intensity within their citizenry.
DEfinInG tHE souL oF tHE nAtIon
But what constitutes the soul of a nation? Philosophically and theologically we’ve been given many definitions of the individual soul; from the celestial poem the Bhagawad Gita to the Sermon on the Mount and much before and beyond these spiritual texts from philosophers and prophets wherein the wonder of the world is sometimes revealed.
Generations have lived by those concepts and transcended immense sorrows men, especially men, have inflicted on the breast of Mother Earth even as they fed on her milk.
Today, I live amidst the most ancient continuous culture extant on Earth.
At the last count it was at least 65,000 years old, although archeologists and scientists continue to discover bones embedded in stones that tell of much older inhabitation of this island continent only recently named Australia. As I’m scribbling my thoughts, it’s Remembrance Day. I know very little about any war and the pity of wars. Yet I know how millions sacrifice their lives so that we may live and let live in peace: acts of soldiers and statesmen. Even Fiji is redeeming its lost honour because of the brave acts of a soldier.
So how does Joe Biden usher in a new era into our lives. This ‘old’ man’s life seems to be filled with personal tragedies. How large and accommodating must his soul be to bear the grief of dying, loss and disappointments, the greatest of which is death; to lose your wife and child in a car accident and a grown-up son to cancer.
Yet he never gave up his pursuit of public service without bitterness. It’s fate that he should now take over from a person who is still in denial and delusional in his egomaniacal thinking. One electoral defeat has revealed his inner hollowness.
Mr Biden is the proper antidote to that kind of a leader; you might say he’s the vaccine we’ve discovered to give back ethical good health to the United States.
The Great Soul of India, the other great democracy with its myriad flaws and problems, is of course the mahatma, precisely named.
Mahatma Gandhi was killed at 78; Mr Biden becomes President at that age. The journey must continue as the Earth revolves every instant.
One image of the Great Soul I’ve is his walking barefoot on the brokenglass-strewn paths of Noakhali to save ordinary lives from the madness of communal conflagration of imperial Partition.
One inevitably thinks of the American Civil War – both President Lincoln and Gandhi were assassinated by their fellow countrymen. But both in their life and death enlarged the soul of their nations with inspiring words and daring acts.
Today tragically in both these great democracies – one the oldest, the other the largest – the soul of the nation is tied to the wheels of fire of racism and religious bigotry.
THE Most ExpErIEnCED MAn to BECoME prEsIDEnt
So what does Mr Biden victory tell the US? Mr Biden is a man who has served for almost 50 years as Senator and Vice-President.
No past president has had this experience in his political life.
He’ll be the most experienced person to honour the presidency of a 244-year old constitutional democracy.
But what is profoundly appealing is the man’s personal values in life. These have made him a stronger man and a more empathetic soul.
It is suffering that maketh the soul of an individual and, more importantly, the collective soul of a nation.
It can be seen on the cross or crossing a river.
It is about the soul of a nation that we must talk about. The tragedies of America are numerous; from civil wars to assassinations of Presidents. Gandhi understood this more than any Indian. I believe he saved the soul of a divided India through his sacrifice and unshakable belief in this invisible concept of soul.
But what is the soul? Of a person or a nation? There’s nothing concrete about it – it’s invisible and infinite like God, whatever your beliefs may be. It is a presence, precious and deathless, inside and outside. It is indivisible.
The soul of a nation is contained in more than human beings: the environment, the rivers and seas, the skies and stars, the stones and trees, the numerous atoms and mountains that shape our lives in relation to other lives, animate and inanimate; creatures, big and small, go in shaping the soul of a nation with acts of imagination and intimacy of living together. I AM because WE ARE.
It’s a spirit that rolls through all things and makes us see into our lives and the life around us in its multitudinous forms and faces and surfaces, visible and invisible, felt along our heart, blood and bones: the very spirit in our being.
It’s an endless journey of the endlessness of our being and becoming.
The soul of a nation for us is what we create with our body’s breath; our arts and crafts, our dreams and nightmares, our conquests of the space and our relationships with our neighbours, our interpretations of scriptures and songs, our words and silences.
Out of the broken pieces that litter our lives, we bleed and give birth.
It is seen in the Songlines and Dreamtime of our Aboriginal world.
It is what we, the citizens, the components of a society, make it.
It is the poetry of a nation in which the soul of a nation finds a voice, a vision, even a vote.
‘Promises to Keep’
Some years ago Joe Biden told his tragic story in a book titled Promises to Keep.
The title is from one of America’s favourite poems composed in 1922. It was also found scribbled on the desk diary of Pundit Nehru on the day he died in 1964:
Whose woods these are I think I know His house is in the village though; He’ll not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
In a sense this little poem sums up the mystery and magic within our souls. And connects it to life around us with immeasurable obligations of human bondage.
One can wish the new President-elect the best so he may walk on a path lit by Diwali diyas with Vice-Presidentelect Kamala Harris with the living message of Christmas greetings of goodwill, grace and light of which we’re the fragments.