Nodeless

I made an interesting discovery last night: one should not drink a quart of chocolate milk immediately before going to bed. I must have made about 40 trips to the necessarium during the night, and I felt like I'd swallowed a ShamWow or something. It was as though there was something huge, fluffy and "uber-absorbent" in my midsection, pressing on all my internal organs and making me have strange, borderline unwelcome dreams about wagon trains.

President Obama. That has a nice ring to it. I note that America is already starting to become modestly cool in other parts of the world. That didn't take long, and I can only expect for the situation to improve. Just as Bush set the tone by repudiating the Kyoto Accord early in his administration, I expect Obama to set an equal but opposite tone early in his.

The whiny right-wingers at work insist that what the world thinks of the United States is irrelevant. Some go so far as to say that it's better to be feared than loved, which I think was the inadvertent credo of Caligula, and you saw what happened to him (spitted by his own bodyguards). I think it does matter. I think it's better to have 150 countries that admire you in one way or another than it is to have 150 countries that fear and despise you.

So even though Obama isn't President yet, and hasn't even named his Cabinet, I am reassured and calmed by the way things are working out. I'm not stupid and I know that it won't be all sunlight and flowers - contrary to what my embittered right-wing associates think, I'm neither stupid nor naive - but reading the international news reports and finding people favorably disposed toward my country again? Oh, that makes me feel good.

I remember a time when people were very favorably disposed toward my country, when America was regarded with awe even by its enemies. I was in the USSR in the 1980s and noticed that the one country the Russians seemed to admire more than any other was the United States, and this was during a chilly spell in the Cold War when we were fixing to nuke one another's underpants off.

It's been a good week.