In The New Straits Times Online, which seems to be an English-language publication serving those with an interest in the Malaysian sphere, a columnist named Umapagan Ampikapakan writes that “We really do need the mirage of America.”

I have always been unapologetic about my feelings towards the United States of America; about their spectacular politics, about their brave, raw prose, even their obtuse poetry.
All of my encounters, be they with Walden, Barack Obama, or Bob Dylan, have always left me whet. For I have found their product to be truer than most. I have found it lacks the hubris and pretension all too apparent in the European. It may not be as subtle, but therein lies its beauty.

You can easily spot me in a crowd. For when the conversation inevitably descends into global politics, I am usually the lone voice in the corner. I am the one defending the seemingly indefensible to those compulsively clad in Levi’s jeans and sipping diet colas. The irony of which has long escaped them.

When Mr. Ampikapakan says that his encounters with Walden, Barack Obama and Bob Dylan “have always left [him] whet”, I take it that his intention is to say that such encounters have whetted his appetite for more of the same. In any case, he goes on to express a kind of qualified hope that Barack Obama will again “make America that shining example of a liberal democracy.” He says, “We need America to be great. At least, we need to believe that she is.”

Apparently George W. Bush disappointed the writer along with so many of his Levi-clad compatriots. Perhaps his hope in America — such as it is — will be restored. Who knows? But he should beware in case the hero he hopes for in the new American president instead provides merely a return to the kind of realpolitik that for decades offered lip-service, at best, to the concept of any kind of self-determination for Muslim peoples. Whatever many of the people in those regions of the world may think of President Bush today, he has actually believed that freedom is God’s gift to every man, woman and child in the world — as he has said on multiple occasions — and it has been a very distinct underpinning of his foreign policy since September 11th, 2001. In that he has been unusual, to say the least, and it seems unlikely that another American president will give such priority to the same concept for a very long time to come.

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