If 2008 was charmingly preoccupied with the idea of Barack Obama as a heroic outsider, scourge of political business as usual, and all around harbinger of a more level playing field to come, then 2009 is turning out to be–what?–a refreshingly stiff antidote to such heady optimism. The YES WE CAN-dust has cleared, and politics has settled once more into what Rahm Emmanuel rightly calls the art of the possible. The economy is still in the toilet. America’s still got one (Iraq), two (Afghanistan), three (still at “war” on “drugs,” last we checked) wars on. And Obama has turned out (fortunately) to be something both other and decidedly more pragmatic than the angel Gabriel. Change you can believe in, it turns out, is a slow and fitful process: Business may not quite be as usual, but it hasn’t gotten all that unusual either. The financial industry continues to resist restructuring, and reformers continue to be tarred as renegade socialists. The playing field may have been “leveled” in the more ruinous sense of the word, but it remains safe to say that the meek haven’t exactly inherited America. The historically marginal are still just that, somewhere subsumed in the grand sweep and process of events that even in topsy-turvy 2009 remain cosmically beyond their control.
In the US, anyway, but maybe not in Myanmar, where John Yettaw, an American Vietnam vet, Mormon, and armchair psychologist of dubious credentialing, has struck a major blow against the Great Man theory of history.
On May 5, Burmese authorities arrested the 53-year old Yettaw as he was swimming away from the Rangoon home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel-decorated, opposition leader and democracy advocate who has been under house arrest at her lakeside home for 13 of the past 19 years. In what has to be the single most depressing instance of geopolitics parodying a Wes Anderson film, Yettaw, an asthmatic and borderline diabetic, outfitted himself with plastic bottle floaties and homemade flippers and made the mile-long swim across Inya Lake in hopes of speaking with Suu Kyi about a paper he was writing on forgiveness and resilience.
Suu Kyi, who was up for release this year (when, significantly, the ruling Myanmar junta plans to hold elections), pleaded with Yettaw to turn back immediately but ultimately relented (sympathy being a common flaw in the Nobel temperment) and let the poor bastard stay the night to regain his strength. The whole bizarre episode ended, of course, with Yettaw being arrested on his return voyage across the lake and being summarily shipped to a Burmese prison to await trial on charges of immigration violations and entering a restricted area.
Worse yet, Suu Kyi is being tried for violating the conditions of her house arrest, and it doesn’t take real a cynic to guess that the junta will be more than happy to extend her imprisonment and cripple the opposition through the slated elections. Many Burmese are livid or despairing (rightly so, in both cases), and George Packer at the New Yorker has publicly entertained the idea that the whole thing was a set up. Either way, John Yettaw’s treatise on forgiveness and resilience is shaping up to be a classic on the subject.
Last week, TIME wondered if Yettaw is “crazy or just eccentric.” Here’s an idea: how about we ditch the false dichotomy and call him the single most destructive (and historically significant) idiot that America has unleashed on the world since Bush left office?