(Based on a rough draft written in a packed Spitfire bar this morning): I never saw so many people in a bar prior to 9 a.m. since the last soccer World Cup. It’s now 10:37 a.m. and the place is still quite full, just not to standing room only. According to reports, the scene was just as packed and festive at the other viewing parties around town and around the country. Lots of hugging and kissing and clapping and cheering. A spontaneous chorus of “Na Na Na Na, Hey Hey, Goodbye” ensued when the Bushes boarded the helicopter. A lot of people, including myself, seem not to want this moment to end. Yet it must.

Or must it?

What if the joy, the celebratory spirit, carries over into people’s everyday lives? To work, school, commuting, recreation, family, lovemaking, feeding, grooming, worshipping, checkbook balancing, and all the other things normal American humans do in their normal lives?

I’ve never known such a world. The many corporate attempts to create all-positive spaces (Disneyland, malls, casinos, porn) invariably reveal a heap of sadness, a face of tragedy glaring from behind the comedy mask.

But Obama’s positive thinking is a very different flavor from an incessant/manic corporate positive thinking—and from the neocons’ bullyish swagger.

It’s a positivity that recognizes the negative, while vowing to overcome it. Not to hide troubles behind slogans and forced smiles, but to solve them. To create a new reality the hard way, the only way that ultimately works.

Thus the call to begin the real work, invoked by Obama during the eat-your-vegetables passages of his inauguration speech.

How far will he, and we, get about rescuing the economy, health care, education, and the planet?

One thing we do know: That incessantly repeated Pepsi commercial with the song “My Generation” totally blows.

Yet the fact that one of the world’s most aggressive marketing companies wants to hop on the hope bandwagon reveals something. I don’t know what exactly, but something.