‘The Ocean’ by John Wight

Peter is a Hungarian migrant to the US. He arrived thirty years previously determined to become a success in this supposed land of opportunity. Now in his fifties, a security guard in a shopping mall, he is struggling to meet the rent on a one-bedroom apartment in Venice, California.

George is a homeless black man for whom every day is a challenge to be able to get high and effect a temporary escape from reality.

Both men, natural adversaries under the dictates of social convention, forge first a friendship then a kinship as they embark on a journey of mutual self-discovery in Obama’s America — even as destruction looms.

CHAPTER ONE

By the time he delivers his landmark speech on race — ‘A More Perfect Union’ — on March 18 2008 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Illinois, Senator Barack Obama is two months into his bid for that year’s Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States. The stakes are high, what with him bidding to be the country’s first black president and what with his Democratic Party rival, Hillary Clinton, vying to be elected as the country’s first female to hold that office.

Tonight’s speech is being delivered in response to the controversy whipped up by remarks made by Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright. Until the controversy surrounding those…