So why shouldn’t I throw my hat into the ring with all the other commentators? I watched it, and over all, it underwhelmed me. So here’s my take on the whole Inauguration Day Madness.
First of all, what went wrong with the music? Aretha’s canned backing track arrangement simply reeked of schmaltz, and when combined with her ridiculous hat, took us all back to the Reagan era inaugurations (I wasn’t alive then, so I’m guessing at the amount of schmaltz and surplus bows). And while Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, and John Williams collectively have more talent that the rest of the world put together, that performance fell flat. By the way, do we not have any home-grown classical musical talent? No corn-fed Midwest violin virtuosos? And you simply cannot do “Simple Gifts” without a trumpet. We all recognize, even if we don’t know the name, Copland’s superb arrangement of this melody. It needs a trumpet. I don’t even particularly like trumpets, but to do that piece with no trumpet fanfare is a sacrilege!
Obama’s speech, as I expected, had neither emotional punch nor any kind of even vaguely specific plans. While most of it just went in one ear and out the other, one comment made my jaw drop. He said, “We will not apologize for our way of life.” What!!! We are apologizing for our way of life, we have been apologizing, and we will probably continue to apologize for many years. The current economic crisis, the apocalyptic weather, and even the terrorist attacks are invitations to apologize for a lifestyle that has spent the last several decades completely out of control. If we want the change that Obama promised, then each and every individual person also needs to change, and change fundamentally, our life styles, or else we will have a much bigger apology to make.
The ceremony reached its low point with the “poem,” if I can even call it that. The poem itself had no rises and falls, no tension, no drama, and of course no rhythm or rhyme, or even something vaguely resembling any kind of appeal to the listener’s ear. But even the worst poems improve through the voice of a good reader. And this lady could not read a poem to save her life. At times she seemed to try to recall Whitman with the catalogs of ordinary activity. But she didn’t even come close to doing it with the vitality and grace that Whitman did. Shall I remind you that Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” which he read at Kennedy’s inauguration, lasts only 16 lines?
The high point came with Benediction Dude. I don’t recall his name, but there was a guy who knows how to talk! That was some good old-fashioned preaching, man! It succeeded superbly.
All the newscasts and all the people that the newscasts interviewed kept talking about the inauguration as “historic.” And that got me thinking about just what that word means. Perhaps it means that later history books will include this event. Or it means that this event is what I call a “before and after” moment, meaning it represents a watershed moment that changes all that comes after it. It seems that historic events have nothing to do with history, unless it is to change history. Rather, historic events relate to the future—after historic events, the future takes on a different hue.
And looking at all the crowds, I also thought about the ritual involved—the gathering of people and the shouting. And I thought about what historic events like these in which I would have liked to participate. And the first one I thought of was Woodstock. Woodstock’s historic—don’t laugh, it is. Or Live Aid or Live 8. When I think of huge numbers of people gathered together for a common purpose, I tend to think of those moments that arise almost spontaneously, independent of political calendars and formal governments. I had difficulty embracing Inauguration Day as a really “historic” day because the Constitution says that it will happen on January 20. But the moments I think of—the Woodstock, the war protests—have much more an air of magic around them because they spring from the collective desire of individuals untouched by Constitutions and government arrangement.
I’m reminded actually, of a comparatively trivial event, but one which first showed me how people could come together to celebrate a common purpose: summer 1996 in Darmstadt, Germany. Germany had won the Euro Cup when only a split second later the street erupted in celebration. Only nine years old, I had never seen so many people shouting, singing, honking horns, and running through the streets. I had also never seen such public drunkenness and public urination. Along with music, sports provide a ritualistic setting conducive to individuals coming together into a collective whole. Likewise, look at the Olympic Games. I always cry during the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games because they have such an investment in ritual meaning.
I think that “historic” also means an event that makes you say to your grandchildren, “I was there.” And I wish that I could participate in some event that I can say to someone, “I was there.” It seems that these events grow ever fewer and fewer. I mean, where are the protests? The closest I’ve come to an “I was there” moment was 1) at a U2 concert and 2) Harry Potter book opening parties. But I really wish that I could find some opportunity to go to an event that really means something, that presents, as Wordsworth would say, “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” by a huge group of impassioned people. Of course, corralling the requisite thousands of people would require a little bit of planning. But I definitely want, sometime in my lifetime, to say “I was there.”
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Perhaps you are being unfair to the man and that your expectations are unrealistic. After all, just because he is black (all right, half black) does not automatically make him brighter or more articulate than his predecessors. Too many people have fallen into the trap of deifying the man; yet he is only a man. It might be more important to focus on the change from W to Barrack because that change is truly dramatic. But you see, that by engaging in that exercise, you are actually placing more of the emphasis on how bad W was for the world and America. In other words, any change and any candidate would have been so much better than W.
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