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Notes on an Inauguration

An aged Jew dies and ascends to heaven. Upon meeting God, he asks, "When will there be a Jewish president?"  God answers: "Not in your lifetime."  "And when will there be a black president?" inquires the recently deceased. "Not in … Read More

By / January 20, 2009

An aged Jew dies and ascends to heaven. Upon meeting God, he asks, "When will there be a Jewish president?"  God answers: "Not in your lifetime."  "And when will there be a black president?" inquires the recently deceased. "Not in my lifetime," replies the deity.

A joke, said Nietzsche, is the epitaph on the death of a feeling, and that feeling of shrugging hopelessness is, we can all agree, long gone. It may well be the case that in four or eight years time, Obama will leave office with many clamoring for the end to presidential term limits. Alternatively, there may be a large and loud chorus wishing him well but in a hurry to welcome the first female chief executive, or yet another prosaic but genial male WASP.  Today’s ceremony has all the uncomfortable features of a royal investiture; little acknowledged amid the kitsch trinkets, the Top 40 serenades and the endless queques of hungry historical witnesses in Washington is that this is an employee’s first day on the job. The man himself is still very much a blank canvas, which is why his many votaries — as well as recent converts — can find whatever it is they’re looking for on it, owing to their own individual brushstrokes.

I wasn’t entirely sold on Obama when I voted for him (I bought in a foreclosure market), and it still remains to be seen whether his dual defeats of a formidable primary rival, and a not-so-formidable general election rival, were indications of great political skill or harbingers of true leadership. (More than one shrewd commentator has remarked on Obama’s unmistakable gift of good fortune; just try tallying up all the eerily near-miss events that led to this moment.) One advantage he has right from the start is knowing almost exactly what he’ll be up against: two wars, an economy in ruin, a nuclearized North Korea and Iran, the refurbishing of the American "brand," and… what else?  Oh yes, the inevitability of another act of hideous holy violence on these shores, which may, through no immediate fault of his own, happen on his watch. What surprises after the blood-brutal dawn of the 21st century apart from the landing of extraterrestrials?

Next stop, optimism rehab. I say this copping to my own feelings of sentimentality, knowing that on this frigid winter’s day, a major stain on our republic is effectively washed clean, almost two hundred years after the birth of Abraham Lincoln, and forty-five years after the moral ascendancy of Martin Luther King.

Poetry can do justice, it’s true, but any critic worth his salt will tell you it more often specializes in bathos. Let us hope that our most literary modern commander-in-chief never loses sight of the fact.

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  • Alcove-One

    The lady protests too much.

    In all seriousness, try to get me banned. That’s usually how you guys debate.

    Readers, if you see me no more, you will know why.

     

     

  • JewcyCraig

    No I don’t! I don’t, I swear!!! SHUT UP!

    In all seriousness, your arguments sucked.  I hope you won’t waste any more of our time.

  • Alcove-One

    Thanks but no thanks.

  • JewcyCraig

    Good to see you’ve abandoned this miserable debate. Thanks for playing.

  • Brian

    The only thing sillier than trying to say that Democrats love black people and Republicans are racist [Kanye West, looking in your direction....] or even vice versa, is Alcove-One’s paragraph that sets Craig off wherein he suggests that black folks have it better in America than they do anywhere else in the world, and that should be a bigger deal than seeing individual black faces in high places. The first thing to take issue with his use of the moniker African Americans. Because if you have a passing familiarity with sociology (I recommend checking out Thomas Sowell- who is conservative), you know that not all black people in America are African American. America’s black population includes West Indians, Latinos and straight up African black folks.  And the socio-economic statistics among these black ethnicities defy a blanket characterization on their "success" as a whole. Do the richest black folks in the world live in America? No. And until Tuesday, neither did the most powerful black man in the world. You score no points trying to minimize the staggering significance of this moment.

  • Alcove-One

    …but the Democrats embraced it and fought for it. Sorry, facts are stubborn things.

  • Michael Weiss

    The simple answer is: American slavery preceded the Democrat and Republican parties.

  • JewcyCraig

    You’ll have to keep clarifying. I don’t see what Robert Byrd’s reprehensible past has to do with anything.

    And I don’t see how it’s reasonable to presume that culpability for Democrats engaging in shameful business can be palmed off onto the nation.

    Sounds like you’re just trying to launder blame through the semantics of political parties. Here, try thinking of it like this: you can vote for whomever you please based not upon your party affiliation, but instead upon your beliefs. I don’t know how you got so twisted up into thinking that political designations matter. Especially 150 years ago. Whatever nomenclature was relevant then is not necessarily relevant now.

    Simply, Democrats today believe don’t believe that slavery is moral. If I identify with the Democratic party of today, don’t pigeonhole me into the politics from a century ago. This all seems fairly straightforward, I don’t know what big revelation you think you’re making. But then, you’re the one who thinks that "some are getting wise" to the big "trick" mentioned above.

    Maybe your point was to draw a parallel to modern politics. In which case, at least your head’s screwed on straight. But your argument was apparently shit.

    I’m getting ready to drop the point of the last paragraph.I can’t tell if you agree with it, or are being sarcastic, or what. I don’t see how it’s relevant and, further, I don’t know what basis you have for presuming that it "signifies the success of one man." Perhaps you have a case for the other way around. Unless you can elucidate this one for me, too though, it seems to be an entirely rhetorical point, a hash-mark in your list of "Successful One-Up’s I’ve Made Against the Evil Slaveholding Democratic Party Today".

    And again, now you’ve added a new quandary for me: report you to the moderators? What? To whom?! For what??

  • Alcove-One

    JewcyCraig

    After Obama, Sen. Robert Byrd is third in line to be President and he is a lifelong Democrat and former member of the KKK who was purposefully uttering the "N"word in interviews just a few years ago. Granted, Byrd is an ancient senile joke but he is not quite 150 years old so the revelance is closer than you think.

    If Republicans do something shameful, it is a Republican sin.

    If Democrats do something shameful, its America’s sin.

    A cute trick but some are getting wise to it.

    As for the last paragraph, the outstanding success of a minority group n the USA compared to their number in the rest of the world is more important than the success of one man.

    ….and yes, you are confused. Now quick, go report me to the moderators.

  • JewcyCraig

    Alcove-One, did you really just stick it to the Democratic party of 150 years ago? Really? I could be confused. 

    And I don’t even understand what you’re trying to say in your last paragraph.

  • Alcove-One

    ",,,major stain on our republic is effectively washed clean, almost two hundred years after the birth of Abraham Lincoln…..

    No stain on the Democrat Party of course that embraced and defended slavery despite the efforts of Abraham Lincoln and the radical Republicans who were as popular with Democrats as George Bush and neo-cons are now.

    You would think when African Americans became the richest and most successful Afrocentric people on the face of the earth that would have signified something larger than the success of one man.

  • Barbara Reader

    He just got elected.  Yes, I voted for him.  And I even tried to go to Peter Norton’s Symphony Space for the swearing in, because it was open, and because it is a memorial to a slain Jewish civil rights marcher from THOSE DAYS.  But it was overcrowded and I went home to watch on my own TV.

    That having been said, this is not the end, it is the beginning.  The second biggest crowd was for LBJ in 1965.  We know how popular he was three years later.  

    This is not a measure of a Presidency, only of a campaign.  I’m delighted that he seems to be reaching out to Republicans as well as Congressional democrats.  But I don’t know if that will be effective.

    I did not vote for Obama in the primary, but saw the writing on the wall after Super Tuesday.  Clinton had failed to put him away, and therefore could not win.  It took her a while to figure that out,  although I give both her and John McCain credit for being gracious in defeat.

    His lack of experience worries me.  The two ongoing wars worry me.  Iran and North Korea worry me.  The handmaidens of Iran attacking Israel worry me.  The economy worries me.  Our lack of an industrial base worries me.  Our dependence on foreign oil worries me. … if you get my drift, thd soundbites are nice, but we have real problems.

    I hope he fixes the roads and computerizes the health care records.  I hope he finds efficiencies in government and finds a less violent way to conduct our foreign policy which gives us more and costs less in both blood and treasure.  I hope we have the massive rebuilding of our power grid so that we have fewer power plants that can be targeted by our enemies, domestic and foreign.  I hope he finds a way to improve the productivity of our health care system which is ranked as 40-somethingith in quality and first in cost.  

    None of that is done yet.  Time will tell if it will be done.