1/21/2005

The President Has Seen His Shadow

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 10:07 am

….so it’s four more years of political winter for everybody.

I didn’t pay much attention to the inauguration, not surprisingly. I mean, I think that a little pomp and ceremony is in order; the guy won, after all. If not fair and square, then at least fair and polyhedronal. And the (re)election of a President should be celebrated. It should also be protested, because it is our right to do so, but I couldn’t even get it up enough to watch much of that. Hurling insults at an armored limousine speeding by seems, well, really flaccid and ineffetive. I would have liked to see something a little more dramatic yet relevant. Maybe a nationwide outbreak of impromptu soup kitchens to feed those who have lost their jobs to outsourcing, or a flash mob of people delivering pizzas to mangled vets in VA hospitals all over the country.

A man standing with his five-year-old daughter on his shoulder, shrieking “Murderer!” at a passing limo might have been cathartic for him, but it did nothing for me.

Frankly, I was a little surprised that protesters were allowed along the route at all. Here in the post-September-11 USofA, I was sure that the Bush administration would find some reason to keep all protesters out as a security measure. After all, audience-filtering was a big hit at the campaign rallies, and they had a good start with the ludicrous ban against signs on sticks (“Tragedy at the inauguration today as President Bush’s bomb-proof limousine was crushed by hundreds of pieces of half-inch lath….”). I guess they decided that the ensuing media coverage would be worse then the protests.

And wasn’t it great how the White House chalked up a $20 million tab for security and then turned around and made the District of Columbia pay for it? Out of their Homeland Security budget, no less. Guess it stands to reason, in some wierd stunted way: we’re holding this event in your homeland, DC, and it’s going to take a lot of security, soooooo….

They would have made DC take it out of their Head Start budget, but sadly there weren’t sufficient funds available.

My favorite factlet surrounding this brouhaha is the now-familiar comparison between this inauguration celebration and that of FDR in January 1945, in the midst of World War II. Roosevelt restricted the proceedings to a ceremony on the White House balcony, with a buffet lunch of chicken salad and pound cake. Cost of the 2005 wartime inauguration: approximately $50 million, which can only be described as a whole holy fuckload of chicken salad.

Like I said in the beginning, I’m all for a little whoop-de-do at an event such as this. But really, can you imagine the good karma the President could have enjoyed if he had kept the glitz and expense to a minimum, instead of topping Clinton’s second inauguration by more than $15 million? If Bush were the kind of President who might, say, mandate that the various inaugural banquets serve nothing but MREs in honor of the US soldiers serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots worldwide…..hell, even I might have voted for him.

I was horribly depressed after the election, but I wasn’t one of those who threatened to emigrate, mostly because I still love my country but also because I’m way too entropic to consider such a massive disruption in my life. I’m also something of an optimist in that I think this current trend to the right is just one half of the complete swing of the pendulum. I think that a few more years of G.W. might be just the thing to set America on the right—er, left—proper path again. Four more years of environmental deregulation, economic inequality, perpetual war and smarmy false piety, and I’m hoping people will rethink their outrage over oral sex in the Oval Office.


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