Goin' Up For The Risin'


Image: Marc Hall/Getty Images via Los Angeles Times.

So we are going up on the Chinatown Bus to the mass celebration of Obama's inauguration. My Amie has some rather nostalgic memories of Clinton's inaugural, and there was a kind of fair environment on the Mall, and great music, for free.

Well, this is not that.

After seeing the extravaganza on Sunday, this is not a trip to the fair.

She got the tickets for us two weeks ago before we knew what this was shaping up to be; now, with the weather perhaps to call for snow, we learn that umbrellas are prohibited. Bring a plastic trash bag and a piece of cardboard to stand on, the Washington Post counseled.

I'm ecstatic as a citizen of the republic to see this event come to pass in my lifetime. The pomp and pageantry attending his elevation to the post, I certainly appreciate it from the show business angle. And I must confess, as I've said elsewhere in this blog, this entire process has been like The. Best. West Wing. Ever.

I see him and his family, rocking back and forth to Stevie Wonder, and I still cannot believe it's happening. Doesn't seem possible or real. And that's me, a newly minted 48-year-old white guy from Richmond, Va. What the sensation must be to African Americans, I can only imagine, and really, only imagine.

But once all the music's echoes have faded, and the roar of the crowds subsided into the usual noise of traffic in the nation's capital, what Barack Hussein Obama is confronted with is a multiple collection of crises and controversies the likes of which none of his immediate, living predecessors have confronted.

A continuing war in Afghanistan for an ambiguous conclusion is folly; the British couldn't control that country, the Soviets got wrecked there (in part thanks to eventual covert U.S. assistance), and there's no reason for us to think our luck will be any different. That's a sign of arrogance that is more of the past than the apparent present we've voted for. What's there is an oil pipeline and opium.

The bailout mishigas is going nowhere.

And that's just for starters.

Our Comcast was out this past weekend, and my wife put in a DVD of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. At one point, the parvenu Lyndon is beating up his step son during a chamber concert. The audience watches both appalled and entertained. But all the sudden his wealthy friends stop calling, and like Hogarth's Rake, all his bills come "with a hasty unanimity." This sequence reminds me of our country's current situation.

Barack has an impossible job ahead of him. I cannot think of what will come next.

We'll be standing there, with a few million people by the Jumbotron watching him take the oath and cheering, too. And hoping this can be a new day, and not just a change of scenery.

Sunday Meditation
"This was not a pious culture, nor an especially law-abiding one,
but it was convivial."

William Hogarth: The Rake's Progress -- At The Gambling House
(via Art of the Print)

Excerpt from Alan Pell Crawford's "Twilight At Monticello--The Final Years
of Thomas Jefferson (Random House, $27.00, or, 10 $2 bills with Jefferson on the front and the Trumbull's "Signing of the Declaration of Independence" on the back; a $5 with Lincoln, and two ones with Washington, plus tax. Not bad company.)
Here, Crawford sets the context for Jefferson's 18th century Virginia upbringing and the rather wild and woolly behaviors of his social class.

"Most Virginians, black and white, lived in cabins or shacks, but here and there, on the hills overlooking the Rivanna, stood crude manor houses that their builders often called mansions, surrounded by unpainted wooden outbuildings, stables and slave quarters. These plantations were, for the most part, self-contained, self-supporting communities and the closest approximation of towns or cities for miles around.
Travel between these plantations and to the towns back east--sixty miles east to Richmond, say, or a hundred forty to Williamsburg--could be perilous. The dirt roads and carriage trails that connected the plantations were often impassable. Finished goods, like crops, moved mostly by boat. So, quite often, did the settlers. Whether they went by boat or made their way along the crude roads, people traveling to visit neighbors frequently found themselves facing clouds of black smoke from farmers' fires.
Because Virginians lived at such distances from each other, they took every opportunity to socialize. They endured considerable hardships to attend barbecues, fish fries and horse races, and at all of these events drunkenness was commonplace. The society into which Thomas Jefferson was born aspired to gentility but rarely achieved it. Taverns predated houses of worship, which, although established by the Church of England, were attended but grudgingly by the colonials they had been built to serve.
Under English common law, which prevailed through the colonial period, Virginians could be fined for missing church once, flogged for a second infraction, and put to death for a third. Until Thomas Jefferson, as a member of the Virginia legislature, recommended revisions to the penal code, free-thinkers could find their children taken away. During Jefferon's childhood such laws, though rarely, if ever, enforced, remained on the books.
This was not a pious culture, nor an especially law-abiding one, but it was convivial. As soon as work was done, when holidays rolled around, or there was business to attend to at the courthouse, the leading men of the county--entertained themselves in raucous fashion, playing cards, dice, and billiards, often for high stakes. Violence often followed, "it not being the fashion of the day," Jeff Randolph's words, "for men to restrain their tempers."
In 1748, five years after Jefferson's birth, fighting had gotten so vicious that Virginia's colonial legislature passed a general statute against maiming, making it a felony to cut out another person's tongue, put out his eye, or bite his nose or lip; thirty years later, just before the Revolution, the lawmakers added a prohibition against "gouging, plucking or putting out an eye, biting, kicking or stomping upon" a fellow subject of the British crown."