Saturday
The 11 p.m. Fung Wah bus out of Boston is a kind of surreal thing. It leaves out of South Station, like any other bus, except that by the time anyone shows up to board it, the terminal is completely empty, and the sole vehicle on the last platform is waiting for it’s final passengers to scurry up onto its back and journey along for the ride. This journey is especially dreamlike, since it was hastily planned over a conversation with a colleague named Harry in the afternoon hours of our closing shift at Starbucks. We got out at 9:30, which led us to the clear choice – no, because I suppose there was no choosing involved, so, the solution – the solution that we hop on the ol 11 o’clock funger.
So now, here I am, half a bottle of wine – my associate informs me it’s a “nice Riesling” – and about 72 minutes into the last bus of the night from Boston to New York, with every intention to make my way to Washington by Monday night to see what by all reasonable estimations has been decreed the largest crowd ever assembled in the history of these states. The predictions range up to four million.
I can’t imagine how many of the other 40 or so people on this bus might be leaving with the same objective, but as I’m jotting this down I can’t help but feel like I’m recording the minutes of some American pilgrimage to the christening of a newfound Mecca, as good as the real thing plus inflation. The mood says this trip is a summons. It is no choice. It is the solution.
And this is only the bus to New York.
A graphic in the New York Times today illustrated the capacity of the Washington Mall, from the Capitol steps where the speech will be given, in varying intervals back to the Lincoln Memorial, which sits no easy distance from the dome on which Freedom stands, about a 45 minute walk, as I remember. The figure showed 1.7 million people could squeeze between the two monuments.
The bottom article of the page asked the obvious – Why make the trip? Why do so many people feel so drawn into this event? Why do we gravitate to it like zombies on wheels, rolling in from anywhere between the seas to fight unprecedented crowds of people in a city that will function about as well as a pile of mush for most of the weekend? Why go when “going to see the inauguration” has come to mean “going to watch what I hope will be a giant projection of Obama on the side of the Lincoln Memorial as he gives his inaugural address, as long as I can get that close and they set up TVs and speakers all the way back there.”
There’s no doubt that Americans are eager to rid themselves of anything even remotely resembling the last eight years of executive rule, the falsely arrogant swagger that cast a dark, pointy-eared shadow over our foreign policy and negligent domestic deciding that seemed to drive our country uncharted levels of dissent, at least with this generation. The time that Americans hang their heads with shame among the global community will come to an end this Tuesday morning, or so we hope, and no longer will we be left only to point fingers at each other in lieu of any plausible solution that doesn’t start with fundamental change.
But the Obama era will cast a sharp contrast to the last two terms for even greater reasons than policy making and justice appointing. He will be a new leader in a new world, where globalization is more than a buzzword. Al Gore may have invented the internet, and George W. Bush may have been our first new millennium commander-in-chief, but Obama will be a leader for his time, in a way Bush never could.
Obama’s campaign used the internet in ways never seen by a politician on any level, transforming his website into more of a social networking tool than an informative brochure. He used the web to make his grassroots take hold, and it resonated throughout the country with every American looking for a leader who understood the speed and the tools of the 21st Century. While Bush would be more than satisfied chopping wood and mending fences on any old Saturday down at the ranch in Crawford, Texas, Obama will be checking the news – and maybe the White Sox score – as he stays on task as president.
Obama’s love affair with his Blackberry and his passage through the grief cycle spawned by the requirement that he set it down for the next four years have been well documented. Unlike his predecessor, he is constantly connected, in tune with the world he is now responsible to lead. This term’s “White House West,” or “White House Midwest,” as the case may be, will likely make its residency in Chicago, perhaps the most urban place in this nation, save the city to which I am currently en route, and one of the tallest places in the world. Though it has cost him the label of an “elitist,” Obama’s connection to life in the city has made him attractive to young people across the country, the same people who logged onto his website throughout this longest campaign in American history, and those people are now flocking to the Capital City of this country like a massive congregation in bad need of more than just therapy. They’re looking for something spiritual. They’re looking for the solution.
What these people don’t understand is the very thing Obama is likely to tell them this Tuesday: that they are their own solution. As he now so famously stated during his campaign, “We are the change we have been waiting for.” He is no more than another one of us, as elitist as he may be. Obama’s legacy will lie in the fact that he can do something Bush never could: he can inspire people to find their own answers, and he can listen to them. Even now I find striking my level of comfort typing away on a laptop on the last bus of the night. I don’t know what combination of the normalcy of global connectivity, the strange breath of change in the air and that nice Riesling is responsible for it, but something new is happening to this democracy, and it will start with every set of fingertips punching away at a laptop, and every letter to the White House, and we know we will be heard.
And so with this in our minds and a breeze of relief starting to whisper through the air we breathe, we keep rolling down the road to that city of cities that is an iconic model of our way of life, further south, pressing on toward the capital.
Sunday
Sunday started with a 1 p.m. trip to Moonstruck Diner on 2nd Ave. It seemed the most American start to the most American day of the week, sleeping off the weekend hangover and going out to an old fashioned diner for an American style breakfast. I’ll have coffee, orange juice and a glass of water – why settle for less?
Sunday is an odd day for the most part, and this one was unique to its kind. I’ve always had trouble considering Sunday a part of my weekend, since it’s about as stressful as writing on a deadline. Sundays can be relaxing, but they’re also usually the last chance to tie up all the loose ends of the week before a new one begins. But tomorrow isn’t the start of a new week, at least not on the business calendar. Tomorrow is a federal holiday, the 24th memorial of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the timing couldn’t be better, for obvious reasons. This four-day weekend is a commemoration of the steps America has taken in its brief history, although that doesn’t mean it’s stepping hasn’t been entirely too slow.
Obama’s election will be considered an enormous step in our democracy for years to come and a feather in the cap of progress, but with his move from the dome to the Oval Office, he leaves a Senate with no black members, and gerrymandered districts have no effect on that part of the legislature.
How much progress have we made? Even the NFL has an affirmative action policy in regards to its coaches. The Rooney Rule requires teams with coaching vacancies to interview at least one black candidate, which may be the reason Mike Tomlin will be coaching in the Super Bowl in two weeks, after his win over the Ravens this evening. I didn’t watch the conference championship games today, but I don’t know if it was the winds of change that are bringing Tomlin to Tampa this year. After all, the Steelers are tied for the most Super Bowl trophies of any team in the league.
The games did bump 60 Minutes from its timeslot though, but I can’t be too bummed about that. I’m sure they would have aired more Obama coverage, since they’ve been just as obsessed with him as any cable news network since Nov. 4. What I am excited about watching is the season premiere of Big Love, the big HBO series of the season. A return to the show about the corrupt life of polygamist Mormons is probably the only thing that could rival the ratings of an Obama reality series. But a show like the Wire, about black culture, crime and life in urban Baltimore, with a writing staff worthy of a Pulitzer let alone a Golden Globe, could never measure up to the hype. When it comes to inner city life, we’d rather have Flight of the Conchords.
Is this progress? I can’t tell if the breeze hit the city walls and just died or if it’s still blowing down to the district. For a minute I thought that whisper was beginning to sing, but it was just the simple harmony of a cab honking its horn as an ambulance sped by.
Monday
I heard a song on the radio today about Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a rap song fittingly enough, with cheesy electronic beats that might have well been from the New Kids on the Block, let alone Run DMC or the Furious Five. I don’t know who it was, but it wasn’t Stevie Wonder.
All I could think about were my thoughts about progress, and how we love to pay tribute, but we hate to continue the struggle, to take up the fight, to carry on the dream. A couple million people are already on their way to Washington, and I’ll be boarding a bus later tonight, the last bus of the night once again, with estimated time of arrival scheduled for 4 a.m. Tuesday. But I doubt I will make it by four. Even then there will be congestion and delays. Millions of people don’t travel well, not for Moses, not for Martin and not for Obama.
I still can’t figure out if this experience will be worth having. But even more on my mind is whether the next four years will play out as a tribute or as a battle, as a celebration of progress, or a continuation of it. True progress can never be achieved until we are all constantly working toward it. We can pause from time to time to acknowledge it, as we will tomorrow, but four years from now we’ll be glad to say we didn’t pause for long, and we didn’t wait for anyone, no matter how inspiring, to tell us to keep making moves.
Tuesday
The walk to the mall was an easy one. Not because the size of the crowd was significantly smaller than expected – although there were by most accounts less than two million people I don’t think I would have known the difference had it been three or four – but the magnet drawing us all there was as powerful as ever and that faint hum that had been drawing us south all along had become a roar.
We left late, around 10 a.m., and we filed in we managed to get up right in front of the Washington Monument, on that little hill that surrounds the pointed tower, with relative ease. From there I could only take pictures of the nearest jumbotron screen, one of more than a dozen stretching back from the Capitol steps, and even then the only coherent shots required digital zoom.
The speech was not as powerful as I thought it might have been, but I think it got the point across well. The point that the faithful following needed to hear – the point that no solution can be given or even achieved, but only diligently worked toward forever, like the curve approaching its asymptote.
As he faced out down the mall, toward a statue of Lincoln, the most noteworthy Illinois politician before him to give an inaugural address, he echoed the sentiments of the man who saved the union and freed the slaves, saying “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”
No doubt the defining quote of the speech, this was where the new president began to find his footing.
Obama, perhaps the greatest personification of the progress spawned by the man whose statue he faced, continued Lincoln’s vision of a nation conceived in Liberty and the notion that all men are created equal, not through a fight to preserve the union, but rather to preserve, or maybe to restore America’s place as the leader of the Western world.
He channeled Lincoln early on, describing a nation carried not on the shoulders of “those in high office,” but where “we the people have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbears and true to our founding documents.”
Obama found himself untrue to one of those documents immediately prior to his speech, when he and John Roberts, Jr., fumbled over each other’s words during the recitation of the oath of office. It was clearly an uncommon slip up for a usually ice cold public speaker, and I thought it one of the few times I’ve sensed the nerves of the young leader, including the day after his election, when he spoke from Washington.
On a separate note, when will a president finally point out the absurdity of putting their right hand on a Bible while taking the oath? When will one of our leaders abstain from adding those divisive four words to the end of the oath laid out in our Constitution – “So help me God”? To most, this addition is a choice. I’m curious if Obama would have added this on his own had Roberts not asked him, upon completion of the oath, “So help you God?”
But nervous or not, and how could he not have been, he was cool as ever reciting the mantra that got him to the podium from which he spoke, saying, “the world has changed, and we must change with it.”
I was surprised to hear cable news analysts criticize the address for its lack of the “fireworks” some had been expecting. Though I would have liked to hear him talk about Afghanistan and Iraq higher in the speech, it was fitting that he stayed home, with his domestic agenda, when speaking to the largest American audience he is likely ever to face, in a time when we need to focus on our problems at home as much as our endeavors abroad.
But will we change? Will we progress?
Not enough, that’s for sure. And if that is our attitude, that no sign of progress will ever be good enough, then that is all we can ask.
And with that, it’s time to toast the new black president.
Wednesday
The New York Times is obsessed with the word sober. They used it in their headline about the speech (a “sobering address”) and again to describe the new administration in the lead story on their website. Maybe that’s why I felt it necessary to get so shitfaced last night, or maybe they’re as disappointed as everyone else having not seen the fireworks of the dawn of a new leader.
I’m back in New York now, and it’s business as usual. Maybe people are beginning the work of remaking their country. Maybe they’re just trying to make another buck before the next bank crashes.
People in New York project an unaffected air, but people in DC try to convince themselves they care more than they do. In New York, everyone wants hear your opinion, but it won’t change theirs. In Washington, they want to work with your view, or at least that’s what they say.
They’re networkers and card sharks. That’s how they get down. It’s like partying with the AP English class. It’s good to be back where the party doesn’t have to start with an R or a D. Here, the inauguration was a grand event. There, it was a change of life.
I went to a dance party at a club in Georgetown last night, with DJs the Fort Knox Five and Africa Bambaataa, and even as hipsters break danced their hearts out in a circle of sass, those on the outside talked politics and blogs. Any conversation had the potential of coming off like a job interview.
In New York, it’s easy to be fooled into thinking a job interview is just a conversation.
But that was true before the speech and it will be true long after. This is the country we must rebuild, as united as it is divided. As diverse as it is homogenous. As stereotypical as it is complex.
I don’t know if we’re getting there any faster, but we’re moving. We’re still moving. It just might take a little more effort if we want to keep from slowing down.
