It might seem disrespectful. In many ways it was, a silent protest, seeing
La La Land instead of our new
President’s inauguration, the first one we’ve missed in decades. It seems like yesterday when we were filled with hope as evidenced by what I wrote exactly eight years ago. The complete text is at the end of this entry.
After watching the never ending ennui of the Republican
primaries and the solipsistic behavior of our new President-elect, how could
anyone welcome his presence in the oval office?
And I’m referring to his behavior, not necessarily his policies, which,
to be fair, remain to be seen. We had
hoped Obama would have been more effective, but how could he given the illegitimacy
narrative so infused by the right and particularly by the new President himself?
All those years contending he was not
born here, that he is a secret Muslim, ad infinitum. It was their objective to block any and
everything and for the most part they succeeded. Still,
the unemployment rate has dropped from 9.3% when he took office to below 5% and
the Dow has tripled (although I am not naïve enough to singularly credit
President Obama for these changes, but his leadership had an impact). Obama was
not a “perfect” President, particularly in foreign affairs, but he was a decent,
rational person. Can we say the same,
now?
And now there are accusations of Trump being an
“illegitimate” President because of Russia’s interference (not to mention
Comey’s). As there is no evidence that
ballot boxes were hacked, he is not illegitimate in the legal sense of the
word, but one can reasonably conclude the election was tainted. One cannot prove an alternative reality but no
doubt these events impacted the election results.
I had to laugh (or cry) at Trump’s assertion that “we
have by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled.” You would therefore think that his pick for
Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, would have a better excuse for his failure
to reveal $100 million in assets and links to a tax haven company, than saying “as
you all can appreciate, filling out these government forms is quite
complicated.” After all, isn’t he a
genius like all the rest of the Goldman Sachs ringers appointed to the Cabinet?
Not that I have anything against Goldman
Masters of the Universe other than when Trump was running he equated them with
the “swamp” of the establishment, paying Hillary Clinton for speeches.
But I’ve now read Trump’s Inaugural address which, when
read, sounds like many of his impromptu electioneering stump speeches, but
pulled together into one dystopian narrative. I’m
ready to embrace a stronger economy, jobs for all, but we’ve been on that
trajectory for years now. Rather than
rebutting some of the speech, point by point, NPR has done a good job with fact
checking. Not that facts matter anymore
in this post-factual, reality TV world, but here is their take on it.
So, to us the perfect antidote to the malaise of fear and
despair over the election was seeing La
La Land while the new President was sworn in and fêted. The movie is a sweeping reaffirmation of the
power of music and the arts, and a declarative statement that the American film
musical is back. It’s wonderful that a
new generation is ready to embrace this art.
There’s a lot to be said about living in fantasy when one goes to a
movie theatre, but it’s another matter to live one’s real life in the real
world with leadership in serious doubt.
I hope President Trump transcends all these concerns.
Nonetheless, what a difference eight years make…
Monday, January
19, 2009
Early in the
Morning
It is early in the morning on the eve of President-elect
Obama’s inauguration – in fact very early, another restless night. When it is so early and still outside, sound
travels and I can hear the CSX freight train in the distance, its deep-throated
rumbling and horn warning the few cars out on the road at the numerous
crossings nearby.
Perhaps subconsciously my sleeplessness on this, the
celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday, relates to the incongruous
dreamlike images of the bookends of my political consciousness, from the Little
Rock desegregation crisis of 1957, the freedom marches that culminated with the
march on Washington in 1963 and Martin Luther King’s historic "I Have a
Dream" speech, to the inauguration tomorrow of our first Afro-American
President. All this breathtaking
demonstration of profound social change in just my lifetime.
Much has now been said comparing Obama to Lincoln. In my “open letter” to Obama that I published here last May I said “Your
opponents have criticized your limited political experience, making it one of
their main issues in attacking your candidacy. Lincoln too was relatively inexperienced,
something he made to work to his advantage. Forge cooperation across the aisle in
congress, creating your own ‘team of rivals’ as Doris Kearns Goodwin described
his cabinet in her marvelous civil war history.”
The Lincoln comparison is now omnipresent in the press,
not to mention his cabinet selections indeed being a team of rivals. But I am
restless because of what faces this, the very administration I had hoped for: a
crisis of values as much as it is an economic one. The two are inextricably intertwined.
I am reading an unusual novel by one of my favorite
authors, John Updike, Terrorist. One
of the main characters, Jack Levy laments: “My grandfather thought
capitalism was doomed, destined to get more and more oppressive until the
proletariat stormed the barricades and set up the worker’ paradise. But that
didn’t happen; the capitalists were too clever or the proletariat too dumb. To
be on the safe side, they changed the label ‘capitalism’ to read ‘free
enterprise,’ but it was still too much dog-eat-dog. Too many losers, and the
winners winning too big. But if you don’t let the dogs fight it out, they’ll
sleep all day in the kennel. The basic problem the way I see it is, society
tries to be decent, and decency cuts no ice in the state of nature. No ice
whatsoever. We should all go back to being hunter-gathers, with a hundred-percent
employment rate, and a healthy amount of starvation.”
The winners in this economy were not only the
capitalists, the real creators of jobs due to hard work and innovation, but the
even bigger winners: the financial masters of the universe who learned to
leverage financial instruments with the blessings of a government that nurtured
the thievery of the public good through deregulation, ineptitude, and political
amorality. This gave rise to a whole
generation of pseudo capitalists, people who “cashed in” on the system, bankers
and brokers and “financial engineers” who dreamt up lethal structures based on
leverage and then selling those instruments to an unsuspecting public, a public
that entrusted the government to be vigilant so the likes of a Bernie Madoff
could not prosper for untold years. Until we revere the real innovators of
capitalism, the entrepreneurs who actually create things, ideas, jobs, our
financial system will continue to seize up. That is the challenge for the Obama
administration – a new economic morality.
Walt Whitman penned these words on the eve of another
civil war in 1860:
I hear America
singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics,
each one singing his as it would be blithe and strong,
The carpenter
singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing
his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing
what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker
singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The woodcutter's
song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at
sundown,
The delicious
singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or
washing,
Each singing what
belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what
belongs to the day--at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open
mouths their strong melodious songs.
It is still early in the morning as I finish this but the
sun is rising and I’m going out for my morning walk. Another freight train is rumbling in the
distance. I hear America singing.
