A Lucky Guest Attends the Inauguration
As I tore through the boulevards of the capital yesterday morning, sirens blaring, I wondered why the Secret Service agent driving the truck looked as if he thought it was just another Tuesday. Stone-faced, with closely-cropped hair and sunglasses, I might have mistaken him for hired security at a Division-III college basketball game were it not for the trademark earpiece and black pistol. Is it because he’s paid to look this inert? Tired, maybe? Worried about my safety?
No, I thought. Something more pedestrian, but what?
I continued to mull this over after breakfast in the Capitol, as various Congressional aides and District Police showed me to my seat at the podium’s four o’clock, some rows back. I scanned the crowd through my camera’s viewfinder, fiddling with knobs and buttons, and it struck me that nearly everyone looked a bit like my driver. Excited, to be sure, but not visibly overcome. Not like the campaign.
It clicked: all these familiar faces had seen this before. These men and women I have seen in the media for ages, some of whom appear in my earliest memories, have been doing this for years. They know that the cameras are watching and folks at home are moved to tears, but by virtue of the fact that they are participating in this live - sitting under blankets mere inches away from a symbol of so much hope - they know that that symbol is just a man. Nothing more, nothing less.
This was a surreal realization; I was there live, too, and it was inescapable. I became worried as I listened to Barack Obama and didn’t feel the infectious hope I had grown accustomed to catching while watching his speeches. He was giving what most of the initial commentary regarded as an excellent speech, and I was right behind him, agreeing, but I missed the feeling.
As the Inaugural Address wore on I got more worried. It was not coming back. And then it was over, and while I snapped away with my camera I started wondering how I could spin this to my friends. “It was an off day,” I imagined telling them. Or “he was probably trying not to overdo it.”
Horrible excuses raced through my mind and I didn’t notice the Reverend Joseph Lowery hobble up to the podium on his four-legged cane, smiling. I knew everyone else who spoke but not him, and I didn’t even pay attention until he got to the end of the Benediction. “O Lord,” he said,
“In the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.”
Suddenly: laughter. Lots of it. Every talking head, every jaded windbag, every DC socialite; everyone giggled like a schoolgirl. From Souter to Schwarzenegger and out into a million people, a laughter roared. It made my day, and everyone else’s, I suspect.
After the Address, the Atlantic commentator Ross Douthat remarked that “no Presidency in my lifetime has begun with so much promise and peril intermingled.” If Barack Obama does succeed - and like any skeptic worth his salt, I have some doubts - he will do so not because he has come to save us from on high, but because of men like Rev. Lowery who dare to simply be men. Fallible, funny men who can approach a stage knowing that history and the world are watching on this day if any, and have the gall to recite a risque and penetrating schoolyard joke.
Life, I have read, is probably too short for anything else.
AMR
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