Yesterday was an exciting day. I didn't pay much (read "any") attention to politics when I was a little kid. I think Jimmy Carter's inauguration when I was almost twelve was the first I remember seeing. So I've been paying attention for the inauguration of five previous Presidents, and this is the first that I've ever seen to generate this kind of excitement. The Inauguration yesterday felt like an EVENT, almost a national holiday. I don't recall any feeling like that when President 43 was sworn into office. And I understand the enthusiasm. Whether a Republican or a Democrat, whether Obama becomes the greatest President of all time or is driven out of DC after four years, the fact that the nation has come so far to elect a minority President is a monumental achievement and a pivotal moment in U.S History. And it makes me proud to be an American.At my work, so many people were interested in the inauguration that I had to send out an email in the morning asking people to watch on traditional TV rather than the Internet if at all possible as I was afraid it might crash our state-supplied Internet connection if everybody in the district tried to watch streaming video on the Internet at once. Despite my warning, we still utilized 65% of our bandwidth from 12:00 to 12:30. Which actually left us plenty of room. Unfortunately, the CIO's in the other 174 districts in the state did NOT send their users a similar warning. As such, KDE utilized 100% of its bandwidth, meaning that despite our district having a fairly clean pipe, viewers couldn't get out to see the video. In fact, the image you see above is pretty much what I got when I tried to watch online. I got about 5 seconds of video, about 20 seconds of audio, and then the whole thing froze up with that image (which I grabbed by taking a quick screenshot of my computer) and sat that way until I closed my browser.
I ended up giving up trying to watch the video at work and waited and watched it last night in my hotel room (I'm out of town at a conference for a couple of days) while I was ironing my clothes. It was a moving speech, with several sections I found so moving, profound, or surprising that I circled around the ironing board to rewind the speech and hear them again. My favorite line was "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." I'm glad someone finally was smart enough to say that! I've been waiting five years for it.
All of that said, I was so sick of hearing about the inauguration that I almost didn't watch it at all. The news from about Thursday on was about nothing else. There IS a war going on in Gaza, I thought to myself, and we are involved in two wars of our own, and the economy is tanking. Is an overblown ceremony really that big of a deal?
But maybe that's just a fault of mine. Pomp and circumstance has never mattered much to me (except for the SONG "Pomp and Circumstance." I'm still steamed that it wasn't played when I got my B.A. as an undergrad!): I didn't care about the ceremony of getting married, I don't much care for Independence Day or any other ceremonious holiday, and I skip awards ceremonies--someone else's or my own--whenever I can. So maybe Inauguration Day SHOULD be such a big event.
But I really don't care about it. Now that the brouhaha is over, let's see what happens TODAY! That's what really matters.
6 comments:
Agree, just too much celebration, but without bullets and bloodshed we changed our leadership. I am not sure exactly what he meant by your quote. Hopefully he will not "play his cards" in public media. He has many things to deal with but he has a great honeymoon coming up with the majority of magazines, newspapers, and network TV being of liberal bent. I was bothered that Mr and MRS Bush were booed, real class crowd. My life has come a long way. I remember a cross burning in 1972 while in the Army. I pray he does so well that we will want a constitional amendment for a term greater than 8years. I was also offended that John Lewis said about hoping that "whites would get it right". Without the "white" vote a different president would have taken office.
I think his quote was referring to to protect Americans: Calling prisoners of war "Enemy Combatants" so that we could give them harsh interrogations which either bordered on torture or just went ahead and crossed the line into torture. Invding the privacy of legal U.S. citizens without any real cause under the guise of protectcting us from terrorism. Stuff like that. I'd been waiting for someone to say "We're better than this."
Whoah! I accidentally deleted part of that first sentence. It should read, "I think this quote was referring to some of the more drastic steps that the Bush White House took to protect Americans...
I live in the UK and the Inauguration was broadcast live on the BBC and we certainly heard all the boos for Bush! Let's hope this means some good news for the whole world, as well as the US. Good Luck!
1. The term "Enemy Combatants" is defined by the Military Commissions Act. People held at Gitmo have it made when compared to POW's in any war. Harsh interagations, no legs missing, fingers cut off etc, but loud music (if it is RAP I agree it is torture), sleep deprevation etc is NOT torture. BY closing GITMO you now have a major problem. Do you bring them to USA or send them to other countries? They will see real torture if sent to other countries. If to USA and tried in our courts what then, do they all have the rights of a "citizen" even if they are not a "citizen" Bush didn't just come up with this stuff he WAS GIVEN the authority by congress on October 11, 2002 which effectively overruled the congressional right in the constitution "to declare war" and gave it to the President. Now WMD, is not chemical weapons used to kill a WMD? The definition keeps changing.
2, Security is a big issue but if you think this will stop you are mistaken, I personally know we did this in the 50's and 60's. It will not stop and should not. I am not sure what "drastic steps" we have taken. It is just more open.
3. This so called crisis is nothing but a press contrived attempt that suceeded in putting a democratic in the White House. When Regan took over for Carter we had double digit unemployment, 18% mortgages, 20% down payment required for home purchase and just a mess. So the press should be happy; they have created this crisis and if oversight is the problem, oversight is provided by congress, not the president and look at the financial genius we have in Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Ouch. And we want a guy that failed to pay taxes running the treasury and the IRS.
4. We have a very bad habit now since about the 80's. That is we destroy the messenger instead of the message.
5. Lastly we must honor the office of president, no matter who is in that office.
TransyLegs and 51Woody, as I said in my mentioned in my original post, I ended up watching the Inauguration on Youtube in a hotel room on a laptop with tinny speakers (How's that for a string of prepositional phrases?). Because of this, the audio quality was fairly poor, and because of THAT I couldn't hear any boos when Bush was mentioned early in Obama's speech. I did notice much less applause, but that was all. I am very sorry to hear that people booed Bush. I wasn't sorry to see him go, but I can't imagine booing a former President.
In reply to 51Woody's latest comments:
1. All good points. Thanks.
2. I agree that security is a big issue and I don't expect the enemies of the U.S. to stop now that Obama is in office. But there are several provisions of the Patriot Act which are overreaching. The one that bothers me the most is the "warrantless wiretapping" clause. The idea that the government can "listen in" on communications that they deem a threat to the country--and that it's up to the government to decide what those threats are--scares me. I understand that at times the need to act quickly makes getting a court order difficult, but there also has to be some protection of the rights of U.S. citizens, and the amendments that have been made to the law don't really help.
3. I'd disagree that the press created the economic crisis. However, I would agree that there are some striking similarities between the state of the economy today and the state of the economy in the late '70's and early '80's. However, I'd disagree with your conclusion drawn from those similarities. I guess what I'm trying to say is that instead of saying "There's no crisis because we were just as bad off in the late '70's" I'd say "There was an economic crisis now AND then, too." And I'd argue that it's worse now. The current crisis happened much more quickly, was not the result of external, non-US economic forces like much of the problem was in the '70's, and it really did for a while there threaten the entire US economy. All of that said, I do agree that the press has whipped people up into a frenzy of worry about the economy and that the poor economy resulted in the shifting of power in DC more than anything else. Of course, the same could be argued in 1980 as well. Despite the Iranian Hostage crisis and Reagan's plea for a better America, Carter probably would have been a two term President if the economy had been humming along in 1980 like it did for Clinton in the 1990's.
4. I agree with the comment, but I'm not sure what you're referring to in regards to this chain of converstation.
5. I agree. And I think anyone who believes that President Bush ever did anything other than what he truly believed to be best for this nation is a fool.
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