Lenny

I was at the Obama Inauguration. I wrote the below as series of postings elsewhere, to pour out my firsthand observations so that I wouldn't forget them. (If anyone reads this, I apologize in advance for it being perhaps meandering and long; again it was simply the pouring out of raw observations).

I was at the inauguration today [20th January 2009], standing several hundred yards behind the second "Jumbotron" monitor from the Capitol. Since the poorly-run local heavy-rail system was totally overwhelmed very quickly, I walked to and fro, many miles each way. I entered the train station at 6:10am or so, and left after about 5 minutes. The platform for trains going to Washington was packed with human-sardines, an equally-packed train was just sitting there, and I could see the headlights of another in the distance also just sitting there. After about two minutes of bizarre inactivity, I heard "This train is out of service, all passengers must exit due to a passenger sickness”. (lol, what?) That was it for me: I shoved my way back upstairs [which was difficult due to all the escalators going down on the inbound platform that day] and left the station, wasting $1.65 in fare for getting out of the same turnstyles I had just entered. If I had stuck around with the fools in there, who knows how long it would've taken.

I got to the Mall (the two-mile-long open space where the Capitol and monuments are) around 8:30am. And things were going on till 1 p.m. After that, getting out of the Mall area was an even worse nightmare than getting in that morning; it took me an hour to move a few hundred yards. Why? Because of the extremely-poorly-thought-out "plans" by the army, trying to funnel hundreds of thousands of people through two tiny street openings. They rigidly stood by these "plans" for no apparent or logical reason. (Yes, there were actual U.S. Army soldiers everywhere, not just National Guard... I am pretty sure that deploying the Army to domestic crowd control violates Posse Comitatus).

Now, as for the actual event:
It was a circus the likes of which I have not ever really seen in my life. The crowds and the general hecticness of it all were one thing. But the atmosphere of it all was very surreal, very strange. It was as if this was a giant celebration of the death of a hated enemy. I suppose that’s exactly what it was, an electoral coup-de-grace of the Dispossessed Majority (that old Nixonian term; which will soon have to be renamed "The Dispossessed Former-Majority"). But seeing it in person was very surreal to me. I’ve had dreams that were less surreal than this.

The mask of post-racialism, if it was ever on in the first place, seemed to be torn off today. There was so much thickly-implied (and occasionally very overt) racial triumphalism in the air. The true face of it all is: Nonwhite-Ascendancy and White-Dispossession in the USA (and, implied, hopefully the rest of the world soon enough.)

Both the official program and the ambiance created by the crowd (esp. the blacks) gave this impression.

Obama's line in his speech about "melting away all the tribes" [miscegenation] or something to that effect; the brazen "civil rights" prayer-leader calling for black supremacy and demeaning whites to " [finally] do what's right"; the idiotic Rick Warren ranting about how great it is that America is "not united by ties of blood in any way"; the awkward swearing-in with the repeated phrase "Barack Hussein Obama". I took the general awkwardness and verbal slip-ups in the swearing-in to be a sign that Obama suddenly had a pang of guilty conscience: "I don't belong here". It flummoxed his mind for a fleeting moment. And then a moment later that the thought drifted away.

Yes, and Obama wasn't alone in the pangs of guilt. Behind this "historic" occasion and all the celebrating, I sensed this same sort of repressed feeling, something akin to awkward guilt, among some in the general public who surrounded me. White-America is on the precipitous decline, Obama is a capstone of that decline and the ultimate symbol thereof. While most of the nonwhites esp. blacks (obviously) were basking in masked or overt racial-triumphalism; the faces of others, their demeanor, the occasional "off" reaction to something going on on stage (pregnant-pauses) definitely suggested to me a strain of "repressed guilt" about an Obama presidency--that what they had done was is in some way(s) "wrong". The guilt feelings will probably linger on but rarely if ever be spoken about. To understand what I mean, it is perhaps akin to the well-known feeling of something like pesky-shameful-remorse felt by a white woman who bears a mulatto child ("my child doesn't look anything like me").

In short, what it felt like to be on the ground at this "historic event" was 1.) Shock at the vulgar racial-triumphalism that permeated everything, kind of like a Bizarro-world "Birth Of A Nation" being played out on the Washington ‘National Mall’, 2.) An undercurrent of repressed awkwardness and guilt among some about the symbolic overturning of the old apple cart; the symbolic coup-de-grace of the Dispossessed Majority.

Other disjointed observations:
--The booing from the general public was loud and long when Bush was announced or shown on the jumbotrons. To be expected from this crowd. But, not one peep when McCain popped up. Not one. Why? I think it's because there was an understanding on some level that McCain essentially threw the election. He played the part of magnanimous loser from day one, so as to let Obama be crowned. In a way, McCain wanted Obama to win almost as much as Cris Matthews did. (See here). Yes, and despite a.) McCain's best attempts to lose [successfully depressing white-Republican turnout, while nonwhite turnout -- 85-15 for Hussein-Obama -- soared] and b.) A media machine that loves Obama more than Der Stuermer loved Hitler, it was still pretty close.

-- The grotesque commercialization of Obama and of this event. Thousands of ad-hoc street-vendors peddling t-shirts and buttons (and anything else suckers will buy) with Obama's face on them. So many local stores have stupidly-contrived "Obama specials", or had plastered new slogans or logos aping one of more of Obama's slogans. (One bar in upscale Georgetown had some kind of new special alcoholic beverage they named after Obama, for example). Images of Obama's face are plastered everywhere in Washington. That is so surreal for the USA. Oh, and LOTS of free Pepsi merchandise was distributed. Pepsi is apparently the official cola of the ObamaNation. They used their new Obama-esque logo and copied his slogans like "H[Pepsi-symbol]PE" on little backpacks they handed out. "Refreshing America"! I also saw a couple "My President Is Black" t-shirts, worn by blacks.

-- At one point I saw white Obama-tourists giving a fairly-large amount of money to a black panhandler. (I will spare you a joke here involving the word "change"). Everyone with sense knows not to give them money since it goes straight to the liquor store. These people get free food from many of the shelters and soup-kitchens; what they don't get is free liquor, hence the begging. And when an astute but sympathetic passerby gives them actual food, it usually ends up in the trash. Why do I bring this up: Because it crystallizes the Obama-phenomenon among the whites who supported him: Naive fools whose minds have been inculcated for a couple of decades now with bizarre quasi-blacksupremacy ideas (the most important people in U.S. history? "Dr. King" and Rosa Parks, of course) and the black-victimization mantra.

--- I witnessed many other interactions between what appeared to be local (DC/MD) blacks and out-of-town'er whites. All these verbal interactions had a terse quality to them, such that it was clear that the whites were cautiously venturing "past the Rubicon" and testing the waters of the new postracial Age Of Obama with these "difficult-to-get-along-with" DC blacks. Even in the Age of Obama, there was no harmony to these interactions at all; they felt something like a child speaking to an adult in terms of awkwardness. (This is not to imply that either party was "the adult", just that this was the raw level of awkwardness).

-- On Monday, “Martin Luther King Day” (a federal holiday so I was also went downtown), 10 or 12 people from something called "The Revolutionary Communist Party" had set up near the Washington Monument. They were accosting passersby to take their newspaper, called "Revolution", and asking for donations. The distributor team consisted of half whites and half blacks, and most of the whites looked noticeably Jewish. The newspaper talked about Obama being the same as Bush and people being conned by phony-change, and then the obligatory "capitalism has failed, communism is the solution" stuff. I stuck around as I was intrigued, and eventually one of the Jewish distributors briefly ranted to me face-to-face about some guy who died after being shot in the back by San Francisco cops. Then he urged me to give him money. I think these people were from New York judging by their looks and demeanor.

Photograph
-- I was somewhere between the second and third jumbotrons on the right side of the above-linked photo, near the tree line. They had these huge "jumbotrons" set up all the way back to the Lincoln memorial in the background there. Assuming this photo was taken on the Capitol building, the columned building in the distance [Lincoln Memorial] is exactly two miles away. All the space in-between was filled up I'm told, and latecomers after 10a.m. couldn't even get in. (The tall buildings in the further distance are the Virginia side of the river, from whence I walked).