By Jeff Guy
I watched Joe Biden’s inauguration on YouTube at the 6 o’clock hour before work, two days after it happened. I think it was anti-climactic, which is a good thing. I’d had enough of the drama. Maybe it wasn’t such a big deal to me in the wake because for two weeks, I rarely listened to NPR (as much as I love it) or went on social media.
What’s the use? I could go on the fucking Facebook and see some comment from a guy I knew in school, saying Joe Biden is an idiot. Or another guy who was, like, King of the Popular Kids’ Table at lunch...35 years ago...going all ammosexual about how a government without arms can’t govern. As if. The U.S. Government has the most abundant arsenal in the history of man and woman. That’s never going to change. It’s not going to be Men in Black coming to your garage and confiscating your guns. The guy from school had the words, “Trump won” up in Christmas Lights last December, an image he wielded on Facebook like a phallic symbol, which is about all Fakebook is anyway.
I really don’t dislike these fellows. They are nice guys, but fuck ‘em. It’s one of the reasons I don’t go to high school reunions. I don’t want to see how people turned out. A lot of them are gun fetishists, racists and Breitbart believers (but oh, so Christian). Why should I raise my blood pressure? Anyone I give a shit about from school, I’m in contact with anyway so it’s all cool.
Anyhow, Biden’s inauguration and his actions as President these first couple of weeks don’t hold a lot of spectacle for me because I consider it back to Business as Usual (hopefully with a little of the unique, the unusual). It had been a long time since I’d seen a president look Presidential. Biden doesn’t have the oratorical flourish of an Obama, Reagan or Jack Kennedy, but he has a sincerity and natural quality that’s always been a character trait for him. After four years of a president pitting Americans against each other, it was refreshing to hear a President talk about unity. Refreshing, but predictable. I took a shit load of speech and communication issues classes in college and the instructors and textbooks were always talking about how a President delivers a message of American unity at an inaugural address and in times of disaster. I remember studying the language of Reagan’s television address following the Challenger explosion.
But you have to be careful with the unity theme. Racists, gay bashers, vigilantes, insurrectionists, theocrats - I don’t want any unity with. It’s like how you don’t dig murderers, rapists and psychopaths, in general.
I thought Obama was too conciliatory in expressing his desire to work with Republicans after the 2008 election (they were in a restaurant the night of his inauguration, plotting how to screw him) and later when they took the House and Senate. I hated it when he said, “I might like to share some Kentucky bourbon with Mitch McConnell.” I am a bourbon man (my dad was a Scotch man, but doesn’t drink anymore because he’s old and has health issues) but McConnell -- I wouldn’t play shuffleboard with that lying, cheating sack of wrinkled snake shit. I could be as dry as a 12-stepper with a suitcase full of sobriety chips and I still wouldn’t activate a filter with the man. Obama has the personality for public office - and I mean that in the good sense. People like myself don’t.
Back to unity. I hope that doesn’t mean not impeaching Trump. I know everyone’s sick of hearing about him, and I am too, but he needs to pay for his worst transgression. If stealing money from that children's cancer charity was the only thing he’d done, I think he should be impeached. Inciting a violent overthrow of the government isn’t something to let slide. I say this, not out of vindictiveness, but from the perspective of justice. If rioters have to go to prison, Trump should too. I don’t care if he left Biden a nice letter (the one tradition he kept). I think that was a CYA move.
I don’t hate the homegrown terrorists who stormed the Capital. (Maybe I should; would I hate them if they were Islamic extremists?) I hate what they did. There were people who wanted to hang Mike Pence and assassinate Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s the human condition I have a problem with. Knowing what humans are capable of. I don’t like to use the word “evil.” I prefer the term, “misguided.” I feel no sense of schadenfreude at the backlash they’re deservedly getting. It’s just one of those things.
Okay, I wanna get happy now.
That poet -- Amanda Gorman. OMG! I was working at McDonald’s when I was 22. But, hey, we all climb our own hill, right?
“The Democrats do seem to attract more esteemed pop stars,” my daughter, Kenzie, said.
Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Foo Fighters...And Lady Gaga singing, The National Anthem...her voice is so precise and commanding. The U.S. Marine band backing her.
What did Trump have? Third Eye Blind? No disrespect to them, but that was it. I don’t think they were excited to be there. I have this feeling, it was just another gig for them.
Who gives a shit what "Chachi" Baio says? Now, Henry Winkler (The Fonz), I like that guy. Too bad the show jumped the shark with all those added-on actors, but hey, the same thing would later happen to The Office.
Reagan, whatever his talents were as The Great Communicator, popularized a lot of the toxicity that’s regressed into what we have today. The movie star president. Okay, but time has proven otherwise. Jimmy Carter was a distant cousin to Country Music's legendary Carter Family. He's a sixth cousin to Elvis Presley. He’s a distant cousin to Motown founder Berry Gordy on his mother’s side. Reagan, who co-starred with a monkey, was a B-lister, while Pres. Carter was on the A+ list. And hey, one of Carter's sons -- not sure if it was Jack, Chip or Jeff -- smoked a joint with Willie Nelson on the White House roof one night. How fucking cool is that?
This brings to mind the first Presidential inauguration I saw. It was January in 1977. Mrs. Clark and Mr. Johnson’s second grade classes combined on the rug, in front of a small black and white TV and watched Jimmy Carter get sworn in. Afterwards, Carter shook hands with outgoing Pres. Gerald Ford. It’s only now that I realize how much that handshake resonated with me. I saw that even though a presidential campaign is a dogfight, at the end of the day, we’re on the same team. We’ve lost that. I hate to think of what it might take to get it back, but we’ll hope for the best.
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