Not everyone in America, it seems, is looking forward to this week's giant Obamafest. Case in point: Sunday night, the bar at Fort Lauderdale International Airport. (Yes, they have flights to Jamaica.) I'm killing time, watching a woman throw back tequila shots, a little too early in the day. Curious, I turn to her: "nervous flier, huh?"
"Not particularly," she answers. "Like tequila?" I persevere. "It tastes awful." I won't be defeated: "burgeoning alcoholic?" Exasperated, she turns and says: "this week is going to be a shit show with all you Obama people everywhere in DC. I have to be there for class. I'd give anything to be anywhere else." There's just no pleasing some people.
The "We Are One" concert, honouring regular campaign volunteers like Bono and Beyonce, happened while I was in the air. Watching the re-broadcast on HBO, at the end of the concert, Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen sang "This Land Is Your Land." I grew up in Upstate NY, a short drive from where Pete Seeger lives. He's the man who looked at an impossibly polluted Hudson River more than 40 years ago and said, we could clean it up, and started the Clearwater movement. Hearing Pete singing this progressive ode to America - "In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple, near the relief office, I see my people" - moved me to song and tears.
It's difficult not to get emotional this week, even show the kind of passion usually not drawn out so easily by really bad television. A friend assures me that at the exclusive hotel The Hay Adams, where Obama stayed last week, the entire bar burst into song. But it took a diverse group of the fabulously wealthy - every rich colour of the richest rainbow anywhere in the richest country on earth - and 400,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial joining in, to get me in the proper state of mind to celebrate this moment in history: the inauguration of Barack Obama and the end of the reign of error, eight years of Bush/Cheney.
But enough consideration! The point of this week is excess. As a sometime watcher of British politics, i remember your wonderful Mayor noting that the day of drunkenness on London's tube prior to the alcohol ban had been ""anthropologically misunderstood," and was in fact best compared to "a kind of exuberant Celtic-style wake." Much the same is true of the way people in DC are celebrating the passing of Bush. I paid respects first at the Florida Obama Campaign staff party, people I knew from working on the campaign in Orlando. The collective exuberance was still there. We won in Florida, people seemed to say, so, Katherine Harris, consider it recounted. I closed out my night of mourning at a friend's Hawaiian-themed inauguration house party. Soon, it was 1 in the morning, and the alcohol had run out an hour ago. But everyone was still laughing, and calling their friends to tell them to come over. A complete stranger turned to me and said "this is awesome," and I don't know if he was talking about the party or the inauguration. But I couldn't have agreed more.
[Editor's note - Aaron Banks will be blogging for Prospect during inauguration week. He wrote an amusing "confession" in the previous edition of the mag, which is worth reading too. A version of this post was cross-posted at the marvelous MyDD.]
Prospect's man at today's giant Obama party
January 20, 2009
