President Obama and Travel

"Let it be told to the future world . . that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive . . . that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet (it)."

--President Obama in his Inaugural
Address quoting George Washington's
words of 1776.

I am off to the Philippines tomorrow for ten days, posts will resume in early February.

The Moment, The Torch

For many of us, tomorrow's inauguration of Barack Obama is the fulfillment of a promise implicitly made at the 2004 Democratic Convention. By the time Obama had completed the keynote address you just knew that he would be president someday. Tuesday is the day.

He is a writer who is also a politician and no Inaugural Address since JFK's has been awaited with such high expectations. It's like hearing that your favorite author's new book will be in the stores this week--you lay a strategy for purchase and all other things become secondary. Only those anticipated golden words matter right now. In a few hours Obama's Inaugural words will be in our ears and in our hands and we will decide, over some time, how much of them to mix into our lives and future. If his past is prologue, they will mean very much to us and to the world as the 21st Century unfolds.

The next few days will pop like champagne corks as President Obama
makes it emphatic that the sad sag of the last eight years is being powerfully resisted by a new generation of Americans. As a dear European lady I used to know would put it, we must "make attention,"
this is important.

A couple of years ago Barack Obama attended an event--a funeral, I think--and Ethel Kennedy was there. She said to him, "the torch is in your hands now," and he said to her, "I know."

Hudson River

That jet in the Hudson River looks so forlorn tonight, like a porpoise that has snuggled its nose up to the dock to be petted by the tourists. Earlier today, in the middle of the river, the ferries and tugboats surrounded it like like a herd of elephants around a stricken member. How strange to give life and feeling to these big machines; all the people survived too.

Barack's Sadness

One week is left for Barack Obama to have something like a private life. On Tuesday, January 20th he becomes president and will be President Obama to the world forever after. I've sensed some sadness in him as he sees parts of the life he has loved beginning to slip away. The trips with his kids, going out to a gym every morning, his beloved Blackberry, are his last holds on normal life and he struggles to keep them. He has had the most unique young life imaginable for an American President and he no doubt has had a strong sense of his own independence and freedom of movement, as they would naturally accompany the experiences of differentness and loss that he was fated to have. Now, he must lose both the freedom and some of the differentness.

Right after his election he referred to himself as "a mutt," which means that one is hard to classify by birth. By choice and hard work Barack Obama has transcended his origins to become a thoroughbred of his own making, but they are few indeed and fated again to loneliness.

And so his sadness.

A Weekend In Anaheim

A weekend in Anaheim, a change of scene, was the most I'd bargained for. It is a city built around Walt Disney's dream and baseball and hockey teams. If they do not suit you there are always hotels to gawk at and restaurants to attend where some very large people indeed are doing what they do best. "There's no there there," Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, California but she never saw modern-day Anaheim. Talk about your soul-less cities! It is a conglomeration of junk buildings and signs with no discernible center unless you want to count an area called "Downtown Disney," which is part of you know what.

California is a very great and beautiful state, today--January 11th, while many states freeze in their snow--it was 75 degrees and sunny in SoCal. The humidity is so low that, with strong winds, it is a fire danger.
Yet it is a place that proves that stunning geography and a climate that people in other states can only imagine are no insurance that its residents
will conduct themselves in appropriately beautiful and temperate ways.
What is it in Southern California that causes some people to create such ugliness and desolation?

Maybe the beauty frightens them, makes them feel small, and they can only respond by despoiling it.

Claiborne Pell, R.I.P.

Tonight C-SPAN showed the funeral of former Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, who served in the Senate from 1961-1997. Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and others spoke of the man's life and work. He was that disappearing form, a gentleman. They are melting away like polar ice. Biden told of a meeting of Democratic senators in the 90's who were being advised to run negative campaigns against Republican opponents, this style being the latest succcessful gimmick. Pell said he could not do it, "never speak critically of your adversary in a contest," he said. Old School, yes, but what are the great things about the new one?

He's Good Enough, He's Smart Enough . . .

The Minnesota State Canvassing Board will announce on Monday that Al Franken has been elected U.S. Senator--to the Paul Wellstone seat--by 225 votes. Nice number, anything more would have been gauche. The Coleman camp can start a court challenge but I'm predicting here that Norm won't bother with that. He's beaten, exhausted, and thinking of far happier work than being in the forlorn Senate minority while the country falls in love with Barack Obama.

Well done, Al. Keep a picture of Sen. Wellstone on your desk and you can't go wrong.

Show Me The Books

W is just about gone and there is a coming glut of books and articles on the grotesqueries of the past eight years, but something has come up recently that must be commented upon now. Karl Rove writes in the Wall Street Journal that he and W had yearly contests to see who could read the most books and that, while Turd Blossom always won, W had read roughly 100 books per year since 2004. I'm sorry, but this is impossible to accept. If one is a reader it is soon apparent to an audience: book titles are mentioned, writers are quoted, vocabulary reflects experience with literacy and refined expression. None of these qualities are evident in W.
He does well if he speaks two or three coherent sentences in a row. Nothing about him suggests that he is a serious reader and this outrageous last-minute attempt by TB to to turn his life-long project into a thinking man is reminiscent of the scene in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein where the created slug comes out on stage in a tuxedo and sings Puttin' on the Ritz, with a hilarious mispronunciation of Ritz. The audience laughs, the monster reverts to type, and his rampage sends people screaming.

Who needs Oliver Stone? Mel Brooks nailed W and TB decades ago.

Another Opening, Another Show

We spent New Year's Eve at a dinner party that included a 92 year-old lady who had raised her three kids alone, worked a full time job, and came home at night to do the housework. These days she reads the LA Times "cover to cover" every day, watches MSNBC, attends lectures with her husband, argues powerfully in favor of the Democratic Party, and is trying to organize all of us to go to a local eatery that is "a little pricey," so she was hoping somebody had a birthday coming that would provide a good excuse to splurge. The lady loves good Mexican food but only attends those places that serve a good Margarita. She watched the Kennedy Center Honors the other night and her critique was biting: the rock band was terrible and there should have been more Streisand.

Dismiss her at your peril: she brought up Alan King's old comic routine about very old men who die, and according to their obits, are "survived by his wife." No matter how old these guys live to be their wives always last longer. She has been around the block more times than you can count and has recently taken up a new form of walking--twenty minutes a day on the treadmill.

Happy New Year, Ruth.