Obama's Inauguration

I am sure that many more people will have insights on the Inauguration this year, and they will probably have better analyses of the speeches and players than I do.  But I did want to acknowledge that I was a (long distance) witness to the event.

I'm usually at work by 8 am, but since the Inauguration was playing live at 9 am my time, I hung around in bed to watch.  It is the first time I have watched in Inauguration, and the first time that I have actually gone to see the person being Inaugurated while they were campaigning.  I have to say, the man keeps impressing me.

When he stumbled during the actual swearing-in, I wondered if he'd done something similar while standing at the altar in front of Michelle.  Then the newscasters revealed that the Chief Justice of the United States, The Honorable John G. Roberts, Jr., was the one who had actually screwed up.  He had switched the words, so Obama paused where everything had gone a little haywire.  Listening to it again on the radio as I drove to work, you can hear Roberts correct himself after Obama's pause, and then Obama actually repeats the original, incorrect version.  I wonder if he was wondering whether the Oath would be valid if it wasn't said correctly!  As a coworker noted, it goes to show you that Obama was actually thinking while he was being sworn in, and that he already had the Oath memorized.  The man appears to be nothing if not prepared.

I liked the "cultural" bits too: Aretha Franklin's "My Country 'Tis of Thee," with the fabulous Aretha-ized ending, the instrumental piece "Air and Simple Gifts", which I though was played exquisitely and did a great job of weaving the old Shaker hymn into a modern composition, and even the poem by Elizabeth Alexander, although I didn't like her reading of her poem as much as the poem itself.  That sort of distant, stilted reading style is very common among poets, but I feel that if you don't allow the words to flow the way they would as your eyes follow the page, then you're doing a disservice to your own work.  (Sorry, that was the former poet in me taking over there.)

[Update: it's the 23rd, and I just read that the quartet "instrument-synched" their piece.  Unless you were standong close enough to hear them unamplified, what you heard was a recording of their piece done in a studio a few days earlier.  Which I guess explains why the playing sounded so amazing, and the sound was perfectly balanced.  They say they did it because it was way too cold for any of their instruments to stay in tune.  Now, one of the news announcers made a point of saying that Yoyo Ma was playing a carbon-fiber cello, since his cello couldn't stand the cold, which obviously gave the impression that we were hearing them play live.  I agree, it would have sucked to listen to a bunch of professional musicians play out-of-tune instruments -- it would have been like hearing the Jonas Brothers live.  But it seems like they should have said something at the time, instead of pretending that what we were hearing was their live music.  I feel oddly let down.]

My favorite part of the whole shebang, however, came during the closing prayer.  Reverend Joseph Lowery gave a better and less speech-y prayer than Reverend Rick Warren's, I felt, and I absolutely loved the way he ended it:

"....help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right."

T actually laughed out loud.  The rhyming probably went a little off the rails, but the playfulness of the sentence, and the meaning behind it, helped add a little joy and celebration to the very serious and somber act of swearing in the first African American President of the United States.  Thank the goodness of the American people that we finally got it right this time.