Kudos to Mr. Eisenman for his thoughtful and poetic assessment, which appeared in Monday's Post, of President Bush's first inauguration day. It's brimming with gray skies, ever-niggling emotions, and perhaps even Mr. Bush's overcoat - but there is a silver lining poisoning Mr. Eisenman's account and thy name is Obamania. The sheer thrill that we in Our Fair Nation experience every four years or so, of being partial, of having that very Jeffersonian say in The Way Things Go. This all is saccharine: the best part of being an American, of being a citizen, is having a say and an opinion, whether it is to be judged later to have value or not (as someone reading this is doubtless doing).
But to Mr. Eisenman's column, one simply has to wonder: what's the point? What's Mr. Eisenman getting at? That presidential inaugurations can, gasp, happen on somewhat insalubrious days? It's as if a moment like Mr. Obama's inauguration - a day where the stars line up correctly - are few and far between. Mr. Eisenman would have us believe that inaugurations are supposed to be happy occasions (the political it's a boy!), but the fates were scorning President Bush on that dark and stormy day back in 2000.
Dios mio.
A little historical perspective is useful here, lest we take Mr. Eisenman at his word. We need look no further than our spiritual and constitutional predecessor, the United Kingdom. There, the election of a prime minister doesn't quite have the same ring to it as a U.S. president's does, so I suppose the next best cognate would be a king's coronation - anathematized as the enterprise of kingship has become since John Locke gave us the okay-go on representative republicanism.
David McCullough opens 1776 with an excellent assessment of the procession of George III, the king who lost America
to Westminster to address Parliament on the growing situation in the American colonies. Fifteen years before, George, an incredibly erudite man of well-learned background, came to the throne of a nation at war to the death with its old Gal Friday, Bourbon France. And yet, George simply going down the street to Parliament was a grand affair. Imagine it. A remarkably clear day, with a remarkably providential sun shining down on the new monarch. A gilded chariot trotting along at walking speed from St. James' Palace to Westminster (a large part of which we remember best as being blown up in V for Vendetta). And George himself, decked out in the finest accoutrements of the day. The King of England was not quite God's regent on earth anymore (funny story: some riotous Parliamentarians 126 years prior had ended that monopoly by offing old King Charles' head), but he still commanded a modicum of respect that put a new name to showmanship.
What is the point, then? A few things. One: watching today's inauguration the cognates seem obvious, though instead of the erudite King George, we have the debonair Prince Barack. I watched earlier as the unshakeable truth of it all finally hit: This was exactly like George's jaunt to Parliament, though slightly more momentous. The pomp and the circumstance (apologies to our graduating seniors). The throngs packed three or twelve deep, the flags waving and coloring the District of Columbia in red, white and blue. The motorcade at walking pace, and the Esteemed Leader even walking on foot: to be among his subjects, to see what they see, to (finally) have arrived at this very Atlas-moment of having the world at his fingertips. To have become the man in charge of the American realm.
Second point: it's frightfully Romantic (in the classical application of the term), the Obama inauguration and even mad old George's trip up the street, too - quite different from Eisenman's sturm und drang account of President Bush's first such go-around. But there's an undercurrent to the whole enterprise that probably only the terribly unimpressed and clearly partisan like me would notice.
Third point: Enthusiasm which sounds like a nice thing in real life but had particularly destructive consequences to our friends across the pond, pervades the inaugural circumstance. Imagine it. At Westminster McCullough writes, people were packed solid
many having stood since morning
hoping for a glimpse of the King or some of the notables of Parliament. So great was the crush that latecomers had difficulty seeing much of anything.
Everybody coming out in great throngs to see the new Esteemed Leader, their passions, hopes and dreams all on their shirtsleeves; their unrealized wishes given a shape they can quantify and with which they can sympathize. Again - capital R Romantic.
But it is a slippery slope between appreciation for new leadership and an overt enthusiasm for new blood and new life breathed into old institutions. If you permit the connections, it was enthusiasm, both for religious uniformity and allegiance to a sovereign no matter what, that cost Charles I his head in 1649; it was enthusiasm for a godly, necessarily Puritan, revolution (in so many words, from arch-Whig SR Gardiner) that brought Cromwell to power in the 1650s. It was pro-Catholic enthusiasm that led James II to attempt re-Catholicization of the realm in the 1680s; and finally, enthusiasm for change, no matter the cost, on the part of Whigs that led a Dutch Calvinist, re: a foreigner, to assume the throne of England in 1688. Contemporaries examined all of these things dubiously in their own time, and these events remain hotly contested in stuffy historian-type circles and classrooms on this campus.
But if this sounds like the carping of an overzealous undergrad (too late!), I admit that the world is of course different nowadays - Georgian Britain was, to follow Mr. Eisenman's model, a nice and poetic equivalent.
But we ought to remember and embrace a tempered attitude to our presidential politics, lest we lapse into blind enthusiasm at what amounts to a political changing of the guard. Overt hero worship turns our new president from an intelligent policy-maker into a celebrity worthy of gossip rags and Perez Hilton. Meanwhile, enthusiasm for President Obama's election alone, for making history by simply getting to the White House, discounts automatically any of those policies he may or may not actually undertake. This is a momentous occasion, do not misunderstand: But it would serve President Obama and us better to approach it with the scrupulous, none-too-prideful eye. We ought to assess him on what he has done, is about to do, on his policies and actions, rather than simply being a physical manifestation of change itself.
Chris Creamer is a senior studying history.
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Opinion
Letter to the Editor
