blogging the inauguration

[kleenexwoman]

Okay, well, we're at Joe's house in Southfield because Joe didn't get any sleep and can't drive. We made it to his house so he could change shoes, and then he sort of laid in the snow for a while and we decided that it was a bad idea to go into Ferndale. Still watching the inauguration on his little wood-paneled TV in the sunroom. He's drinking coffee and snorting to keep himself awake. (Not snorting anything. Just making weird noises.)

Everyone was booing Bush a few minutes ago. "Bad form," said the MSNBC announcers.

I didn't get much sleep last night. It really felt like Christmas Eve used to when I was a kid. Lying awake savoring the anticipation, knowing that if I closed my eyes, everything would be here and it would all be over too soon. (Except it won't be over for about four years and maybe then another four. Sure, that new-president smell will wear off eventually, but I think it'll be a while.)

Okay, so I've never actually seen one of these before. Is the invocation actually supposed to be a prayer, or is that just a Rick Warren thing?

Joe's crying. I'm just sort of numbly happy.

oooh, now Aretha is going to sing. Now I'm getting all shivery. I spent a lot of last night watching local news reports about black churches that were taking their congregations to Washington, and they interviewed all these older people who talked about how hard it had been when they were growing up and how they'd been pushed around and mistreated just about everywhere and how incredibly proud they were now. Most of them were crying.

It's Biden! Trying to look solemn, but still smiling so hard.

Nice soothing classical music. The camera keeps cutting to what appear to be seagulls.

He messed up the words. Oh, Barack. Obviously very eager to get on with it. Can't blame him.

The speech: I swooned. I've never swooned at a politician's speech before. Not even when I went to see Clinton. This really is a very Christmas morning feel. The next four years are like a big shiny present with a huge bow, and we are going to unwrap them very slowly.

Comments

[drworm.livejournal.com]

Glad you enjoyed it. :) I happened to catch Aretha while I was waiting in line to get my parking permit and they had the tv on...

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Aretha was so awesome. :) I actually got a little bored halfway into the speech because he was just repeating the first part in different words, but the first half was pretty awesome too.

Obama's speech was AWESOME!

[sighing-echo.livejournal.com]

Happy Inaguration Day.
We had to see it on local news with pretty stupid announcers and camera angles that satirize all public figures. Cheny in a wheelchair was creepy.

Re: Obama's speech was AWESOME!

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Cheney is the creepiest motherfucker alive.

We were watching MSNBC. I particularly enjoyed it when the announcer said that Obama was going to escort Bush out of the White House, because the way she said "escort" made it sound like "escort" as in "was escorted from the premises under duress." Nicely euphemistic.

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

Obama is in a very difficult position, because it appears that the average American (and most of its politicians) have no real idea of just how atrocious their economic position is, and is going to get, or why. I will be very surprised if he even gets to try to do half of what he would like to do, right or wrong, because it just isn't going to be economically feasible for some years.

I have revised my position on the economy on account of the depth of the crisis being worse even than I had supposed (and I have always said this is potentially worse than the 1920s). That revision causes me to think that apart from sitting on our asses and hoping, public works are now the only alternative that can be tried that might work; and in that case, America has got the best President it could hope for at the moment, because he was so minded to go that way before it made sense. And thus despite being as wrong-headed economically as a man can be prior to this crisis, he just might be the man to do what fits the day.

We had better hope so. Doing nothing, economically, is certain to be very grievous at present. Public works, if they are got wrong, are the way to even worse than I have currently envisaged, because they increase debt, and debt, at the levels it exists today, is the heart and soul of the economic crisis; it is beyond comparison with anything that we have known.

Bluntly, America, and other countries that have behaved in the same way, now have decades ahead in which the repayment of former debt will dominate economics, OR, there will be an economic meltdown on a scale that few people can even imagine. To repay that debt, one must first have a sound economy; public works might enable that to be the case, and I can see nothing else that could do so at this point, since other approaches have already failed elsewhere. But that must be the point of public works; a sound economy, and thus the ability to repay debt.

Yet repaying that debt will squeeze 10% out of America's GDP each year for the next twenty years. How, if that is to be achieved, are any major spending programs of any kind to be achieved, other than those required to make the economy work again? It can't be done.

There are a limited number of futures.

- Sit still and let it hit. Repay debt for twenty years. Strike all aspirations during that period.
- Public works revive the economy. Repay debt for twenty years with a functional economy in which people can live without too much pain.
- Get public works wrong, and head for a future that is truly scary, in which the dollar collapses, and you repay your creditors in their currency practically forever, or, the entire basis of the dollar is redefined, and the country is sold off in a garage sale to your creditors, and you then live on their terms.

Pick. Those are the choices, and I think Barack has now seen that to some extent. I wish his electors had already done so.

Why? People are very ready to blame bankers, but the culprit is, as Barack rightly said, greed - whether he knows it or not, that greed originates in individuals ready to take and use loans that mortgage their future in a way that former generations knew better than to do, in the now provenly false supposition that the future will always be rosy enough to repay those debts in richer times.

That form of greed and, frankly, economic ignorance, has been the norm, and the banks have merely given the people what they wanted. I said this was a property bubble in 1995; see the graph of US debt versus GDP, and that's when the debt problem got worse than it had been in the 1920s. I was not to know that at the time, but it remained obvious to me that that was about the time where all economic sense was being thrown to the wind in pursuit of an arithmetically impossible dream; credit from cradle to grave.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Door #2?

I was just barely a teenager during the economic bubble of the 1990's and was not aware of anything that was going on; my entire adult life so far (not a long time) has been spent dreading inevitable economic collapse and having to live in a suburban post-apocalyptic wasteland. Public works sound good to me.

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

(1) will be discarded, and that leads to choices that will result in (2) or (3). We would all like (2), but unless it is done extremely well, we will get (3). The record of your legislature in finding ways to move vast sums of money for local political causes as almost blatant bribery to secure the votes of senators (Byrd in particular) does not augur well.

Triumph, for Obama, will depend on hanging out to dry the worst culprits in his own party, where he has influence; it is very, very far from a given.

You make an interesting statement - the thing is that what we begin doing as adults depends on what we thought normal in childhood. Very many first time voters will have no idea of living in another world; that's where a lot of Obama's support has come from, and when I think of that, that is when I am most sorry for his burden.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

by the way, off-topic but where was that poem you wanted me to listen to? I finally figured out how to jack my headphones into this computer. The jack was under a large pile of cobwebs and I'm surprised the whole thing didn't catch on fire before this.

[sir-dave.livejournal.com]

The main one is here, below the heading 'audio sample', but you'll find several others on this page.

The first one develops the concept of changing the dramatic feel through rhythm alone. That's my main claim to originality. I am not (yet) a great reader, but since I am the one I have got that is best placed to show how the verse is intended to work, I have done this to get the ideas across.