A Bar Stool View of This Moment in American History

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 12:35 PM on January 20, 2009.

Tomorrow, I will allow my cynicism to return; I’ll face up to the fact that we now have an instinctive centrist tasked with digging us out of the deep hole in which we find ourselves.

I’ll be acutely aware of the promise and peril of an Obama administration; he can give the Right the gift of laying blame for 8 years of disastrous “conservatism” onto Obama — and liberalism by extension — or he can usher in an era of liberal consensus such as existed between FDR’s swearing in and the signing of the Civil Rights Act.

But today, I think it’s appropriate to celebrate the moment. Change has come — its exact nature still  to be determined — and that is something joyous unto itself.

A smart black guy with a funny ay-rab name just became president of these United States.

I wanted to watch the speech with others, so I hit the streets.

The ceremony took place at 9 AM on the West Coast, and I found myself in an Irish bar that wouldn’t open for some hours. They had made the mistake of turning on the TV and leaving the doors open while they loaded in the cases of brew they’d serve this evening, and soon a crowd had gathered to watch. The barman hadn’t opened up the till yet, so coffee was on the house. There were tears during the ceremony.

The Irish, being proud of their rhetorical tradition, all agreed that Barack Hussein Obama had to have some Irish blood in him.

I live very close to a gentrification line, and at some point moved a few blocks down the street to a dank bar where crusty men drink beer early in the morning. My fellow patrons, already one sheet to the wind, were exactly the sort of people for whom politics usually means nothing (although most are likely impacted greatly by shifts in public policy that more affluent citizens would never even notice). The bar was book-ended by TVs, but nobody was watching the re-run of Home Improvement.

I actually missed the speech -- or at least the images projected to the nation. A weary old man, a stooped African-American man walking with a cane, one who had no doubt seen a lot of struggle in his life, stared silently at the tube, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. When it was over, he got up and as he left the bar he quietly remarked, “well... damn, there’s a nigga’ in the White House.”

This was not a day about policy, or partisan allegiance. For me, it was about that old man in a dingy bar, the drowsy hipsters wondering whether a guy named Obama really could have a drop of the Irish in him. It was about millions of people animated about politics for the first time since ... since I don’t know when.

Among the tens of thousands who trekked to DC for the occasion, the cameras picked up faces bright with enthusiasm. Many shed tears of joy. Perhaps this is a good time to remember a story from just a few years back that the commercial media went through great pains to downplay.

Here’s the story from January 20, 2001 — the contrast is stark ...

Not since Richard Nixon paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1973 has a presidential Inauguration drawn so many protesters -- and last time, people were out to protest the Vietnam War.

Demonstrators turned out in droves on Saturday -- a miserably gray and drizzly day, with temperatures hovering in the mid-30s -- to protest the Inauguration of President George W. Bush.

They came out in scores... Interspersed between Bush-Cheney signs and Texas flags were thousands of protest placards, bearing inscriptions such as "Bush Cheated," "Hail to the Thief," "Selected not elected," "Bushwhacked by the Supremes" and "Golly Jeb, we pulled it off!"

The police did an effective job of isolating protesters and the general public in small clusters along Pennsylvania Avenue, drastically reducing the threat of riots or violence.

But this also meant there was a steady stream of heckling of Bush and Cheney as they moved along the broad boulevard toward the White House

The hatred was palpable. At one particularly dark moment, a protester lobbed an egg at the presidential limo. Bush remained safely inside until the final block before reaching his new home. (In the past, Bush's father and even Bill Clinton walked large stretches of the parade route, but not so during this cold and contentious day.)

Perhaps I’m wrong, but my gut tells me that all but the most rabid right-wing lunatics took a moment to put aside the bitterness that animates their worldview to appreciate the moment. For a few hours on this day, the country probably is united. It’s a nice time to remember that as contentious as our polity can be, we do hold a few shared values.

The speech...

It was an eloquent speech, of course. And it struck me that it was pitched as much at a global audience as to the American people. He said that earlier generations of American leaders “understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” As perverse as it might seem in the era of neoconservativism, this message is truly conservative, in the best sense of the word. He said, “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals, invoking Ben Franklin’s famous admonition: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

A few moments stood out for me.

We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth...

There was a pause between Hindus and non-believers. A pregnant pause, and one that I thought put an exclamation mark on a president acknowledging America’s most loathed minority — atheists.

And this ...

...The stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.

This resonated with me especially because I’ve made the same point many times before, like in this piece from a year ago:

I've always thought that a better approach is to confront the premise of the big/small government debate head-on by stating what should be obvious: government should be no bigger than needed to accomplish the tasks people want it to do, and the question of whether a government is doing that effectively or not is really the only issue that matters. Forget about big and small -- good governance should be the goal on which everyone agrees.

When talk shifted to terrorism — a political necessity in today’s America — I took note of a subtle, but real shift away from the “war on terror” rhetoric that has alienated so many around the world.

Here’s the new, Democratic wording: “Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.”

I find this to be a mixed bag. On the one hand, it accurately describes Al Qaeda as a “network,” as opposed to an all-powerful, menacing army of Islamofascists. It also shifts the focus of our aggression from “terror” — a subjective term, and, as a strategy, something that can never be defeated — to a concrete group. That means that at least in theory, the “war” can end.

But while it’s closer to reality than anything ever mumbled by the outgoing Commander-in-Chief, it still accepts the premise thatlaunching a “war” against a country is an appropriate response to the actions of a small group of non-state actors.

Moreover, it perpetuates the common fallacy that there is a unified Islamist movement that is bent on perpetuating violence against the West for reasons no more tangible than “hatred.” The reality is that the overwhelming majority of violent extremists are motivated by domestic grievances within their own countries — many legitimate, regardless of how heinous and illegitimate their tactics — and to the degree that these disparate groups have begun to see themselves as united in a common cause, it’s very much a product of the Clash of Civilizations narrative advanced with equal zeal by reactionaries like Osama Bin Laden and Dick Cheney.

But I’ll begin to worry about things like that tomorrow.

Today, it’s just a nice day to be an American.

Tagged as: obama

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.