A Bar Stool View of This Moment in American History

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.)