Review

21 Jan 2009

I am home. I got here just before 4, and had to run out immediately for an eye exam. Now I am back, unpacked, settled, etc. We had a rather smooth drive home, except for when we stopped at a rest area in CT. We managed to lose the car key inside of the dashboard, and the driver and I spent about half an hour disassembling the dashboard before I was able to fish the key out.

DC was a fabulous experience. Overall, the city was in the strange state of limbo; everything had sort of stopped, and yet there was a feeling of great motion within the city. This may have been due to the literally millions of people in the streets.

We had tickets to the Silver area for the inauguration ceremony, which was closer to the Capitol steps, but when we got there, the ticketholders’ line was about five or six thousand people long, and growing longer, so we decided not to risk missing the ceremony standing on line and to go in the general admission, which didn’t have any security, and thus no line, just a whole lot of people. A whole lot. I have never in my entire life seen crowds this size before. We ended up on the National Mall at around 9th street. We watched the inauguration on gigantic screens, which realistically is probably what we would have been doing if we were in the Silver area.

One thing that pissed me off was that the sound and video were out of sync. The sound was live, but the video lagged about one second. I do not understand why they didn’t fix this; it seems like it would have been fairly simple to jump forward in the feed by a second; certainly easier than jumping the sound forward if it had been lagging. Oh well. We could hear the proceedings, and that’s what counted.

Back at the apartment on Penn. Ave. (when we finally got there), it was a mob scene. Everyone was jubilant, and there was an enormous quantity of most delectable food. Once the parade started, we trooped out to balconies and roofs to watch. At first, it was rather boring; imagine about 50 consecutive motorcycles driving at five miles an hour. But then Obama’s motorcade came along, and we saw him! Him and Michelle got out of the car, and they walked and waved! I got some pictures, but the iPhone camera is not very good, so it’s hard to see who’s where. Some of them give a pretty good image of the parade overall, though.

We came back inside and watched coverage of the parade for a while. It lasted for many hours, and if we opened the door, we could hear it outside; marching bands galore.

We also saw some footage of the Obama’s special presidential limo. It was a rather unremarkable black hulk, until I saw them open the door. The door must have been a foot thick. This thing is apparently bullet-proof and bomb-proof, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was mortar- and apocalypse-proof. I have never seen such a beefy car. It must get awful milage.

In terms of current happenings related to the inauguration, the Obama administration appears to have gotten off to a flying start, ordering Guantanamo detainee trials frozen as part of a broader effort to shut the place entirely, and making some excellent statements about transparency, as well as sining executive orders to this effect. And John McCain, ever the honorable man, has urged fellow Republicans to work with the new administration and Congressional Democrats to move forward. This is truly a new era for cooperative and constructive politics.