Inauguration Day - Part 4

1/20/09 Inauguration Day – Part 4

So it’s approaching 11:30 a.m. and I’ve been up for 8 HOURS ALREADY AND OUTSIDE FOR SEVEN and maybe it’s in the low 20s and amazingly I’m starting to sweat under the many many layers I’m wearing. And people are still smiling and people are still happy and the look and the talk that is shared is invariably a look or a mention of CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW FUCKING GREAT THIS IS AND HOW GREAT IT IS THAT WE ARE HERE TO SEE IT AND SHARE IN IT?! And the hours don’t matter and the cold doesn’t matter and nothing matters now except that Joe Biden is being sworn in as the Vice President and it makes sense cause if something were to happen to the PEOTUS in the few minutes before his swearing in we’d still have a President and the business of government could go on functioning as efficiently as it always has. Kind of dark and kind of scary but I imagine that’s why they do it v.p. first. And forget that bit about the business of government functioning efficiently. Yeah, that’s why we have no reasonable energy policy or no realistic health policy and every other policy we don’t have thanks to 28 years of Reagan-engineered deregulation and dismantling of government.
Anyway, joe’s sworn in, it all goes smoothly and associate justice john paul stevens does the job well, a precursor to the piss-poor job coming up. Stevens was appointed by Gerald ford and he’s been an okay justice, usually putting the law first and thus helping people. As opposed to the current chief justice, corporate punk/shill john Roberts, whose moment of infamy will come soon.
And then rick warren, the homophobic, evolution-denying pastor of a monolithic megachurch in southern California is up to deliver the invocation. It’s a prayer and it pisses me off. warren is the opposite of jesus in so many ways – he’s obese, he hates the poor and downtrodden, and he’s a right-wing ideologue. Jesus, had he been walking the Mall today would be the painfully thin (think Ramones thin), lover of the poor and downtrodden and a far-left, ultra liberal, flaming progressive. Just read what he had to say and you know he’d have a show on MSNBC on each night at 10, after the two hour block of keith and Rachel, olbermann and maddow, followed by Christ. Hardball with chris matthews, countdown with keith olbermann, the Rachel maddow show, and following all that, He says, she says, Jesus Says. I am so there. Sorry, david shuster, but this is the JC we’re talking about.
Anyway, rick warren talks interminably with a complete lack of style and in a crowd of 1.8 million, many of whom are of color, that is unforgivable. Nobody is listening and we are getting colder for the first time and then he does two things that make me want to separate church and state right then and right there for all those yahoos who think the founding fathers were Christians (they were deists!) and that america is a Christian nation (it isn’t. read the fucking constitution!).
He gives us 5 names of jesus!!! He gives us emmanuel, he gives us yehoshuah, he gives us Hay-sus, and I don’t even know what the other two are and I’m thinking about that line that the devil has many names and here’s fat, boring rick warren giving us 5 names of his god or son of or whatever (who exactly do these fellas pray to and where exactly does jesus fit into that pantheon they’ve created to appeal to those pagans two thousand years ago???) and if jesus has many names maybe he’s, you know, like the other guy… hmmmmmmmmm? Bet they won’t be talking about that one at liberty or bob jones or any of those other phony baloney colleges that actually give degrees in this stuff.
Anyway, the many names of jesus isn’t even the best part of his bit. It’s when he spits out in some weird way the names of the obama daughters that he hits the hights. SA-SHA!!!
And MA-LI-A!!! he spits out SA-SHA! Like he’s the drunken m.c. at some strip club near LAX and SA-SHA is the latest in a long line of Ukrainian teenage virgins who came to this country to become doctors but needed to make some coin so here they are stripping, prior to hooking, prior to being dissolved in the acid bath for wanting to return home cause stripping and hooking is not pre-med at UCLA. I’m convinced rick warren was an M.C. at a strip club and I want to hear the tape of him introducing DES-TINNY!!! CHAS-TITTY!!! SA-SHA!!!!!
And then it’s Obama’s turn to put his hand on the bible and he’s got lincoln’s bible and please, let’s not get into any symbolism there, and john Roberts, that dickwad of a chief justice, blows the whole ceremony by blowing the words to the swearing in. he tried to memorize the what, 5 or 6 sentences and couldn’t do it and right-wing nutjobs all over immediately thought the swearing it was invalid and I said loudly, “in the new york city public schools, in like the 3rd grade, we all had to memorize the entire preamble to the constitution. What were we, like 9, 10 maybe? And we all did it. And here’s the chief justice, the corporate apologist, a man who probably blew it cause he was never this close to a black man (okay, half black) in his entire life that he got nervous and no, Clarence Thomas, the supreme court justice WHO HAS NOT ASKED ONE QUESTION YET IN ALL HIS YEARS ON THE COURT, does not count cause I’m sure he speaks to no one and no one speaks to him. Yeah, so Roberts blows it and Roberts blows and obama’s the president and people are smiling and clapping and tears are streaming down everybody’s cheeks and we’re happy and history has been made and it is truly a wonderful moment and a wonderful sight and a great thing to have been there.
Soon, the people I shared this moment with………..