Intermezzo And Inauguration

I write this (in my head) while seated in a dentist’s chair.

The dentist in question, plus an assistant, a hygienist, and the Lady Out Front Who Does The Billing are all . . . ALL … trying to insert various instruments of mass destruction into my mouth. I think that was an oil derrick that just went in a moment ago. Hard to tell, though. Could have been an aircraft carrier.

Oh, and there’s a nasty grinding sound as the dentist does something singularly horrible to me involving two fillings and a crown.

Great stuff.

Particularly since I hadn’t meant to write it at all.


*

It’s like this: you’ll recall that I’m re-starting explosive-cargo. You’ll recall as well that I was doing a quick recap on my life and the lives of my family so everybody could catch up with events. Last week, I did my son, David. And he’s almost forgiven me for it. Not quite. But almost. And I suspect after a couple of decades in therapy, he’ll look back and laugh. It’ll be a pained, hysterical laugh, but a laugh just the same.

This week I’d originally planned to move to Martha, my beloved wife … “the idol of me life” . . . who has (for reasons beyond the comprehension of mere mortals) actually stayed married to me for … uh, er . . . 25 years now. (YIKES.)

But, then, I remembered that this is Inauguration week. And, as everybody knows, it’s a ye ole historic occasion. As I write this, Barack Obama is becoming the 44th President of the United States of America.

They say upwards to two million people are watching him take the oath. Millions of Americans more sit fascinated in front of their TV screens. Billions of others, in the every nation on the globe, follow the proceedings with breathless anticipation.

And me . . . ?

I’ve got an oil derrick in my face.

*

In some ways I don’t really mind. This was the only time I could get the appointment. And, besides, when I did make it, some months ago, I didn’t connect “January 20 the Dentist Date” with “January 20 the Most Important Historical Event In Recent American History.”

Besides, you can always catch it all on the news tonight and . . .

And . . .

And who the Halibut do I think I’m fooling?

I HATE IT.

*

The dentist has this little wheel thing on what looks like a scaled down rotary saw. He’s busy whacking away at this molar in the back that needs to be filed down to a nubbin.

And there’s this lovely smell. Sort of like … well, when you were a kid, did you ever roast a grasshopper with a magnifying glass? Sort of like that. But with the faint and delicate tang of raw rubber in a hot box.

This is the way that human teeth . . . and other things . . . smell when they burn.

If, per chance, I should kick the big one, and the gleeful heirs decide on cremation, would you remind me to hold my nose? Thanx loads.


*

I’m missing the Inauguration . . . well, at least on TV. I wouldn’t actually have gone to Washington, of course. But I am missing the live broadcast. Which saddens me.

Actually, it’s been interesting to watch the coverage of the new Presidency for the last few weeks. I’ve tuned in now and then, on those rare occasions when it hasn’t made more sense to get your news from the ‘net.

Mostly it’s been pundits telling us what to expect from the incoming Administration and/or the Inauguration. CNNers gaze at us mournfully and repeat the endless series of trials that await the new President (the economy, the war, global warming…ad infinitum), usually with the distinct overtone that Nothing Can Be Done. Fox bombastoids sneeringly pronounce Obama a new Clinton…or, at the very least, Out Of Touch With American Values. Whatever the h*ll that means.

Yet, if you looked at them closely, you detected hints of nervousness, a fearful glancing to the right and the left, an uncertainty…

Perhaps they realize, however dimly, that the upcoming Inauguration will be a Real Event, which will genuinely fascinate the American People, and which will genuinely effect us for generations to come.

It is not, in other words, one of their Manufactured Incidents, one of their little circuses designed not to reveal the news but to conceal it.

Instead, it is authentic. It is beyond their control.

And they hate it.


*

A tooth explodes. Bits and pieces of enameled shrapnel bound about my tongue. “Excellent,” says the dentist.

For this . . . for this . . . I am missing the Inauguration.

Later, I will see parts of the Inauguration on the replays. I will watch while the President Elect becomes the President in Fact. I will watch while he puts his hand on a Bible and swears to defend the Constitution. Every president does, of course, but some mean it more than others.

The thing that strikes me most is actually not the President himself but his wife, who stands next to him while the oath is administered. Her face is animated, she smiles or looks out at the crowd, holds her husband.

And this is different. How often we have seen Presidential spouses wearing what I’ve come to call “The Nancy Reagan Stare,” that look of manufactured adoration, unblinking and unreal, while the icy politician within pretends to be the dutiful helpmate.

This woman, as she stands in the cold beside the 44th president, is alive.

That intrigues me.

*

After that, I will watch the live broadcast of limos and buses making their way through the streets. I will watch them arrive at a massive reviewing stand. Dignitaries of various sorts make their way into its copious interior. In a moment, parades will begin.

The broadcaster narrating the affair will refer to these men and women as VIPs—“Vee Eye Pees”—Very Important Persons. Dems and Reps and everything in between. I have hated the term since I heard it as a child. You see, if someone is a VIP, surely that implies that someone else is not important at all.

The camera will come in for a close up on the VIPs emerging from the limos. They are little different from what you’d expect. Chiefly, there are of two sorts. First, are the Men, white haired and white skinned, the sort you find on stamps and boards of directors. They emerge blinking into the light. They wave to the crowd, not seeing the people within it.

Second, are the Women, striding purposely forward. They wear their business suits and stern expressions. They make a cult of their own toughness and their own success. More than anyone, they worship at the shrine of Our Lady of the Perpetual Career.

I wonder, do either of them glance out at the men and women who line the streets? The two million strong who watch them? Do they ever suspect . . . even dream! . . . that those uncounted multitudes might even now be judging them?

And that they might be found wanting?

*

I will watch as well while the Bushes leave the White House and board the helicopter that will take them away. There is an uncomfortable similarity to the Fall of Saigon, the Huey helicopters whisking ministers and orphans to overburdened aircraft carriers and exile.

*

Similarly, I will watch former Vice President Dick Cheney as he is wheeled into the reviewing stand. He threw his back out “moving boxes,” and so attends the event in a wheel chair.

He will sit and scowl, looking rather like Davros, creator of the Daleks in Doctor Who.

I think, on some level, he is the most interesting vice president the country has ever possessed. If I were still a historian (had not, that is, been cast from academic heaven by the holy angels of my dissertation committee), I would want to study him.

Alone among vice presidents, he was not really a politician. There was no kissing babies for him. He wouldn’t have glorified Joe The Plumber. He was a pure technocrat, interested solely in the exercise of power, and very much his President’s unelected prime minister.

At one time I thought he might be the future of the American executive—the gray man behind the scenes, the appointed and non-democratic Head Of Government—as opposed to the President, selected by ballot and hanging chads to be the (irrelevant) Head of State, allowed out now and then to proclaim that this Mission is Accomplished, that Course To Be Stayed.

That could still be the future. It will depend greatly on this new President, on the power of the Bush-era elites to smear him, and on the willingness of Americans in general to let it happen.


*


And the smearing has begun already, hasn’t it? From the Right … and the Left.

On some level, the Right is the better. It, at least, is more honest about what it’s doing. The more or less open appeals to racism (“Obama the Magic Negro”), the ubiquitous references to his middle name (“Hussein”), the whisper campaign begun during the election and continued to this day that he is a crypto-Moslem (or at least un-America) . . . all these are happening as the Tom Delay branch of the GOP seeks its return to absolute power.

(One wonders, in the end, will that form of the GOP, perhaps under a new name and as a new party, find itself meeting in sheets under a flaming cross?)

But, the Left is not to be forgiven. Already . . . already . . . one hears the fashionable disillusionment in their voices, sees the weary (and oh so trendy) cynicism in their eyes. Obama will be not liberal enough . . . not radical enough . . . not Green enough . . . not, well, fill in the blank.

This is not to say that he will actually be illiberal, or non-Green, or fill-in-the-blank. But complaint is their forte, and all that remains to them now that they have so thoroughly abandoned any attempt at actually impacting the world for the better.

*

But isn’t just politics. It is the American system.

As I sit watching the crowds and the VIPs in their glass booth, I will recall the teachers in local schools who refused to let their students view the Inauguration during class time because “education doesn’t pause for history.” As though history were not education. As though their endless and repetitive worksheets were.

But, the teachers are not alone. As I watch the Vips behind their glass staring down at the parade below them . . . and as I consider the men and women (oh so sophisticated) that I met in the academy and the world . . . I can almost hear their thoughts. How, they think, banal.

The parade begins and soon winds by them. It is an endless succession of high school marching bands, police on horses, police and firemen with bagpipes, Masons and Shriners, church groups and youth clubs . . .

How banal. How bourgeois—you can hear them thinking. What, after all, is more pathetic than a high school marching band? An assembly of asthmatic nerds tinkling on triangles? What is more prole than a policeman or a fireman with a bagpipe? The man who maintains antique conceptions of honor, and plays Amazing Grace at the funerals of friends? What is more absurd than a Shriner? A little man in a fake fez and a miniature car?

Except . . .

Except . . .

The high school band did not lead us into Iraq. The firemen and policeman clawed survivors out of the rubble after 9-11. The Shriners founded and funded the hospitals that provide free care to children when our noble elite graciously declined to give a damn.

*

The exploding tooth is finished now. The assistant is now occupied sweeping up the remains. She sticks a suction tube in my mouth and I hear the little clattering of tooth bits going down the pipe.

“There, looks great,” says the dentist.

Really?

“You see,” he continues, “sometimes you have to take everything down to the beginnings to build back up again.”

Well…

Couldn’t ask for a better metaphor, could we?

*

A few minutes later they have me bite down on some ghastly substance that falls somewhere between silly putty and fresh mud. The remains of my tooth will leave an impression and they’ll make the crown from it later.

The dentist goes off to commit some other act of toothy carnage. The hygienist gives me a moist towelette so that I can clean up later. She warns me that my lips may be dry for the rest of the day.

I rise unsteadily from the chair and wobble into the lobby. My coat waits for me on a peg in the wall. Shortly, I exit into the bitter Boston winter, crunch my way over the ice in the parking lot, and go home to watch what remains of the Inauguration.

And, as I go, I think . . . if I were the historian my dissertation committee emphatically assured me I was not, I would compare the day to another Inauguration, this one 180 years ago. I mean, of course, that of Jackson in 1829.

It may have been the most famous Inauguration in American history. Jackson, you see, was many things . . . including a racist and something of a bastard . . . but he was also a genuine populist. He invited his homespun followers into the White House. To the horror of All Right Thinking People, they came.

And, at that moment, the American landed elites who had ruled for so terribly long, began to suspect that just maybe their day was past.

*

Oh, yes, I can hear Those Who Know Best already. The academics, the pundits, the intellectuals…They are saying, no, Your Analogy Is Flawed. It Lacks Proper Grounding In Historical Methodology. You Are Under-theorized. Your interpretation is clichéd, and you, yourself, are Inane.

Probably true.

Yet . . .

And yet . .

*

Later, I will sit at home, nursing my face and watching television.

Watching the endless faces, of all colors and shapes, lining the streets.

And I will wonder.

Our elite? Does it have the wisdom, the insight, and the understanding to look at those millions in DC and be, in however small a way …

Afraid.

*


Until next time,

Onward and upward.












Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker