Setting things straight

Barack Obama was inaugurated as President a couple days ago, and its been an experience which I find hard to place my head around. On the one hand I share the general public sentiment that he's a great guy and that he's exactly what we've been needing in this country, but on the other hand I'm looking at the scope of this event and I don't feel as though I've begun to grasp it at all.

Honestly, all I could think about as I watched the inauguration was how inadequate I felt in the wake of such an historic moment. Its weird, and it may seem too melodramatic, but it was a feeling like that which washed over me as I watched the whole thing go down. I would be sitting there, watching history be made, and I'd think to myself "Is this the position I want to remember myself in as this happened? Is this angle from my TV where I want to remember being as I watched this?" It was strange, and probably about as heady and introspective as I could expect something coming from myself to be. For whatever reason, when presented with a moment of importance I just couldn't seem to find myself gaining the adequacy to stand up to it, as though I wasn't prepared to understand what I was witnessing.

How do you understand something like this? Its hard for me to invest in a singular event like this for an abundance of reasons, but probably highest amongst them would be that I still haven't seen this guy do much politically and for the most part when I'm watching him speak I'm just waiting to see him assassinated. Sorry to be a downer, but the thought rarely leaves my mind when I see him in a public setting, and I think half of me is just waiting for him to get killed so I can finally begin to wrap my head around what he meant to me and the collective American consciousness. 9/11 wasn't like this. There wasn't this same anticipation, this same feeling that something else was going to happen that would either make or break what was happening on the screen. 9/11 was finite; an event that happened entirely unexpectedly and which for the most part was resolved in the act of mourning. Sure, anger remained after we'd come to grips with what had happened, but the thrill was mostly gone, we'd been sorrowed and we knew what to expect from the future. Obama's presidency isn't like that. The experience has cast a strange limbo over the land, the kind of thing where I look at almost any aspect of American life and its surrounded in mist and uncertainty, as though the future is finally as chaotic and undecided as I've always wanted it to be.

There were things I was able to relish in. Though his inaugural address didn't have the memorable jab of FDR, JFK or Reagan, there were definitely meaty parts attached to the bones of it. As some of you may know, I'm very fond of the Pragmatic school of thought, and though he's never spoken of himself as such, Obama is fully and embracingly a pragmatist. His line about forgetting the differences between big and little government and instead focusing on a government that works for the people was the one that sent me over the top, because finally I saw a person in charge of this country whom I feel I agree with philosophically. I've never been able to find any evidence supporting this, but I feel that Obama must have at least read the works of Rorty, Dewey and other pragmatists in the past. I mean, both he and Rorty taught at the University of Chicago around the same time, so if their paths never crossed or if Rorty's ripple was never felt in Obama's neck of the woods I'd be very surprised. I really wish there were some evidence to substantiate this.

I recently started reading the 2nd book of John Dos Passos' "U.S.A" trilogy, which I feel ties into what this is all about. In the books, Dos Passos weaves a tale of men and women in a fledgling 20th century who embrace freedom and revel in the promise of a future in America, but who are ultimately crushed under the weight of the mundane and that which is expected of them in society. Characters will come along who have a brilliance and blindingly optimistic view about the undrawn landscape before them, and slowly we'll watch as they're crippled by a society that demands they toil beneath the headlines and the promise of our nation. In the novels, there is always some reservation about the characters; some unrealized dream or unspoken tragedy which has befallen them to prevent their ultimate rise to greatness. Watching the inauguration, this is the thought that I can most closely connect with my own feelings. I wasn't where I wanted to be, I wasn't who I wanted to be and I wasn't free enough to be doing what I wanted to do. I don't know how to reference this outside of calling it the curse of society. No matter the promise we feel we have within us or the clearcut ambition we have in our actions, most people in this and any other country will never fully realize their dreams. America is proposed as a country where amazing things can happen, and for someone like Barack Obama that's true, but for the most of us we're left toiling in labor, never admired for the finer points we find within ourselves. It just seemed like a strange book to pick up and recognize in the wake of this inauguration, and I think the sentiment is something a lot of people can empathize with. How does someone get out under the toil of whats expected of them and experience a true freedom? I understand the idea's ridiculous because it wouldn't allow society to function, but I think this is an angle that Dos Passos was getting at. At the time of his writing it he was largely Socialist, and I think the largest question Dos Passos was asking was exactly how free is the land of the free? How free are we to pursue our hopes and dreams and actually accomplish them? To what extent are we to compromise ourselves?

These are books about characters who are living in historic times but are not themselves historic. In a society where phoney sentiment and meaning are crammed down our throats at an alarming pace, I think this is relevant. What does it feel like to be completely irrelevant when in the presence of a great event? Are we supposed to fashion ourselves as something better for the moment, as though we're some unwelcome beast on the world front? How do we clean ourselves up for this? How do we find significance for our actions during and after this? Most notably, as advertisers have been telling us our entire lives that we do, do we actually matter and press influence in anything outside of a capitalist and strategic sense? Where does actual influence lie? Who holds it and how closely? In large part, I recognize that we as a people aren't where we'd like to be. In Dos Passos' novels, his characters experience a similar sentiment, finding themselves constantly compared to the headlines which are shaping the American collective but never finding any trace of themselves in those same headlines. I know our interest isn't necessarily in finding ourselves as the darlings of society, but it would be nice to feel our voices heard on a larger scale than getting a public official elected. Admittedly, something like this has never happened before, but as a typical liberal I'm non-appreciative of this fact, demanding more. My thirst for governmental support can never be substantiated.

Please don't think I'm trying to come down on America, because I'm not. I think the evil eschewed here is a necessary one, because as I said, society wouldn't function under absolute freedom. I guess I just wanted to draw attention to those of us who watched these events and weren't actually free, though we had the closest thing to it. I apologize if this isn't all that coherent in meter and composition, I'm fairly drunk.