A Day of Fire

Yesterday, I made my way downtown to watch the spectacle of the President's inaugural parade. Or rather, as security fences kept crowds hundreds of feet away from the parade route, to watch those watching the spectacle of the inaugural parade. It was an unpleasant experience.

The crowd was overrun with two of my least favorite groups of people. On the one hand, there were the red-cheeked, cashmere scarfed, arrogant sheep, the victorious republicans. Looking through the barricade at the rest of us, shaking their heads at our accoutrements, denim, facial hair, and books. Republicans are angry even in victory, and they shouted and taunted like spoiled schoolboys. Which is what many of them no doubt were at some point.

On the other side was the fringe left, that great recruiter of red state moderates for the republicans. Chanting gross hyperbole, wishing desperately that times were truly revolutionary, instead of taking time to think deeply about the issues they espouse.

Things were unnerving if not exactly riotous. Scattered clusters of demonstrators were occasionally dispersed with pepper spray, which then drifted over the crowd, so that everyone suffered, including families waiting with children at checkpoints, trying to get in to see the parade. It was my first brush with the stuff; it makes you teary with a desire to sneeze, and it burns the back of your throat. People shouted back and forth at each other. Bush people in the bleachers threw snowballs at the crowd. The crowd threw snowballs back. Standing at the metal barricade, a few feet from a row of heavily padded cops, a shaggy-looking youth approached me. "It's easy to overturn these things, you know. You just get down under them, and they tip right over." "I think you've got the wrong man for the job," I said. What part of the mounted police, snipers, and billy-clubbed foot soldiers did this kid want?

I don't like Bush, I don't like his supporters, and I don't know how anyone could listen to his speech and draw inspiration, when all I saw were the realities over which his high language sought to gloss. In a speech dedicated to emphasizing the man's love of freedom, one had to ask, why, Bush, have you treated so carelessly the pursuit of that you claim to love? Why didn't we throw everything we had at Iraq? Why hamstring the troops by reducing their numbers and supplies, thus increasing the likelihood of failure? If freedom is why you want to go to war, why not make that case, instead of lying to the world about the presence of WMD's? If you love freedom, why not make examples of proto-fascist Vladimir Putin, or work to alleviate the crushing tyranny of poverty and disease in Africa? I find him insincere.

I also don't like the demonstrators, but I found their protests poignant in light of Bush's speech earlier in the day. In his address, Bush spoke, "Yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators. They are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed." Hours later, riot police extinguished burning American flags and dispersed the burners with pepper spray, in a city made to contribute millions of dollars to the President's inauguration, but whose citizens have no voting representative in either house of Congress. No free dissent; no participation. It promises to be a long four years.