Having decided we needed an hour and half to get back to our bus, we took our leave and headed out into the late afternoon. The sun was bright, the air still cold, the mall noticeably emptier. Our walking route back to our bus—one we planned in consultation with the museum’s kindly janitor—would take us past the Washington Monument and the White House, over to 18th street, then north to K street, where we would turn east for the 18 blocks back to our bus. As we passed by the last Jumbotron on the Mall, a group had gathered to watch the President, his VP and their wives on the giant screen as they reviewed the marching bands. “Poor Michelle,” said one woman, “she looks so underdressed!”
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Our walk near the Washington Monument took us to where the bands were waiting in the cold to begin their parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. Marching bands strike me as a deeply American (take your pick) pastime/obsession/art form. The baton twirlers from Tennesee, jumping up and down in their bright costumes and leotards, looked as frozen as orange popsicles.
I don’t know why the Inauguration of new Presidents always happens in January—it could be they wanted it timed to the New Year, or perhaps to honour Washington crossing the Delaware in the bitter cold. I like to think it’s because they wanted the national character to have a certain backbone, for the incoming President to have a chance to demonstrate how they can tough out the cold and, thus, so can the nation.
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As we headed north on 18th street and left the Mall for good, I remembered the last political event I had attended. It was days after 9/11; a memorial service was going to be held in front of the Canadian Parliament for those killed in the Twin Towers. I felt called to be there, though I expected few would show up, mostly the Americans living in town. When I turned the corner and saw the front of the Parliament filled with people, I could barely hold back my tears. And when that enormous Canadian crowd sang the Star Spangled Banner, I lost it and—surprised by my own raw emotion—wept like a baby.
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Between that event and this one, so much has been lost. The press had been cowed, the constitution trammeled, the nation broken into irreconcilable camps, and a pre-emptive war waged on false pretense. I had, in those eight years, moved past anger into a kind of deep, resigned sadness. The country I grew up in had become something I no longer recognized. Walking along K street though, past countless stalls selling Obama Inauguration memorabilia, I realized I was participating in America’s extraordinary ability to re-invent itself. Even all the young men selling Obama trinkets were part of that reinvention. The Inauguration was a business opportunity and damn if they were going to miss it! America may lose its way, it may trip and fall—and, yes, when it does, the ground shakes most everywhere—but it will, as this young President said, get up, dust itself off and find where tomorrow is headed, likely well before the rest of us.
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It was good to be strolling in the falling light with my sons. The youngest said to me, “Dad, you know what was neat about this? Everybody treated us like we were old friends, everybody, and it’s all because of Obama.” Everybody had treated us like old friends. In some way, I had a sense those hours on the mall were America at its very best—generous in spirit, kind towards one another and, in light of the remarkable diversity, curious about one another’s stories. It was as if we shared an understanding of why we had come, that the Inauguration was somehow a symbolic moment beyond words, and that the occasion had honoured us just as much as we had honoured it.
“Dad,” said my eldest son, “Obama’s my man. He could whip Superman by using the power of his words.” I confess that wasn’t a contest I had particularly envisioned. Nonetheless, I realized my son seemed to have landed upon his first living hero. Not being much of a sports fans, he had heroes on his walls but they were from movies: Viggo Mortensen as Aragon in “Lord of the Rings” and Christian Bale as Batman. Maybe now those posters would come down and he’d put up the Obama poster he had bought. If I had ever been his hero, I had fast been losing ground in that department anyway; now I could settle in to just being his dad.
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We were the last to board the bus. As we left the city, the drop-down screen in the bus started showing the movie Forrest Gump, an appropriate choice —I had forgotten how the movie is a tour through recent American history. Tom Hanks, as Forrest, stands behind George Wallace, the then Governor of Alabama, as Wallace tries to keep the federal government from integrating Alabama’s schools. In my childhood, George Wallace was one of the symbols of the racist south, a politician still fighting for The Confederacy.
Watching the film, I was struck by the refrain, “stupid is as stupid does,” that Forrest repeats at various times. Leaving Washington behind, I wondered if the film hadn't stumbled upon the epitaph for the Bush years.
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Going back to George Wallace wasn’t necessary for me to recall how racism had been alive and well and official in my own lifetime. One night in the 70’s, when I was in college in Philadelphia, my black roommate came back late. He was steaming mad, and I knew something had happened. He and his friend Glen had been walking in an upscale white neighbourhood of Philadelphia when some cops stopped them, then frisked and interrogated them. Unwilling to believe they were college students, the cops threw them in the back of their squad car and dropped them off in a neighborhood where blacks were, to put it mildly, not welcome. The mayor at the time was Frank Rizzo, a law-and-order bigot who had started out as a cop and received global coverage for his hardball tactics against the local Black Panthers. Rizzo was a brute and his police officers had free rein. When it comes to race, suffice it to say America has its share of history to redeem. It is not hard to make the case that the real task of the Inauguration had been to lift the enormous weight of that history.
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I asked two of the students in the back of the bus what the day had been like for them. They said they had grown into their political awareness with George W. Bush as President. It occurred to me that if the two of them were twenty, then Bush had become President when they were twelve years old. They said they had grown up hating the United States, and now, well, they would have to re-evaluate.
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We pulled into a truck stop sometime between exhausted and catatonic. Symbols of a world I didn’t know filled the aisles—hunting and Harleys and Big Rigs (not a reference to trucks). T-shirts and trinkets for a different slice of the electorate. What does Obama mean to the folks for whom these symbols speak? Were any of them at the Inauguration?
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How does a country go from a Bush to an Obama? How could those 20-year old students make sense of it? You come of age thinking your neighbouring country is a war-mongering, rogue state that had sent Canadian citizens off to Syria to be tortured and now, suddenly, that country has a remarkable young President, reasonable, wanting to uphold the rule of law and its constitution. A nation as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It had been a tough go—eight years of Mr. Hyde. And yet there is something in the American project—its call to higher values, its belief in its unique destiny—that makes it susceptible to lofty rhetoric, and when that rhetoric moves in a humane direction, it is glorious to behold. On some level though, I couldn’t help think that Obama, as the working President, would be burdened with what Obama, the symbolic President, means. When the working President doesn’t live up to the symbol, and surely he won’t, what will happen?
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For the last hour of the ride, late in the night, I read more of Leadership Without Easy Answers, the section where Heifetz looks at the nature of Presidential leadership by examining Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to pass the Voting Rights Act. He quotes from LBJ’s speech to the nation on March 16, 1965:
Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself….a challenge, not to our security, but to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue, and should we defeat every enemy, double our wealth, conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and a nation.
The Voting Rights Act passed in August of that year, but perhaps the final answer to the challenge he gave to America “as a people and a nation” was answered more than fourty years later, on January 20, 2009.
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We got off the bus in Ottawa at 5:30 in the morning. The city was frozen in snow, much colder than D.C., and nobody was around. We called a cab. The milk of human kindness was fast asleep across the capital. The government had been pro-rogued. The politicians were back in their ridings. Nobody—neither the pundits nor the people--knew what would happen next. Down in the States though, “Next” had already begun.
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