Well, he has always tended to treat us like grownups, and damn if he didn't do it again today. He could have given us some boilerplate Shining City on a Hill of a Thousand Points of Light Where Change Has Finally Come to America, but instead he used his gift of inspiring and uplifting language to pour a the rhetorical equivalent of a bucket of ice water on us. Barely five minutes into the speech, after a summing up our current state of crisis and anxiety, Obama sums up:
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.
Of course, this is an obvious denunciation of Bush-era politics, but it's also a pretty stinging rebuke to anyone who ever got caught up in the Sandbox Politics of the past eight years. Whether we like it or not, there were 60 million people who voted for Bush the last time around, and while plenty of those people would just as soon like to forget it, I suspect that Obama isn't going to let them---or the rest of us---off the hook so easily. The same goes for all the Tommy Friedmans and Richard Cohens out there who got on the Iraq bandwagon just because we had to kick some Arab ass; for all of us who ever treated the Bush people as good-faith businessmen, from September 11, 2001 to the September '08 bailout (Obama included); for all the greedy little speculators big and small who got conned by the likes of Bernie Madoff promising huge riches for no risk; for everyone who ever fell for the foolish and unsustainable notion of a mortgage-based Ownership Society. Obama knows there's plenty of blame to go around for the last eight years, and that's why he didn't call out the outgoing administration on anything too specific. In a lot of ways, they gave millions of people on both sides of the aisle something they desperately wanted, be it global war on Islam or zero-interest home loans. It certainly says volumes about Obama's writing and rhetorical skills that he could turn such a sobering speech into a sweeping call for uplift and renewal, and that the crowds and pundits in attendance seemed receptive to his appeal, but apparently he managed to pull it off.
Finally, let's hope today's opening invocation has weaned Obama off the idea, once and for all, of any further fellowship with the likes of Rick Warren. The scion of Saddleback could have played it straight---as did Obama, with his nods of equal respect toward Muslims, Jews, Hindus and non-believers---by invoking our universal human creator in his address, but doggone it, he just couldn't resist invoking the name of Rick Warren's creator instead. And that's the problem with people like Warren, and with their creed---it is at once selfish and narcissistic, self-promoting, and more than a little corrupt. Thankfully we got a real pastor to close out the inauguration ceremony with reflections and invocations of genuine faith.
And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on he side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.
---Vitelius
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