Why DIDN'T Cheney Sing? Inauguration Day 2001

This is my Inauguration Day column from eight years ago. Ah the benefit of hindsight!"I hope you had fun watching the Inauguration yesterday. I know I did. I always watch Inaugurations, partly because I love seeing people in hats: Nancy Reagan in her signature reda; Jacquie way back, in her poofy pillbox. Hilary in ’93, in that deep-blue number that matched the coat. I was sorry Laura chose to go hatless, but I understand. We’d be lying if we didn’t admit that Hillary looked a lot like Smurfette in that deep-blue hat-and-coat ensemble, and a little like QE 2 as well, not meaning the luxury liner, of course, but the Queen herself, whose curse it is to live in a country where the female regent is just EXPECTED to wear a matching hat for every coat, and a matching purse to boot."Anyway, I loveall  Inaugurations, mostly for the surprises they furnish us. I think of that blizzard that blew in January 19 of 1960, wrought havoc and blew back out again, blinding poor Robert Frost, who couldn’t see to read his poem, and ended up reciting a diffferent one, from memory. I think of the sight, eight years ago, of Emotional Bill, leaking tears like some Miss Congeniality all during the prayer service he attended the morning he took office."Of course there were small surprises this time too, the way Laura looked in her hatlessness being just one example. There was also:" The way Hillary looked, in what seemed to be a black Johnny Cash-style leather coat, with hair slicked back like Johnny Cash’s too. (Wait! Is Hillary actually turning into Johnny Cash? Is she becoming… TRANSGENDERED, as a final poke in the eye to Cheating Bill?"The way the new president gamely if quietly sang the words to the National Anthem, when that giant soldier-boy belted it out in his plummy voice."The way his Vice President Dick Cheney DIDN’T sing along but looked somberly straight ahead."All this time after catching such glimpses, I still look back at them, parsing them for the insights they might provide into the nature of the regime, and its new boss especially."Because we wonder: will this man be open, affable and good-natured, or will he tend more toward caution and calculation? Will he hold grudges and fence himself about with them, a man in a stockade, or can he let go of grievance, seeing people as he sees himself, filled to the brim with every sort of impulse, from high to low?"Someone said his success will depend on whether or not he enjoys wielding all the power inherent in the office. After all, power on that scale and the nation looking to YOU day and night have been known to turn men from spring-in-their-step bright-eyed warriors to haggard and scooped-out shells (see Jimmy Carter, Franklin Roosevelt, Dave Letterman.)"I HOPE Bush enjoys it. God knows he’s better at communicating joy than poor Al Gore, his opponent in this recent sorry election, and I admit here hat I voted for Gore."I wish the guy the best, as he and his wife Laura take up residence in that satin-pillowed jail, as former Bush and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan once described the White House, and she ought to know since she worked there for three years."I wish him luck, and I liked my Inauguration Day surprises, but still, I have to wonder: Why DIDN’T Cheney sing along?

And so they leave the stage my friends, and so they leave the stage...

 and at long last it really IS Morning in America!

 

 

Putin, the Little Dickens and More

(the original fun guy this guy) I've been gone WAY too long here, driving a zillion miles the day after the election, talking my face off at a library workshop and then on WAMC Northeast Public Radio…and of course voting like everyone else and speaking of that here’s an Election Day lesson for ya: I promised to hold a sign for our new state rep Jason Lewis but being lame and pathetic said I could only do it for an hour - whereas one of my three fellow Jason Lewis signsters had been at the polls since 6am and said he could stay til suppertime if they needed him. He’d worked on Ted Kennedy’s Presidential run in 1980 and also for the late Gerry Studds, longtime congressman from the Cape. He knew from elections.

So did the second sign holder, at six foot six the tallest member of our cohort, a young guy in a watch cap and shades who I realized only a full minute into things was little Tim Waterbury from my Sixth Grade Sunday School class who back at age 11 liked to be courted to join the discussion but then came into it like gangbusters.

The third sign-holder was a beautiful blonde woman from Russia who told us her uncle had pioneered work on a below-the-radar, tunnel-under-the-earth missile system so scary and top secret that he could never leave Russia as she had done back in ’96.  She gave her name but I know I didn’t catch it - Americans are idiots when it comes to understanding people from other countries even if they are speaking our very language - but I got to work asking her all sorts of questions anyway.

And she gave me lots of answers: About her children, and the free-for-all version of capitalism at play in the former Soviet Union now; about Strongman Putin in whom George Bush said he found such a soul mate; even about fun guy Putin's Driver's Ed pupil current Russian President Medvedev who yesterday’s news said could have that old steering wheel wrested away from him any day now by the little giant in the seat beside him.

It was coming on toward noon and when I said I had to go she also glanced won at her watch and said “probably I should go as well. I have a class at MIT at 1:30.”

"Oh, are you taking a course there?” I asked, thinking Adult ESL maybe, moron that I am.

"I’m teaching it!” she laughed. "My husband and I are geneticists there. And THANK GOD for intellectual property laws in US, because between the two of us we now hold six patents. If we are back in Russia? We hold nothing!” And with a laugh and a merry wave of her hand she was gone.

The Tweedles (Dum and Dee)