BT Calgary Blogs

  With hope and optimism and good feelings and all washing over the United States of America this week, it’s perhaps a bit querulous to mutter about the cost of installing Barack Obama as President, but I’m not alone. 

  The guy who owns the local garage said the other day “Y’know, I thought there was a recession on down there, but they’re spending $170 million dollars on this inauguration?  Where are their heads at?”

  On the evidence I’d say in the sand, especially since that $170 million dollar estimate remains an “estimate,” so when all the invoices are in and paid the final total  –  if anybody can figure it out  –  will doubtless end up at $200 or maybe $300 million dollars. 

  And for what?  A trudging ritual, is what, which had pretty well everybody in America, and probably around the globe complaining by midweek they were “Obamaed Out.”  The objective seemed to be how many balls, the Home States Ball, the Commander in Chief Ball, the Eastern Ball, the Western States Ball, and six more could be inflicted on a President and First Lady.  Furthermore, did an increasingly heavy-lidded TV audience have to endure anchors twittering endlessly on about how Michelle Obama was “shimmering in a floor length, one shoulder gown embellished with floral accents from top to bottom” and designed by some fashion type in New York nobody’s ever heard of?  And was it critical that we be advised over and over again that Joe Biden is 66 years old and the first Catholic vice-president of the Republic?

  It was mostly unthinking and uninteresting rubbish, although let’s be clear.  I lived with my family in the United States long enough to understand  Americans hold three things to be immutable.  They have their flag and their constitution and they have the Office of the President and Commander in Chief.  Those three combined equip the American people with a patriotism not found in most other countries, and certainly not in Canada.  (An important distinction here:  opinions of the President himself, or probably before too long herself, vary from near-adulation as with Obama to profound distaste as with his predecessor.  The Office, though, is sacrosanct).

  But U.S. citizens are also in a sense so ensnared by the folklore of flag, constitution, and the Office of the President, they’ll willingly put up with a colossal inauguration bill to verify the nation’s identity, and by extension their own. 

  You’d think, though, that in the midst of dangerous economic conditions which have cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and badly weakened Americans’ confidence in their financial security, there might have been some political leadership, some thought given to scaling down the inauguration rite of passage, which is what it is, by a point or two.  With far less money spent, the flag, constitution, and Office of the President would have still remained intact as those vital American tenets, or markers of democratic citizenship. 

  But the point has evidently been lost on the U.S. government which appears determined, not unlike organizers of the Super Bowl, to make every inauguration bigger and better than the last, so the $170 million dollar, or higher “bigger and better” bill to affirm those three simple principles of the U.S. Republic now comes due.  Perhaps Barack Obama, if re-elected in 2012, will awaken to the wretched excess of his first inauguration and order that the second be less expensive, and expansive, and therefore by scale unnecessary. 

  There is, though, at least one easily defined and immediate benefit to be seen from the ascension of President Obama to the Oval Office, and that is the concurrent departure from public life of George W. Bush.  He was there of course at his successor’s swearing-in, looking like a senior partner in the comedic law firm Pale and Sallow, Gray and Ashen.  (Jimmy Carter, the 39th President, is now 84 years old and resembled a kid on a pogo stick as he arrived:  no less so his wife Rosalynn, who’ll be 82 this year).  Bush by comparison appeared forlorn and bewildered, as if fully aware his presidency will be ranked in history as possibly the worst ever. 

  But that’s for historians themselves to judge in due course, as they assess the wreckage of the war in Iraq and the destruction wrought by the arrogant swine in charge of U.S. financial institutions while Bush held office.  For now, we rejoice in the disappearance of Bushisms which established fresh standards for tortured syntax and tormented misspeak.  As in “They misunderestimated me.”  As in “Rarely is the question asked;  is our children learning?”

  And the classic:  “I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office.”

  You have to figure a man who can barely speak English would be ill-equipped to lead the most powerful English speaking nation on earth.  One suspects those historians, for that reason and many others too,  will eventually deem it to have been so.