Inaguration Week

In contrast to many, I found myself detachedly observing last week's festivities in DC, like an anthropologist from a 1970s sf story studying a mass ritual of a distant society.

Perhaps I would have entered into the spirit of the event if I'd seen unequivocal evidence that President Obama's inaguration embodied the achievement of an ideal expressed forty-five years ago, that the US would be a country where a man is judged, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character; but instead, all I saw were the thick fingerprints of vote banks, oneupmanship among the self-anointed, and manufactured consent.

President Obama is a Chicago Bragadino, an adept player to people's fantasies. (See Greene, Law 32, and favian saw this a year ago). And just like his Venetian alchemist forebear, President Obama is a symptom of our Fourth Republic's decline, not its cause.

You may doubt my pessimism is warranted. After all, President Obama has tapped smart people with advanced degrees from Ivy and comparable universities for his staff, e.g. Holdren, Sunstein, and Summers. What could go wrong?