As of 4:40 AM on January 18th, 2009, CNN is already calling the inauguration “Barack Stock.” They can’t fucking report on anything without giving it it’s own title and tiny little logo graphic for the corner of the screen. They also keep flashing random tidbits of news along the bottom of the screen to remind you that the world is still dying. I’ll keep you updated.
I have stayed up all night to watch it this speech live with my own eyes. I want to feel that moment when the whole intelligent thinking nation sighs and fools itself into believing that they have kicked off four years of peace and prosperity. The moment I hope will be equivalent to feeling the force realign. I had to see it live, I had to ride the rocket. I wanted to taste it and you simply cannot taste something on YouTube. So far it tastes like cheap cold brandy and cigarettes. But it’s not even five yet, things could change. I am running out of brandy already.
I am here to set the record straight, to prepare perhaps the only accurate recollection of the day that we inaugurated Barack. Right now, there are only two types of journalists covering the event. There are those with so many stars in their eyes they can no longer see past the glitz and glamour of the peaceful transfer of power and there are the racist right wingers who are predicting that this is the first stop on the road to the end of the world. Regardless of what other camps you might uncover, I am the only person sitting on the wall of relative objectivity. I hope that when children learn about today in their history books that they will go home and tell their parents, which is you. Their parents, still you, will then hopefully hand over a copy of this manuscript. I’m in it, it’s happening all around me right now like some kind of strange drug induced dream.
Did I travel to Washington DC to camp out on the National Mall? No. I have decided to ride this rollercoaster from the safety and warmth of my couch in Los Angeles. CNN is my chosen conveyer of supposed truth, secretly battling for ratings instead of justice. Maybe we writers need our own sort of Hippocratic oath, swearing to uphold the true values of informative journalism. Did my location protect me from losing my objectivity? I sure fucking hope so. These people on that National Mall have no idea what is actually happening because they are so overcome by euphoria. It has spread through the crowd like a virus. You can see it on their faces.
The unfortunate truth is that George W. Bush has fucked the once revered assholes of America and the world so savagely over the last eight years that doom is almost inevitable. Barack Obama has invariably been sold a lemon. Even old Charlie Lindbergh couldn’t have gotten far in a jalopy like the current United States of America.
I have seen more and more fuckers running around Los Angeles with unbridled optimism in their eyes in the past few weeks than ever before. Somewhere in the vacant passageways of their thin skulls, they are envisioning a return to the prosperity of the Clinton years at exactly noon Eastern Standard time when Barack Obama officially becomes our President and the terrible Bush years have fallen behind us and into the history books. This is a fuck around.
We may be weeks or even hours away from falling into a new and most likely far worse economic depression than ever before. According to an article I read last night, only three percent of America’s money is actually printed and in circulation. The other 97% is based on speculation. You’ve seen the commercials I’m sure, “It’s my money and I want it now.” Tough shit dickie, because if even one street on Beverly Hills all yelled those words in harmony, all of the printed money in the country would be in armored trucks on its way to their houses to be neatly stacked and filed by denomination in ornamental skulls. Faster than you can say Jack Robinson. You better believe the rest of us will be out in the cold.
Don’t get me wrong, I campaigned, rallied, and voted for Obama. I wanted him to win as badly as anyone. An intelligent, well-spoken, educated, bi-racial, son of a single mother, raised by grandparents, took himself through the Ivy League, taught God damned Constitutional law at a University, not to mention the fact that he is under fifty, which I absolutely love. I can’t imagine a better candidate to represent a nation of mutts, bastards, and poor people. As long as he’s serious.
At five in the morning, CNN is interviewing rapper Bow Wow about the youth vote. This is just one more site I have seen that convinces me that America is truly a sinking ship. This is the first election that Bow Wow was old enough to vote in. Today he has become a serious political pundit.
This just in, 22,000 buildings destroyed and 1,300 people dead in Gaza.
There has been a lot of ink put to paper tagging 2008 as the year that hope prevailed. This is preposterous, premature, and absolutely a waste of time. Anyone with any brains in their skulls can see that the prevailing themes of 2008 in the United States of America are unresolved at best. The titular line of 2008 won’t even be written until deep into 2009. It might take until 2011 for anyone to even have the balls to read it out loud. Hope hasn’t prevailed yet. This is also a fuck around. Hope has merely existed.
I am not arguing that the world was not asked to remember hope this year. Thousands of people who had turned their backs on hope cashed in their apathy for some empathy and acted on it. Why?
For the first time in many of these people’s lives, they felt like they were offered a choice. It wasn’t the lesser of two evils, it wasn’t the better dressed of two puppets, there was actually an incredibly earnest and qualified candidate to vote for! For the first time in American history since Robert Kennedy was shot, massive amounts of people began to believe again. People who gave up on voting, gave up on the idea of an honest politician, it was these people who were in the trenches making cold phone calls on holidays and weekends. These are people who cared about politics so passionately when they were young that they actually tried to change things and got beaten bloody. Former picket line screamers, communist journalists, dropouts, socialists, and every other beautiful form of American who had ever been rejected by a political system that is no longer by and for the people and is no longer malleable dusted themselves off and dared to hope again.
But this cannot be the year that hope prevailed until Barack Obama delivers on what he told us he was going to do. Like I said before, the last time a presidential candidate was worth voting for, his name was Robert Kennedy and it was 1968. He once said that “the politics of hope will prevail.” He called on us to end unjust wars, enforce civil rights, and use our modern science and tremendous capacity for human reason to make the world a better place. Two months later he was dead as dog shit and the Chicago Police Department were beating the piss out of peaceful hippy protesters in the street. Hope definitely existed in the ’68 election but it did not prevail. It was blasted out of the water with antithesis of a hippy: a bullet.
This just in, humans rights lawyer/journalist murdered in Russia.
It is 5:30 AM. The National Mall now holds upwards of a million and a half people, all celebrating. They believe that we have already won. Those who know are with me. We are drinking, smoking, and riding the couch while holding onto our balls with knuckle whitening fury. We know this is only the beginning and no time to celebrate.
Most expect Obama to move the country and the world into a new age of reason, science, logic, and peace. They expect him to resolve problems through intellectual discourse rather than bullying people with blockades and building resentment in their citizens. They expect him to stop using the once honorable American Military as a tool to murder innocent people for profit. He said that he would use science to create life rather than to take it away, to provide for those who are the most needy instead of stockpiling the vaults of those who need nothing. He told us that he was going to be perhaps the first President of the United States who understood just how fucked up it is at the bottom of the barrel. In the projects, where babies are hungry, where parents are overwhelmed, where people can’t get work, where schools don’t teach anything, where you’ll make more money selling a rock than studying a book, where people get their feet cut up and sneakers stolen on the bus, in the dust bowl and the rust belt, where the crops won’t grow, where the economy was NEVER that good.
Obama told us that he understood all of these people’s suffering and that he was going to do everything he could to finally help. He even said he would raise minimum wage and that first time drug offenders needed rehab, not prison. All the populism of George McGovern with all the icing of John F. Kennedy. The guy is a once in a generation leader.
I’ll say it again, even old Charlie Lindbergh couldn’t pilot this jalopy we’re calling a country across the pond. We are still doomed. A nation as proud as ours, dealt such a blow to its own ego as to lose two major buildings on its own soil to a band of cave dwellers, is unlikely to ever end the War on Terror. Peace will never come home and the dollar will continue to be worth less. We have been fucked for some time now but at least we can die with grace. We have transformed from a World War Two veteran dying in the middle of their street covered in their own piss into an old vet dying in a reasonably nice hospital. Grace.
No one knows what it would be like to have a friend in the White House. It has never happened before. Sixty seven percent of the world feels that things are going to get better now that Obama is President. The real problem is that seventy two percent of the world thinks he is going to deliver a solution to the global economic crisis today. The President of Spain is even hoping for what he calls an “Obama Effect,” a sudden rejuvenation of the global marketplace due to a smiley new President. Yet another fuck around.
This just in, gas jumps three cents in three days.
CNN just said that the last time our country saw a day like this was V.E. Day. That is the day that Germany and Italy unconditionally surrendered to the Allied Forces. People went to sleep at war with Europe and evil and woke up halfway to peace. V. E. Day was an instant change and the mere comparison only confirms my fears. Everyone really is waiting for the “Obama Effect.” The American people are a venerable Clark Griswald, waiting for our Christmas Bonus checks to start digging that bean shaped pool out back. In case you never saw National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the check never comes and Clark goes crazy. Roll that one over in your mind.
We have become a nation that consumes more than it produces, imports more than it exports, and pretends it’s all going to be peachy keen. Barack Obama is supposed to be the cure for this constant bleed. If Bill Clinton wiped his ass with a million dollar bill every time he took a shit he couldn’t have ruined the economy like Bush Jr. did.
Eight years later, we have forty seven million Americans without health insurance and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The dinner after the inauguration includes roasted pheasant, duck, scallop stew, and cases of champagne. If I were elected President, I would serve chopped up hot dogs in macaroni and cheese. This is what the nation will be eating for possibly the next two decades as we tighten our belts and watch the Pax Americana slip into the past. Eat this pre-packaged, artery blocking, stomach lining eating, and diarrhea inducing slop.
There is four times more security assembled for this inauguration than any other in history. There are FBI, National Guard, Police, Secret Service, CIA, NSA, and all sorts of bastards with huge guns and binoculars. Not to mention the incognito pigs with the hand grenades. At 6:30 AM, two sixteen year old girls just told CNN that they snuck around the security checkpoints by walking around the back of the White House. Their friends were already on the Mall and they used their cell phones to navigate around the checkpoints. So much for the War on Terrorism.
This just in, four dead, fourteen injured in string of Iraq fire bombings.
My real meat and potatoes of the day will come with the speech. A buttery slathering of promises and messages. It will most likely even soften my heart during it’s duration. Obama can command a crowd with all the charisma of James Brown or Prince. His words will make you dance inside. The National Mall is stuffed with a possible two and a half million people now. There are beach balls going around and chants and dances. I have never been to a rock concert that was half as much fun as the National Mall looks like it is. All of the reporters are detailing a feeling of euphoria amongst the crowd. They say that everyone is smiling and saying things like “Good Morning” and “Hello” to passers-by. It’s as if the whole country forgot it was slowly starving to death in a depressed gloom without medical insurance.
Spielberg is there, Dustin Hoffman, John Landis, our President is a rock star. Most rock stars true personalities are pale and lonely when compared to their personas. Obama knows the impoverished, the homeless, the shipwrecked, the Emma Lazarus crew right now. But in six months he may get all Hollywood on us and pretend he doesn’t know us so he can skip out to Kanye’s after party. When the geek girl gets a makeover from the cheerleaders and goes to the prom with the quarterback, she always forgets the other geeks, haven’t you ever seen a high school movie?
At seven in the morning Pacific Time, Obama, Biden, Bush, and Cheney are having coffee and so am I. It is doing well for beating back a whole night of desperation. The birth of a new world with the potential to be either euphoric or soaked in guerilla warfare at home and abroad can only be brought in while severely inebriated. This can only be supported by the unilateral idea that celebrating every New Year in every culture is rang in with copious amounts of intoxicants.
There they are. Bush Jr., Cheney, Obama, and Biden. They stand next to their respective spouses. The vitality of this new administration is only amplified when they stand side by side with the old leaders, the administration of death.
The departing administration of war criminals is being escorted out like Caesars. They should be beaten to death in Harlem on cable television as a message to the rest of the fat blood sucking corporate world. That cocksucker Cheney is riding high in his wheel chair, looking for some final pity points and hoping some poverty-ridden lesbian doesn’t strangle his murderous ass. Dickie is in a wheelchair because he “threw his back out” moving boxes. He really wants to give Barack one more fuck you by not standing up for his oath taking. Thinly veiled racism at its best. He looks like a parody of Oswald Cobblepot, directing his nurse around with hand gestures reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove.
Laura Bush has always looked like someone scooped all of her brains out of her head and replaced them with warm rice pudding and raisins to me. She has the eyes of a doll, like a fucking stuffed animal.
Then there’s King Dickie Bushy Jr. The smirk on Bush’s face is a flashing neon sign that clearly reads “NOBODY HOME.” Just the idea of that stupid grin never representing me again shines onto even this darkened heart. I guess I do love me some Obama. I just hope that he isn’t a bar fly, seducing me with tales that he won’t hit me like my old boyfriend and telling me that if he were my man I would be happier only to slap me with a mouth to feed, a black eye, and an STD.
It seems like every politician I can ever remember is sitting on that stage waiting for the same speech as I am, hoping to feel that magical feeling all Americans will feel when the molasses river of Barack Obama’s speech flows into their ear canals. You can see the evil dripping off of the fuckers. When Old Man Bush and Babs walked out, he was falling apart. They looked like a butler and a maid with bones made of peanut brittle. You could see how the evil has twisted the sinews of their bodies. Jimmy Carter and his wife walked out like spring chickens, all smiles. I guess that’s the difference between living your life with love in it and sucking blood. Now more than ever it is safe to say that Jimmy Carter could beat George H. Bush in a fight.
What a strange thing to be, an ex-President. Spending the rest of your life walking around while marching bands play standards and people take pictures. Doing essentially nothing compared to what you accomplished in between shitting and jerking off when you were Commander in Chief. Reading speeches, smoking cigars with dignitaries, and getting blowjobs from young political science majors.
This just in, Thailand is giving its citizens vouchers as an economy stimulus.
Out come the Clintons, 8:30 AM. Hillary, who lost it by finally becoming the crying mess of a woman every man in America said she would be one week a month, seems to be rather proud of herself. She should be. She somehow carpetbagged New York’s junior Senate seat, gave most likely the best public orator of our times a run for his money in the election, and scooped the Secretary of State position on the way.
The most truthful faces to be found are the Obama children. They are too young to know that scum sucking evil surrounds them. All they know is that their Dad is the President of the United States. They are still at the point in their lives where their Dad is invincible, even if he was a Union Plumber they would feel this way. It’s the age they’re at. This is also compounded by the fact that the guy hasn’t gone anywhere but up, up, and away since they have been around. My Dad was superman once too. The day he threw his back out while we were wrestling it all came crashing down. Obama is superman to a lot of people girls, we’re just hoping his back is in good shape. He’s got a lot of wrestling to do.
At the early inaugurations, there were no microphones. Only the fifty closest people could even hear the speech. Today it is being piped into the veins of people internationally. People a million years from now will listen to this speech, it’s audience will increase exponentially. I am recording it on my audio recorder. I want to be able to hear the inflection of his voice over and over again just in case this is the year that hope prevailed. No telling yet.
Our boy is out of the gate and into the open air, the scientist, the pacifist, a new King Solomon. A black woman with her eyes closed says thank you Jesus. A crowd forms in front of a big screen TV on the streets of Harlem. Ray Nagle cries. On the steps of the Capitol building, which was built on the backs and blood of slaves, an anti-gay minister leads the nation in prayer regardless of our separation of Church and State. Obama’s radiance still makes everything feel right. It cuts through the sickness and irony of American politics and the peaceful “transfer” of power like a hot knife. I think I know what is inside the briefcase in the movie Pulp Fiction. I think it is Barack Obama.
This just in, salmonella in hundreds of peanut butter products. Consumers are urged to display caution when eating peanut butter.
He rounds third and heads for home. The speech is Lincolnian, delivered with all the truth that Barack Obama can muster. He made every word seem real and sincere. He promised every single thing any sensible person could ever hope for. It was absolutely gorgeous, it challenged every single fault in the United States and the world and called on Americans to restore their own worth and respect. There was not one dewdrop of that speech that anyone outside of Pol Pot could possibly argue with. If Barack Obama can possibly deliver the promises he made today as effectively as he delivered that speech, the world will be truly saved. As saved as a world can possibly be while the human race is still here.
Forty-five years after Brown vs. the Board of Education and forty-five years after the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, there is a new moment of zen for all to remember. I can see it now, that speech will be documented by history as the day that the Earth stood still. They are going to say that no one committed a crime, drove a car, sold an orange, or even shot dope during the speech. People will call it proof that humanity can hold hands and transcend boundaries with the proper motivation. Like the moment in the alien invasion/disaster movie where the whole world unites and defeats the enemy/asteroid as humans without boundaries. After all, it wasn’t only historic, it was a hell of a speech.
He even had the balls to tap into the secret fear of all Americans. The taboo that no one has ever uttered out loud. Since 1776, it has been our biggest fear, best kept secret, and motivating factor. The fear that expansion eventually ends in decline, that all things must pass. The fear that America’s decline is inevitable. He swore to us that although the challenges would not be easy and they will take a long time to be met, they would be met. We will overcome, democracy and America will come home, we will have jobs, life will be good again.
If Obama delivers on his words, or at least tries his damnedest, he will be a Lincoln, a Kennedy, or a Roosevelt. He will belong on Mount Rushmore for ushering the US out of post WWII penis envy politics and into the future, the new age of reason.
However if he is lying, people will be so hurt and betrayed that they will surely hurt someone or something. The results of Obama becoming another stuffed suit upon entering office would be astronomically terrible. Riots would happen. Everyone who swore not to give a fuck ever again and then subsequently gave a fuck about Obama would be suddenly armed to the teeth and cutting the throats out of anyone who was wearing a necktie. A briefcase is a beating and shined shoes are a death sentence. Grow your hair or become a victim of drunken vigilantism.
This just in, UK unveils second plan to save failing banks. Failing banks.
Don’t call 2008 the year that hope prevailed until the man delivers on his promises. It could very well be the year we got smoked like doobies by another suit who pretended to care about us minimum wage making drug addicts. The year mopes prevailed.
This year we were asked to believe. We did. If we, the ex-Patriots who were called out of the gutters of American reject politics, believed for nothing… if we relit our torches of hope for no reason, we will piss on all of your shoes. Shame is a dirty coat to wear, but not quite as filthy as the smell of another man’s piss saturating your foot. The freaks and geeks who rose from the holes of society to carry this election on their backs will whip out their genitalia on the street and piss all over all of your shiny shoes. Pack extra socks with your bologna dickie, the morning commute just became a battle zone.
I am crashing hard. I have now been awake for far too long. The anticipation of the way this moment was going to make me feel had kept me awake like a knife to the eyeball. I was waiting to feel at ease, to believe that Obama was telling the truth just enough to pass out and feel vindicated. Sleep was rushing in from all sides like the Red Sea devouring the Egyptian fleet of doubt and scorn for my government that was keeping me awake. It started even before the speech, in fact about thirty seconds before.
If you saw it live, maybe you’ll remember. When the string section tried in vein to top a tearjerker by Aretha Franklin, do you remember that? While Yo-Yo Ma was playing that John Williams piece, the camera caught the moment. If I could find that cameraman I would kiss him, and the guy who flipped CNN to that particular camera angle. He gets a kiss too. Barack Obama looked down at his children, who were off camera, and winked and nodded with a smile lightly cradled in the corner of his mouth. It is the act of a father assuring his children that everything was going to be all right. Even if nothing was going to be alright, he winked anyway. The winking eye of our new President even made me feel safe, it made me feel exactly how I wanted to feel. That feeling had stayed awake so long for to grasp. Finally, I got that jolt that I remembered taking as constant and infallible truth when I was a child. I felt high. I felt like the President was superman again.
Tags: The Voice
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