The pomp and circumstance of the inauguration and the festivities surrounding the inauguration don’t interest me very much and I won’t be following them, analyzing them, or writing about them. But there are a couple of points I do want to make.
The ritual of the inauguration doesn’t seem particularly important to me. But the fact of the inauguration is enormously important.
The election of George Washington and both of his inaugurations were important. But they weren’t of critical importance. It was Washington’s voluntary leaving of power and John Adams’s inauguration in 1797 in a manner proscribed by law and according to the will of the people that was of critical, earthshaking, world-changing importance. And every inauguration that has followed it including this one commemorates that momentous event.
That kind of peaceful transfer of power in a manner proscribed by law and according to the will of the people remains all too rare in the world today. Everywhere it exists there is peace and, in varying degrees, prosperity. That’s something worth contemplating.
I do have one final thing to say about the inauguration celebration. Cancelling the inauguration festivities would take money from the hands of cooks, waiters, chauffeurs, custodians, florists, delivery people and hundreds or thousands of plain working people who need that money to support their families. Unlike the thousands of other government doings this affair doesn’t put money in the hands of a standing bureaucracy who should be ashamed of themselves and go out and get honest jobs, it puts money directly into the hand of a lot of actual workers.
So, sure, there’s a war on. Sure, there was a horrible disaster in the Indian Ocean. Let’s abolish the NEA or the Department of Labor or the Department of Commerce or any of the thousands of welfare programs for corporations and the middle class. But leave the inauguration alone. It employs a lot of poor working stiffs and pumps money into a segment of the local economy in DC that really needs it.
UPDATE: Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam
