There I was yesterday, standing in the bakery, sheeting Obama cookies and listening to the NPR coverage of the inauguration. The Obama cookies were selling as fast as the cookie decorators could slather on the frosting. After the news program Tuesday night, with my cheerful cookie spiel, we sold out. Then the night decorator freaked out and made several hundred more. Then those sold out. And then in the morning people bought the Obama cookies out of the case with the frosting still wet. Literally hundreds and hundreds of cookies were imbued with that symbolic Obama essence.
As the time for the big change came closer, the bakery became very dead. The boss brought in a TV to play in the seating area, which the four customers in the store gathered around to watch.
At 11AM central time, right after the Yo Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman concert, NPR announced that the Bush administration had come to an end.
I actually felt like a weight had left me. I’ve been skeptical about how wonderful the Obama administration will be, I mean, everyone is thrilled that we finally have a president who condemns torture. How low do our standards have to be to think that makes Obama a perfect president?
As I cracked eggs for pastry creme and listened to the inauguration speeches, I mused about all the other presidents I have known.
I was born in the last few months of the Nixon regime, although my parents always told me that I was born during the Ford administration for some reason. They probably just don’t want to revisit that era.
But the first president I remember with any clarity is Carter. Mainly he was the sad and tired old man who lived inside the TV.
Reagan made quite the impression on my youthful mind. My parents hated him with a passion, and even though I lived in rural Wisconsin, the heart of Reagan country, I distinctly remember their perplexed annoyance with those few people we knew who actually supported the president. Some friends of the family who owned a small farm would name their beef calves after various members of the Reagan administration. We would dig our forks into a steak and gleefully ask dinner guests if they liked how Casper Weinberger tasted.
Bush the senior reigned during my high school days. He meshed well with my adolescent sense of eschatonic melodrama. All through high school I was certain that the world would end before I would have to worry about college.
But the world didn’t end, and we moved on to the Clinton years, which coincided almost exactly with my term in college and the years of bumming around afterward. It’s hard to articulate how different those years felt compared to the Bush eras that preceded and succeeded. It felt like wonderful things would happen without us expecting it. The rise of the computer age, the blossoming of coffeeshop culture, and the explosion of independent film and music was certainly a part of that, but there was also a lot of free money floating around. On numerous occasions I personally prospered from imaginary tech money (read: got very drunk).
But there was quite a lot on the Clinton agenda that I could not condone. The dismantling of the welfare system, the solidification of corporate power, and neo-liberal trade. So even though I voted in every Clinton election, I never voted for the man.
If I had reservations about Clinton, then Bush the younger managed to do everything wrong. It was so incredibly frustrating to sit in Texas and watch the White House deliberately make exactly the wrong decision every single day. They’re like an Aspergers kid told not to put their hand on the stove, but who does it anyway just to show that they don’t have to do what you say. Bush’s insistence on flaunting international law, morality, common human decency, and simple competency contributed to a malaise that drowned this country and my own personal life. I feel like I’ve been dead these past eight years, like I’ve been holding my breath underwater, waiting for this period of darkness to pass over. His policies made me a criminal and a radical in my own country. I committed an act of civil disobedience to protest the war and the Bush administration, and I joined a movement of activists who committed futilely symbolic acts of resistance. And meanwhile the Democratic leadership crawled all over themselves to facilitate Bush’s idiocy and to avoid causing a fuss.
In retrospect I can appreciate the strategic decision on the part of Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership not to seek an impeachment or serious investigations into torture or the outing of undercover CIA agents. They were handing the Bush administration foot after foot of rope to hang themselves with. Towards the end, radical politics seemed irrelevant, because everyone in America agreed that Bush was a total fuckup. The ship of public opinion turned in incremental stages until we came to this moment, the first day of the Obama age.
So far nothing has gone wrong. But I’m keeping an eye out.