Well, the inauguration address fell flat. It was filled with trite and commonplace phrases such as “pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off” and “gathering clouds and raging storms”. There was no eloquence from a President who seemed nervous, as if for the first time struck by what he was undertaking, and so having an out of body experience: he was observing himself as in the line of his distinguished and very much less than distinguished predecessors. Another downer was the fact that Obama’s brief walk down part of Pennsylvania Avenue was greeted with a sigh of relief when it was over by, among others, David Gergen and Jesse Jackson who, on CNN, wondered whether the risk had been worth taking, even if, I thought, not having walked those few blocks would have declared that the President of the United States could not even take a ceremonial stroll down the streets of his Capitol City. The poem written for the occasion was, when recited, just awful, given over to the idea that appropriate sentiments expressed in a rhythm supplied by the speaker rather than the structure of the words made a set of words into a poem. The musicians played a bit of fluff when they might have played the Aaron Copland on which the piece was based, and they played it as if with frozen fingers, which was indeed the case. The only moment that reached this viewer was Aretha Franklin, who can make any melody sound fresh and complicated.

The commentators, including some distinguished civil rights leaders, were at a loss to find anything eloquent to say about so dramatic and important a moment, as perhaps had to be the case, because it was the moment that spoke for itself, that needed no reading of meanings to convey its significance. The event, in and of itself did that. The fact that the Chief Justice got the Oath garbled was just another way to show that the installation of Obama as the forty-fourth President was accomplished by the time he took the Oath rather than by the ceremony that accompanied his installation and which recognized it, which is true to the facts, in that the secret codes, the so-called nuclear football, had already been turned over to him. The events of Inauguration Day commemorated rather than created his ascent to power on this particularly wonderful day.

 It seems that most of the country and most of the world has caught on to the idea that this inauguration, more than others, is a major historical occasion. Usually it is surprises, like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, or the deaths of FDR and JFK, that provide that sense of a moment in time when everything changed, the moment when it happened preserved for the ages in the memories of people who witnessed and remembered where they were and what they felt when it happened. I thought at the time that the March on Washington in 1963 was that sort of event, and so did everybody else who was there. Most Presidential inaugurations don't have the heft of history, certainly none since JFK, and that yielded only a false promise.

There are moments whose celebrations are real because the times, they have a-changed. That was certainly true of V-J Day. Most other kinds of public occasions do not have the same resonance. Parades for sports teams resonate only for a week or so. Parades for astronauts after they returned from the moon were not big events but the response to where briefly thought to have been big events. I remember Nixon saying that the first landing on the moon was the greatest event in world history, which made few people at the time blush at Nixon’s hyperbole, even though Christians think the Crucifixion and Rising of Christ might qualify for that title. And that voyage to the moon, proposed to be one of the two or three greatest moments in world history, was, it turned out, a fake moment, in that it did not change the world. We have not been back for a long time and the prospect of going back appears at the moment to be just one of those hare brained schemes invented by the Bushies so as to make believe they were taking care of historical business. Columbus' voyage had changed the world by the time he died, not ten years after having discovered the New World, and it is now more than thirty years since we have been to the moon. Does anyone miss it? Been there, done that; it is now the age of telescopes in space and robot exploration of space. 

Obama's inauguration, on the other hand, does change the world, has already changed the world. It has, for one thing, changed the relation between blacks and whites in this country in a way at least as significant as has any event since Emancipation. The Civil Rights Movement was rightly referenced during the Inauguration coverage as a promise, as a prelude to a great event, and this week comes the fulfillment of that promise. Obama’s inauguration also changes the American relation to the world because in one stroke the last eight years have been erased, however much time it will take to repair the damage of those years. The Europeans are right in thinking that more than policies are changing; they admire the fact that America, perhaps alone in this respect, is capable of living up to its promise of universal rights by having elected an African American as its President. This was no act of affirmative action, no appointment to a high level sinecure. The triumph of the Tuskegee Airmen, as a film about them suggested, was when their services as fighter escort pilots was no longer assigned but was requested. The nation asked Obama to be President.

I would suggest a few more cultural ramifications of Obama’s inauguration. The fulfillment of African American history takes place in America in that here is where its great heroes live and do their work and their people make their mark and have their impact upon the world stage, and so become part of global history. Those events do not take place in Africa, at least not for the past five hundred years, even if the human species emerged out of Africa to populate the world. Where the species originated is a quaint fact and has nothing to do with the credibility of the cultures of peoples trying to establish themselves as valid and even more than that as major contributors to the human project. There is not much to be said for the Afro-centrists who preferred obscure kings to American politicians and statesmen who are African American other than that their cultural interests reflected their despair that anything could come of the African sojourn in America, their view being that it was fated for defeat rather than for a triumph whereby an African American became, for a while, the crest of American culture and the American understanding of the nature of people and of civic life. 

Nor is African American life any more to be regarded as a subculture that exists within the American culture that may contribute its own spices, as Jazz does, but is never in its pure forms to be exported into America but rather is always subject to the rules of cross-over culture: tone it down and use cover artists. That, by the way, was not even true of Jazz, in that the musical form was made popular precisely because its early artists were able to get recording contracts and club dates where white people saw them perform and when much of the music they played was written or embellished by white composers. And the more damaging aspects of African American life are no longer to be seen as a subculture within American life, however much it was the case that poverty was identified as the natural way of life of African American people. The culture of poverty was not limited to poor blacks, and the prosperous black bourgeoisie did not see themselves as having a culture different from that of the white bourgeoisie, only one that was separated by caste, which is precisely the division that the Civil Rights Movement was out to abolish and which it succeeded in doing. The poor are still among us, but they need not be seen just as the black poor who are among us. Obama did not run against black poverty, but in favor of helping all those who needed it, and those especially mentioned were the middle class, not the poor, which goes to show just how mainstream a politican Obama is.

So what Obama accomplished is that now it can be told that the history of African Americans has been woven especially well into the fabric of American life, so much so that this apotheosis can be regarded as one long in the making rather than as the surprise we all at the moment take it for. Black people are one of the essential strands of American history, there as long as there has been a nation and long before. The inauguration of JFK did much the same thing, though on a less grand scale, because Catholics, did not have to be here, maybe, if there had been no potato famine, just as African Americans did not have to be here if there had been no slavery, but they were, and so the historical anomaly gets resolved. The Catholic Church took a very long time to resolve the history of the Jews into their story because they expected the Jews to disappear as a result of the New Dispensation, and decided only at Vatican II that the Catholic sense of history could survive the idea that Jews would be with us until the end of secular time.

It is very difficult to imagine the contra-factual possibility of a world without a potato famine or without slavery or with an unassimilated Jewry. The historical events that set up century long or millennia long dynamics are the givens of world history, the permanent scabs on history. That is why the welding together of an ethnic story that is so deeply troubling for the American experience with that self same American experience is such a great and world historical accomplishment. This is not the story of an integrated society in some backwater of the world. It is the story of a teleological accomplishment in the most powerful nation in the world. It is the story of what nations can do, what nations can become, as they transform themselves from being their pasts into being their futures. And never mind that, it is the story of what humanity can do in its drive towards its own self-made and only slowly discovered teleology.