Ronald Reagan said it on the occasion of his taking the oath of office in 1981, which now seems so distant yet so familiar. For once again a new president moves into the White House and the air is filled with hope and fear, good and evil, past and present all mixing. Mr. Reagan, a happy warrior if there ever was one, put it this way: "Commonplace and miraculous . . . . The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place, as it has for almost two centuries, and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-four-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle."
Just tell it to Aylin Nazliaka, a Turkish legislator who handcuffed herself to the podium microphone of her country's parliament in order to protest the revamp that Turkish president and general dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to complete as he pushes his country back into the Ottoman empire's last, dark days. Ms. Nazliaka's action provoked a brawl among Turkey's female lawmakers, which sent a couple of them to the hospital. Just count the casualties, or the many countries in the world that dare not set a free election at all, let alone complete one. Yet here all--well, almost all--was good will. Thank you, Lord.
Back in 1801, the first peaceful transfer of power in the Western world, the leader of one contending party, Thomas Jefferson of the Republicans, told the leader of the other, the Federalists' John Adams: "We are all Republicans. We are all Federalists." Just as today we are all Republicans, we are all Democrats. For we are all Americans no matter what we choose to call ourselves across the political spectrum from reactionary to conservative to populist to none of the above.
As usual, some of us could have done with a little less braggadocio on the various speakers' part Friday afternoon, and a lot more simple humility. But the presence of familiar figures in the bleachers and in front of the camera assured. There was Associate Justice Clarence Thomas of the country's Supreme Court, a monument to consistency. The Hon. and honorable Michael Richard Pence was there to take his oath of office as vice president alongside the new president. And the seemingly ageless Mormon Tabernacle Choir was still doing its quadrennial shtick, singing the words to America the Beautiful with ever renewed verve:
O beautiful for spacious skies.
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed his grace
on thee
And crown they good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea! . . .
For here we swear allegiance not to any mortal man--not to one people or one ideology--but to one ever debatable Constitution and its never dimmed promise. And fellowship should follow. "They have been magnificent," said the new president of his predecessor and his wife about the cooperation both had shown in making this transition as seamless as possible.
Contrast that scene with a scowling Herbert Hoover, the Great Engineer whose blueprint for the country had turned to ashes, sitting next to an always beaming Franklin D. Roosevelt as they sat side by side in the presidential limousine. Both were setting out for an unfathomable future, however many precedents each might cite. It was FDR who spoke about the forgotten man, and now Donald Trump declares that an establishment that protected only itself will henceforth protect the people. "That all changes, starting right here and right now!" says our own Canute, commanding the waves of history to stop.
All the old familiar phrases from past presidential addresses are themselves a testament to this nation's cramped continuity. The hubris our new president displayed sporadically but regularly during his campaign was once a hallmark of the departing president's once overwhelming but now decidedly underwhelming style. Today it all blends into one--like a speeded-up history of the nation as one scene follows another in rapid succession. At the end of the day, of many days and dicta, only a talmudic injunction remains to caution us: While we need not complete the task, neither are we free to neglect it.
Editorial on 01/24/2017