David Reynolds | An old beginning
It was cold up in D.C. yesterday. Yet I felt a certain warmth radiating from my television set. Is it possible that the inauguration of a president could change our spirits from being in a winter of despair to seeing a spring with hope? It all depends. If we are talking about these United States of America, then the answer is “Yes!” Here anything is possible. We just proved it.
The inauguration of a U.S. president is a grand ceremony. It has to be in order to remind the world how we are governed. By the people. And how we transfer power. For the people. Regardless of what you may hear and read in some quarters, most on this planet still respect and envy us. Check out our immigration numbers.
Yesterday reminded me of inaugurations past. Such as back in 1965 when my wife and I were able to view the parade in honor of Lyndon Johnson from a small balcony off the Old Executive Office Building where I worked. In spite of the JFK assassination only 14 months earlier, the town was relaxed. And so was security. Then in 1977 we saw Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter walk up Pennsylvania Avenue. Oh, those where the days of wine and roses.
But let us not live in the past. America has always been about the future. And about optimism. A friend recently sent me an email reading, “Due to the economy, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.” I replied: “It will be turned back on as soon as our optimism returns.”
Later in the day waiting for the VMI Corps of Cadets to march down Pennsylvania Avenue, I thought I saw that light at the end of the tunnel. I know it wasn’t the setting sun. America has always been about something new and something old. That’s our history. We are a country that specializes in old beginnings.
Still I had a fleeting regret yesterday. I was sorry I wasn’t there. “Dave, are you nuts? You really regret not being out in that cold with outdoor plumbing and being stuck in that traffic? Not me. Thank God, or whoever invented television.”
OK, maybe you are right. I paid my utility bills and my car is safe in the garage. And since I watched C-SPAN, I did not need to have the endless and senseless utterances the networks feel obligated to feed us in their attempt to spoil the view. Example: We were constantly being told we that we are watching an historic event, when that is the job of historians, not some pretty face on Fox who never met Jim Crow in her 25 years of a charmed life.
Besides, now my Lazy-Boy chair fits. Those extra pounds around the middle sure help. And my coffee has zero chance of freezing. Still, there is nothing like being there. Al Hockaday and Dorothy Blackwell were among those from paradise. Ask them. They will tell you not to kid yourself. Sure, television can provide the sights and sounds – but never the experience.
Nine weeks ago in this space I wrote an open letter to Mr. Obama. I said that I did not vote for him. But, for better or for worse, Americans like active presidents, whether they govern from the left or the right. Now Barack Obama is our president. And we only get one at a time. So why not make the most of what we have? One way is to realize what we have in the US of A and make the most of that. America has not crossed its last frontier. Our workers’ productivity index is as high as ever. When we short sell stocks, we short sell America. Just bring back confidence and everything else will fall into place.
If you watch closely these next four years, you will likely witness two battles along the Potomac. One you may have already read about. It will be between very partisan congressional Democrats and an Obama White House attempting to unify a nation. Pray for the White House. The other will be between good economic news which may be years away and the impatience of the American people. Pray for the people.
Then there is the matter of race. On election night a black women, a Democratic strategist, walked up to her white anchor woman, shook her head and made this off air remark, “You all said you would vote for a black man. . . You all said you’d judge him on his merits, race wouldn’t stop you. I didn’t know until tonight that you meant it.” Yes, we meant it. Then as well as now. We are the same country today as we were before yesterday. Maybe we all owe each other a round of apologies.
So, what kind of day was yesterday? It was cold. But not dark. No one turned off the light at the end of the tunnel. It was just another beginning. An old beginning. America is great at reinventing itself.
- Column by David Reynolds
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Nice column but America is not “reinventing itself.” It may be reshaping itself, but hard work, ingenuity, opportunity, and freedom are still the hallmarks of our country. Improve it, better it, cherish it, but don’t “reinvent it.” The old model still works better than most of the rest of the world. An ocassional overhaul is a good thing if done right, but if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
The first American model was the classic colonial relationship with a politically and economically exploitative father state. And then we reinvented America into a political model that was East Coast white-male property-owner driven and an economy that was driven largely by the South and its input of slave labor. And then we had a Civil War and came out with a reinvented white-male-led political society and economy dominated by Northern and Midwestern industrialists and Southern agrarians who exploited cheap labor. Then we had the reinvention brought on by FDR and the Great Depression that gave us our first intently activist government; by then women could vote, and the economy was slightly less exploitative because of the growth of labor unions. Reagan reinvented us back to where we were before FDR economically with his rhetoric on economic freedom that was code for re-empowering the monied interests at the expense of the common folks whose folks he exploited deftly by playing Nixon’s race-baiting game. Obama is reinventing us back again (with W Bush’s help) with a more activist government, a more inclusive political society and God only knows what will happen with the economy. (I say that because I don’t know that any of us can predict what will survive, and in what form, through the reinvention that is happening there organically.)
Sorry Chris: You cannot “reinvent” something that was never “invented.”
Democracy evolved after America was created. It went thru a lot of stages with many starts, problems, and even some stops, but it made it to 2009. You cannot “reinvent” the wheel, only improve it.
As far as I know, the US is the only country to fight an internal war, one of the goals being the ending of slavery. More peaceful “battles” later took place, as you pointed out, for the right of women to vote, for full civil rights for Negroes, better pay and safety, etc. They were accomplished with relatively little bloodshed as opposed to all out battles, and today America is a much better country for it. Most other countries of the world cannot say this. Find out how many coups Bolivia has had since 1950.
America is an example of how a relatively peaceful “evolution” leads to “revolutionary” advances, if “revolutionary” means significant movements/progress forward in politics, medicine, etc.
There is a lot to be improved, but not “reinvented”. This might only be a little debate over terminology, but we do need to be very clear as to what we mean when we use a term. If there is an alternative definition that can be used, let it be, but we need to know in what context it is used, and how it is used, so as to be able to understand and follow the flow of the conversation.
Gee, isn’t freedom of speech and the internet great, and educational?
I said this earlier on another post – it’s a matter of perspective. We didn’t conjure up the idea of democracy, sure, but we were the first to put the idea into general practice. Is that invention? I think so. Nor did we invent the idea of civil war. You’re a bit off there, but that’s OK. We did forge a path for others to follow in terms of post-internal-strife reconciliation. Invention? If you’re the first to do something well, it’s inventive, at the least. FDR put us on an entirely new path. Think about the historical time. The rest of the world reacted to the postwar era and the Great Depression by lurching toward communism or fascism. We on the fly through FDR came up with a different approach – a revolution in a bottle, uniquely American. Reagan then reacted to the excesses of Johnson’s expansion of the New Deal into the Great Society, and brought a new conservatism to our way of thinking about public policy and governance. Now Obama is reacting to the excesses of the Reaganites in bringing his vision to fruition that is a hyrbid in a lot of ways of Reagan and FDR.
Do you see the pattern here? Roughly 60 years following the founding of our country, we had a reinvention via the Civil War, roughly 60 years after that was the New Deal, and roughly 60 years after that is what we might think of as a New New Deal.
I don’t think it’s all that controversial to point this all out. It should make folks on the conservative side feel a little better. It’s not you guys, after all, that did anything wrong. It’s just the cycles of history playing themselves out.