I have seen more photos
of Barack Obama
than I ever seen

of my own mother.
Blame the Press,
digital photography, all

the camera-phones,
raised like Rockefellers,
above the rest of us.

My old teacher Thomas Sayers Ellis gets the last word at 100dayspoems.blogspot.com.

Hooray for Friday, hooray for everything.

* The Daily Show nicely nailed the hypocrisy inherent to the Republican position on the stimulus debate last night.

* Scandal at 1600: it turns out the practice of disrespecting the Oval Office by not wearing a jacket inside it—heroically revealed by former chief of staff Andrew Card just this week—goes back decades.

* They've remixed the audiobook versions of Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. The real scandal is that it took this long for someone to think to do it.

* Remixing the inaugural poem.

* Syllabus for another class on The Wire.

* West Antarctic ice sheet collapse even more catastrophic for U.S. coasts. Icemelt Could Shift Earth's Rotation, Moving Water Northward. Antarctic warming is robust. Everything is fine.

* And will Vermont towns finally get their chance to arrest Cheney? Oh, please yes.

Wednesday, Wednesday.

* Why is Boing Boing giving valuable blog real estate to global warming denialism? I see Cory has admirably tried to push back against the guest blogger, but still. What a sad day for Boing Boing.

* Michael Bérubé just took the GRE Literature in English subject test again. And lived to tell about it.

* Rethinking plagiarism? Sorry, but this isn't that hard. Students know exactly what they're doing when they plagiarize. Turn them over to Judicial Affairs and don't think twice.

* Ten privacy settings every Facebook user should know.

* Joe the Plumber is now advising the GOP. WTFRepublicans?

* Fimoculous has found Wikipedia's list of lists of fictional things.

* The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertberg was not impressed with Obama's first inaugural. More shocking still is the unabashed anti-Hindu prejudice expressed in a demand that they be listed last in the litany of religious belief, even after hated atheists. Via Edge of the American West.

Link dump #3, mother of all link dumps.

* I thought I was over Obama kitsch, but somehow the kids' letters to Obama featured on This American Life last week still somehow got to me. Adorable!

* Austen gets a much-needed updating: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

* The Massachusetts lottery: if you've got $10,000+ to burn, it turns out it could actually be a good bet.

* Wikipedia is looking to ruin itself. More at MeFi.

* A zoomable map of the Moon from a 1969 National Geographic. Simply irresistible.

* How to nationalize health care.

* Rethinking your opposition to nuclear power? Rethink again. I've been working on a piece for the Indy on nuclear power in North Carolina that covers some of these themes. Via Steve Benen.

More links because if there's one thing I hate it's getting done the things I planned to get done.

* Huge gigapixel panorama of the inauguration, with very close zoom.

* The Obameter tracks 500 of Obama's campaign promises.

(both of those via Cynical-C)

* More inaugural poem talk from the New Republic and Edge of the American West.

* Obama reminds Republicans that he actually won the election and that in fact they have no credibility at all. Also, that Rush Limbaugh is a tool.

* And Time considers the future of the publishing biz.

So if the economic and technological changes of the 18th century gave rise to the modern novel, what's the 21st century giving us? Well, we've gone from industrialized printing to electronic replication so cheap, fast and easy, it greases the skids of literary production to the point of frictionlessness. From a modern capitalist marketplace, we've moved to a postmodern, postcapitalist bazaar where money is increasingly optional. And in place of a newly minted literate middle class, we now have a global audience of billions, with a literacy rate of 82% and rising.

Put these pieces together, and the picture begins to resolve itself: more books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City's entrenched publishing culture. Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy, well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds.

The Big Picture comes through with its inevitable, much-needed dose of inauguration porn.

Just in case you missed it—I've buried the posts—I had photos from our spot on the Mall yesterday here and here, with a write-up for Durham's Independent Weekly here.

Change has come to whitehouse.gov.

My Indy piece on the inauguration is already up. Here's another take in the same issue from Matt Saldana.

I'll have a short piece in the Indy tomorrow about my experience in the crowd at the Mall, so for now I'll limit myself to a few comments and some photos. We left Arlington a little later than we'd hoped—around 8:30—and so there was really not much chance to get into the Huge Crowd by the reflecting pool. (You can see in one of the photos just about as close as we got—past the Washington Monument there was just no going.) We settled in instead on 17th St NW right at the edge of the road, which turned out to be the perfect spot: not only was it right in front of a screen, but the cops were trying to keep 17th St clear and so no one was able to crowd in front of us.

There was a lot of waiting involved, but it was an amazing experience, if only to see Aretha Franklin belt out the best version of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" ever (land where my father died—she, too, sings America); to hear the loose live mic going out over the Mall for nearly the entire event; to see hilarious closed-captioning typos like "[CHEESE AND APPLAUSE]" and "♫ Threat ring"; trying to get an "underrated!" chant started after Jimmy Carter's first appearance; and to hear Rev. Lowry's show-stopping benediction:

'Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. Say Amen'...

And, you know, Obama. And Obamaniacs. I say this in the article, but it felt like liberation.

Now, of course, the real work begins.

Some of my best photos are of some nearby protesters, which I'll have a separate post about. But for now, here's a picture of our basic view:



A few of the people we shared the moment with:















Canadians! Who let them in?

I have to file my story for the Indy, and I'm also very hungry, so photos and videos will have to wait. But that was awesome.

They call me Jerry Two-Times because I say everything twice.

Jerry Canavan, a Duke graduate student who was waiting for the train with his wife, Jaimee Hills, also volunteered for Obama, canvassing in North and South Carolina.

"It just feels like starting over," Canavan said of Obama's election. "It's just been an unending series of disasters since we started paying attention to politics, so this just feels like starting over."

Canavan and Hills, who works at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, will be staying in Arlington, Va., with a friend.

"We're just going to walk over the bridge from Arlington and see how far we can get," Hills said.

Woooo! Yes we can.

Generations ago, James Garfield did his imperfect best. The inaugural he delivered, on March 4, 1881, didn’t match Lincoln’s eloquence. But this year it bears rereading:

My countrymen, we do not now differ in our judgment concerning the controversies of past generations, and fifty years hence our children will not be divided in their opinions concerning our controversies. They will surely bless their fathers and their fathers’ God that the Union was preserved, that slavery was overthrown, and that both races were made equal before the law. We may hasten or we may retard, but we can not prevent, the final reconciliation.

More great moments in presidential inaugurations at the New Yorker.

The Bush inauguration, 2001, from Fahrenheit 9/11.

The shittrain began on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas—when some twisted little geek blew the President's head off ... and then a year later, LBJ was re-elected as the "Peace Candidate."

Johnson did a lot of rotten things in those five bloody years, but when the history books are written he will emerge in his proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Americans to lose all respect for the Presidency, the White House, the Army, and in fact the whole structure of "government."

And then came '68, the year that somehow managed to confirm almost everybody's worst fears about the future of the Republic ... and then, to wrap it all up another cheapjack hustler moved into the White House. If Joe McGinnis had written The Selling of the President about good old Ike, he'd have been chased through the streets of New York by angry mobs. But when he wrote it about Nixon, people just shrugged and said, "Yeah, it's a goddamn shame, even if it's true, but so what?"

I went to Nixon's inauguration. Washington was a sea of mud and freezing rain. As the Inaugural Parade neared the corner of 16th and Pennsylvania Avenue, some freak threw a half-gallon wine jug at the convertible carrying the commandment of the Marine Corps ... and as one-time Presidential candidate George Romney passed by in his new role as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the mob on the sidewalk began chanting "Romney eats shit! Romney eats shit!"

George tried to ignore it. He knew the TV cameras were on him so he curled his mouth up in a hideous smile and kept waving at the crowd—even as they continued to chant "Romney eats shit!"

The mood of the crowd was decidedly ugly. You couldn't walk 50 feet without blundering into a fistfight. The high point of the parade, of course, was the moment when the new President's car passed by.

But it was hard to be sure which one it was. The Secret Service ran a few decoys down the line, from time to time, apparently to confuse the snipers and maybe draw some fire ... but nothing serious happened: just the normal hail of rocks, beer cans, and wine bottles ... so they figured it was safe to run the President through.

Nixon came by—according to the TV men—in what appeared to be a sort of huge, hollowed-out cannonball on wheels. It was a very nasty looking armored car, and God only knows who was actually inside it.

I was standing next to a CBS-TV reporter named Joe Benti and I heard him say, "Here comes the President..." "How do you know?" I asked him. It was just barely possible to detect a hint of human movement through the slits that passed for windows.

"The President is waving to the crowd," said Benti into his mike.

"Bullshit!" said Lennox Raphael standing beside me. "That's Neal Cassidy in there."

"Who?" said Benti.

"Never mind," I said. "He can't hear you anyway. That car has a vacuum seal."

Benti stared at me, then moved away. Shortly afterward, he quit his job and took his family to Copenhagen.


When the Great Scorer comes to list the main downers of our time, the Nixon Inauguration will have to be ranked Number One. Altamont was a nightmare, Chicago was worse, Kent State so bad that it's still hard to find the right words for it ... but there was at least a brief flash of hope in those scenes, a wild kind of momentary high, before the shroud came down.

The Nixon Inauguration is the only public spectacle I've ever dealt with that was a king-hell bummer from start to finish. There was a stench of bedrock finality about it. Standing there on Pennsylvania Avenue, watching our New President roll by in his black-armored hearse, surrounded by a trotting phalanx of Secret Service men with their hands in the air, batting away the garbage thrown out of the crowd. I found myself wondering how Lee felt at Appomattox ... or the main Jap admiral when they took him out to the battleship Missouri to sign the final papers.

Hunter S. Thompson on the 1968 inauguration, from his book on the 1972 election, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

The rest of us still have to wait a day, but LEGObama has already been inaugurated.

We're traveling all day by Amtrak to DC for the inauguration, so aside from a few posts I'm about to make there won't be much posting until tomorrow night. I have no idea where we'll be going for the event itself or what if anything we'll be able to see, but I'm fully expecting the whole affair to be exactly like the liberation of Paris. I'll cover what I can and get you photos and video Tuesday night...

Preparedness tips for the inauguration from the American Red Cross. Via my Twitter feed and #inaug09.

Monday midday.

* Followup on the Google-search climate crisis: Google says it's just not so. (via)

* The top 11 compounds in your drinking water.

• Atenolol, a beta-blocker used to treat cardiovascular disease

• Atrazine, an organic herbicide banned in the European Union, but still used in the US, which has been implicated in the decline of fish stocks and in changes in animal behaviour

• Carbamazepine, a mood-stabilising drug used to treat bipolar disorder, amongst other things

• Estrone, an oestrogen hormone secreted by the ovaries and blamed for causing gender-bending changes in fish

• Gemfibrozil, an anti-cholesterol drug

• Meprobamate, a tranquiliser widely used in psychiatric treatment

• Naproxen, a painkiller and anti-inflammatory linked to increases in asthma incidence

• Phenytoin, an anticonvulsant that has been used to treat epilepsy

• Sulfamethoxazole, an antibiotic used against the Streptococcus bacteria, which is responsible for tonsillitis and other diseases

• TCEP, a reducing agent used in molecular biology

• Trimethoprim, another antibiotic

So gross. (Via Boing Boing.)

* Johann Hari in Slate considers environmentalism's great divide: the romantics vs. the rationalists.

* Bruce Springsteen is playing a free concert in DC one day before I get there for the inauguration. There is no justice.

* And Hendrick Herztberg notes in The New Yorker that the Bush years offer, for the first time, a precise measurement of the number of people who can be fooled all of the time: 27%.

The President-elect’s performance can’t fully explain the public’s welcoming view of him. Part of it, surely, reflects an eagerness to be rid of the incumbent. A gangly Illinois politician whom “the base” would today label a RINo—a Republican in Name Only—once pointed out that you can fool some of the people all of the time. We now know how many “some” is: twenty-seven per cent. That’s the proportion of Americans who, according to CNN, cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job. The wonder is that this number is still in the double digits, given his comprehensively disastrous record. During the eight years of the second President Bush, the unemployment rate went from 4.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent and climbing; consumer confidence dropped to an all-time low; a budget surplus of two hundred billion dollars became a deficit of that plus a trillion; more than a million families fell into poverty; the ranks of those without health insurance rose by six million; and the fruits of the nation’s economic growth went almost entirely to the rich, while family incomes in the middle and below declined. What role the Bush Administration’s downgrading of terrorism as a foreign-policy priority played in the success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be known, but there is no doubting its responsibility for the launching and mismanagement of the unprovoked war in Iraq, with all its attendant suffering; for allowing the justified war in Afghanistan to slide to the edge of defeat; and for the vertiginous worldwide decline of America’s influence, prestige, power, and moral standing.

(Via Matt Yglesias.)