Obama's Inauguration Passes Smoothly, Bumps and All

Something peculiar always happens to me the night before inaugurations. Presidential elections are the same, for that matter. I can't sleep. It might as well be Christmas Eve for all my nervous, jittery excitement. And it doesn't matter who the outgoing commander in chief happens to be, whether I liked him or loathed him. Transitions make me anxious. There's something both fundamentally unsettling and thrilling to the psyche to watch the national figurehead come and go with the simple raising of a new right hand, the repeating of an oath.

So I'm always relieved when the ceremonial pomp is over, even if it has a way of proceeding like institutional clockwork what with the prayers and patriotic songs and speechmaking. Not that inaugurations are error-free. Despite it's historic nature, the 56th one was far from perfect, proving that even the so-called smartest and most prominent among us have their off days.

Who would have thunk that the best-selling author and mega church pastor Rick Warren, all controversy aside, would deliver such a flat and uninspired invocation, his only nod to the sublime coming in the inclusion of the Lord's Prayer, penned by decidedly loftier hands than his. Or, that the wunderkind, Chief Justice John Roberts, the nation's legal smarty pants in chief, would flub in his task of swearing-in the new chief executive, opting to forgo notes and thus marring what should have been a crowning moment for now-President Obama. Sadly, Mr. Roberts, there is no inaugural do-over. Though I'm sure poet and Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander would have liked one. Her inaugural poem "Praise Song For the Day" was a tedious bore, a clunky mix of quotidian image and historical reference which might have been penned by any garden variety MFA student. She delivered it in painfully flat, unmodulated tones. Somebody get this woman a speech coach, or at the very least, a better editor.

Obama's inaugural address itself was smooth and inclusive, if perhaps a bit too campaign derivative and heavy on the 'roll up your sleeves and get to work' spirit. These are hard times and I appreciate the nuts and bolts approach, Mr. President, but the soul could have used a titch more poetry (though preferably not that of Ms. Alexander) at moments like these.

All in all, inauguration days are good days. The old passes for the new. A helicopter bears one president away. While a bittersweetness hangs in the air for what might have been, the best days are always those just around the next bend. And, as we all know, things are never so good as they might be as in the beginning.