Looking Forward, Looking Back

President Obama's made it abundantly clear — this country's busted up.

by Brian Howard

I know this puts me in the minority, but I just didn't get as fired up for the inauguration as, like, everybody else in the entire world. Don't get me wrong. It's not that it wasn't all great, from Aretha Franklin's colossal bow-hat, to Saddlebacker Rick Warren's "Sssssashahhhhh," to Biden's Frankenstein-y oath-taking, to the new chief's excellent, no-bull speech. (I could have done without the poetry, but I'm verse-averse.)

I was excited for the Obama presidency to finally start. And really stoked to see finally-not-President Bush hand over the keys. And I certainly hadn't grown tired of the Bush-era montages, packed with so much "food on your families," "don't recall remembering"s, "slam dunk"s and "mis-underestimation"s. It's just that, well, election night was exciting. Tense. Suspenseful.

I get that defeating McCain was simply a metaphor for replacing Bush, and actually replacing Bush removes the step with the metaphor. But I found Tuesday kind of anticlimatic. (Lest you feared a president with an approval rating in the 20s might attempt some kind of military coup.) It's nice to hear Barack Obama give speeches — and his speech on Tuesday hit exactly the right tone. But I think we all, President Obama included, are long past ready — now that the cabinet's in place and the White House cleaning staff's hard at work ridding the place of the stench of blood money — for him to get down to the business of fixing this country. Because as the big guy made abundantly clear, this country's busted up.

Whether you want to blame George W. Bush directly or not, over the last eight years the United States has hemorrhaged money, power and influence, and we're already hearing the familiar chimes of not my fault. "I inherited a recession, I'm ending on a recession," said Bush in his Jan. 12 press conference. Ignoring the difference in scope of those two recessions, what Bush didn't say is this: He inherited a budget surplus projected at $5.6 trillion over 10 years, and turned it into a 10-year projected deficit of $6 trillion. That's an $11.6 trillion swing. And whether or not you buy into Dick Cheney's Reaganomical stance that deficits don't matter, that's still jaw-dropping.

Yes, I think we're all anxious to move on. But there seems to be a groundswell of opinion (at least, by conservatives responding to the critiques we've written of now-former President Bush) that we should "stop picking on Bush because 'we've' won, 'we've' got our messiah, etc." But that's not how it should work. It's great, yes, to have rid the highest office in the land of someone with so little respect for its founding principles. But leave him alone? After the shit-canning the U.S. Constitution has received over the last two presidential terms? After the emotional manipulation that's been waged? After the disrespect, not just for America's reputation but for Americans themselves?

I know I'm behind the curve here, but I've been taking a crash course in Naomi Wolf's The End of America, wherein Wolf outlines 10 "steps" fascists have historically taken to shut down a democracy. My first suspicion was that Wolf was cherry-picking the worst traits of the Bush regime and making tenuous connections to the likes of Stalin, Goebbels and Pinochet. But when your worst actions evoke names like those above, there's a chance you could be a totalitarian fascist attempting to subvert the principles of a nation.

I know that there's a lot of healing to be done, a lot of fences to be mended, and that Obama has, before ever taking the reins, made great strides to not only reach across the aisle, but to short-circuit the channels for inter- and intra-party rancor.

But as we continue to celebrate, I think it's a mistake to let the outgoing administration simply ride off into the sunset, their corporations and their friends' corporations bloated with war spoils. If ever there were a time for an independent counsel, isn't this it?

(bhoward@citypaper.net)