Inauguration Day.

An emotional day.

Indeed…

Let us let it cloud our judgment of the president, his government, and their actions. Distracted and empowered by the horrors of the preceding King, and warmed by the kind, moral words of a forceful, confident tone – an authority that has to, just has to be true – we are, therefore, just and right in our use of force to secure all things that necessarily follow, the glitz and glamor of our newfound social flower blinding us into declaring 8 years of unqualified success before a single day is out and any thought derived from anything more than a feeling can be formed.

But lets break these political lyrics to say…the inaugural poetry of Elizabeth Alexander fucking sucked.

In my opinion, that which largely defines something as poetry is its ability to tap into abstract concepts or emotions that can not otherwise be expressed with more straight-forward, literal writing. It is perhaps subjective, but I do not enjoy poetry that can not be differentiated from a High School essay filled with blunt, literal non-metaphors resulting from the most hackneyed and dull concepts that can only fill my mind with nothing other than what everyone has had no choice to have already been thinking anyway.

To be fair, this is not exclusively a fault of Elizabeth Alexander. It is a fault of the particular school of poetry to which she seems to subscribe that most popularly survives.

But it is also part of the greater fault that is the inauguration itself.

Regardless of who the new president is or what state the economy is in, the inauguration and other such political puffery is such a ridiculousl display of incredibly expensive unnecessary bloated bullshit.

Should I ever somehow be elected president, at most I will invite the media over to my place where some friends and I might dress up like Maynard G. Krebs, making music and reading poetry over a small PA system that I myself will supply, dining on cheese and ring blongna…and then we’ll get on with it.

The official showbiz atmosphere and mandatory awe-inducing – and that’s all – grandeur of the proceedings, coupled with the absurd expense should make it clear how wasteful these events are. However, we are all of us apparently too dependent on these sort of things to actually think of considering them something other than a necessary function of government.

Conceding popular defeat of my pageantry argument, I at least hope that someone else experiences a sense of discomfort with the conversational and ceremonial infusion of religion into almost every phase and place of government, quite evident in the inauguration.

In full disclosure, God and I do not get along. While I ultimately take the agnostic position that we can never know for sure, I don’t spend a lot of time considering his/her existence. If such a character were to prove its existence by thundering onto the sidewalk in front of me, I would probably just walk right by without batting an eye.

However peculiar my particular relationship with God may be, I can and do put it aside to more objectively consider the place of religion in government.

Pages: 1 2