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…and therefore we, 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.

This is perhaps very subjective, but I do not prefer poetry that can not be differentiated from a High School essay filled with blunt, almost literal non-metaphors resulting from the most hackneyed and dull concepts that fill my mind with nothing other than what everyone has had no choice to have been already thinking. 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. 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. However, I do not wish to seem any further academic on this subject – I do not claim such a thing and would surely not fulfill the requirements – and so to quote my gamer friends I will only say, “FAIL! Epic Poetry Fail.”

Thankfully, the preceding serves as quite a segueing distraction to a more literal critique of the 2009 Presidential Inauguration.

The first thing that irks me, is that regardless of who the new president is or what state the economy is in, the inauguration and other such political puffery is such a mandatory saccharine display of incredibly expensive unnecessary bloated bullshit. But now…that is why we pay our taxes, correct? All every one of us really wants is a good show.

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 shitty PA that I myself will supply…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 is enough to make it clear how appallingly silly these events are. However, we are all of us too dependent on these sort of things to actually think of considering them something other than a necessary function of government. So then, I would, however, 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, I hate god. I have no belief in such a mystical entity, yet strongly hate the thing all the same. If – seriously – it were to be found publicly or privately that a god and/or devil did indeed exist and was…indeed…all…powerful…this would cause me to have words with the entity not unlike the spectacular climax to Garth Ennis‘ Preacher comic book series. Perhaps I’d end up looking worse than Arseface, but a good effort nonetheless.

Now, however strong these feelings of mine are…I can and do put them aside to more objectively consider the place of religion in government.

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