Here was a Presidential inauguration delivered within the teeth of a storm of American carnage, but bearing the promise that this time, the storm might abate.
The 46th President, Joe Biden, stood on the steps of the Capitol, a building assaulted only two weeks before by a howling mob of insurrectionists, and listed the cascade of crises facing his nation: a pandemic that has taken as many American lives now as all those lost by the US in World War II; deep racial injustice; domestic terrorism; climate change and yes, white supremacy.
He spoke of the fragility of democracy itself but declared that it had prevailed. He instructed his nation that it must unify and end its “uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal”.
President Joe Biden talks with former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton after the inauguration. Credit:AP
Impossible to ignore, however, was the memory of Trump’s own dystopian inauguration address four years previously, when he declared an end to “this American carnage”.
He defined the carnage as inner-city poverty, rusted factories “scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation”, an education system depriving the young of knowledge, and crime, gangs and drugs stealing lives and unrealised potential.
And here in the heart of Washington DC these years later was proof not just of Trump’s failure to stop the American carnage, but to have supercharged it.
There was no crowd lining the streets, which were as empty of life as Trump’s promises. Instead, 400,000 flags fluttered on The Mall, representing the lives lost to a pandemic that Trump had first denied then thoroughly mismanaged. Those who did attend all wore the masks that Trump and his supporters had derided and turned into political weapons.
Most of those within sight of the Capitol were armed troops from the National Guard, 25,000 of them, called in to protect the arrival of a new President from the threat of rioters goaded by Trump to deny Joe Biden’s legitimacy as an elected President.
And yet, the American taste for spectacle was met in ways that seemed grand in this unusually intimate setting.
Lady Gaga, glorious in a black-and-red gown and a giant golden dove of peace pinned to her breast, lent the US National Anthem an emotion only her voice could provide.
Jennifer Lopez conjoined the Woody Guthrie classic This Land is Your Land with America the Beautiful, and for moment there, you could believe both sentiments. Right in the centre of it all, Lopez injected the words “Justicia para todos” (Justice for all), which fitted neatly with Biden’s message that “unity is the path forward”.
American poet Amanda Gorman reads her poem for the 59th Presidential Inauguration. Credit:AP
And the African-American poet Amanda Gorman, at 22 the youngest poet to appear at a Presidential inauguration, recited for Biden – at 78, the oldest President in American history – a work entitled “The Hill We Climb”.
“We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,” she intoned.
“Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy/And this effort very nearly succeeded/But while democracy can be periodically delayed/It can never be permanently defeated/In this truth/ In this faith, we trust/For while we have our eyes on the future/History has its eyes on us.”
For a long moment there, in the youthful hope of those words, all the carnage was forgotten.
US power and politics
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