Fuck Inaugurations
They're ceremonial nonsense in the best of times and downright insulting in the worst of times.
My mom took me to Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in 1993. I remember realizing it was a big deal at the time, though I don’t remember much more than my aunt putting my older cousin on a leash for some reason and spending most of my time staring at the assholes of strangers from the nosebleeds.
In retrospect, since I was a naive six-year-old, I was duped into thinking Clinton’s ascension would instantly cure whatever seemed to ail America at the time. I spent the next ~10 years of my life thinking he had done just that.
It wasn’t until later in life that I realized, holy shit, Bill Clinton was a sex criminal who deserved to be impeached not because he received a consensual blow job from someone other than his wife but because he sexually exploited an employee. Oh, and he executed a mentally deficient man who saved the pie in his last meal “for later” as a campaign stunt to appear tough on crime to the sickos that comprise a large part of the American electorate.
A therapist would probably point out that a lot of my issues with presidential inaugurations stem from the bill of goods I got sold as a dipshit kid almost thirty years ago. Well, at least I didn’t need to hang a bunch of fancy degrees on my wall to figure that much out. It doesn’t change that they’re a joke.
An ex-girlfriend once told me I would make a terrible president because I would kill myself if I hadn’t fixed every American’s personal problems on Day 1. She’s right, and I judge every other president on that scale.
Typically we spend $100 million on the swearing-in ceremony. That number doubled this year thanks to President Business Deals inciting an angry mob of white supremacist business executives and realtors and Q-Anon freaks into storming the nation’s Capitol building and trying to overturn an election in which he lost by seven million votes.
Personally I would have held the ceremony on Zoom instead of putting the nation’s capital under military occupation for a week but hey, at least Biden didn’t get JFK’d before he took the oath and we had a full-fledged Constitutional crisis on our hands.
I think it’s dumb but I understand why we have to watch these idiots say the same words every for years like oaths mean anything at all in 2021. What I don’t understand is everything that comes after it. The concerts, the balls, and all the glad-handing as corporate pigs try to curry early favor with the new administration:
(You can read the full list of Biden’s corporate donors here.)
It’s even grosser when you realize a lot of these same corporations also donated to Donald Trump’s inauguration, which is still under active investigation by the D.C. Attorney General.
Biden ignored calls from leftist groups to reject corporate donors for his inauguration because it’s just another way for them to grease the wheels of our political system. The companies who financed Trump’s only inauguration got quite the return on their investments.
Sure, Biden doesn’t openly operate as a mob boss currying favors, but you’d have to be naive to think these corporations are shelling out that kind of cash because they’re just happy to see Biden return to office. They crunched the numbers and they expect a return on their investment.
Even in the best of times, the high-priced donor affairs that take up the rest of the day are crass and unoriginal. In a pandemic, it’s downright disgusting to see celebrities bopping around like all of America’s ills are suddenly cured. At least I was six when I thought like that. Not sure what the excuse is for anybody else older than that other than they have a terminal case of American Propaganda Brain.
I realize that some people relish the return to normalcy. To them I’d say do a little research into the administration of the last guy that successfully campaigned on that platform. He was inaugurated 100 years ago yesterday.
Normalcy is what led us to Trump. We mock MAGA stooges and rightfully so. But we also live in a country where tens of millions of Americans think Barack Obama’s biggest scandal was wearing a tan suit. That’s just as delusional as anything Trump fans have produced.
Trump won’t be a pariah. Just look at George W. Bush, who was unquestionably the worst president of my lifetime and the worst ever other than maybe Andrew Johnson.
He melted the world economy twice, basically allowed 9-11 to happen despite multiple warnings, lied our way into two forever wars that killed over a million people, signed the PATRIOT Act and bungled the response to the devastating Hurricane Katrina. Just to name a few of his greatest hits.
W. deserves a fate worse than Trump. But where is he now? Oh, yeah, hobnobbing with sex criminal Clinton and that failure Obama at yesterday’s inauguration. This was hailed by Serious People on both sides of the aisle as a display of American “statesmanship.”
As inaugurations currently stand, I’ll never watch another inauguration again. Did they take the oath of office without getting shot? OK, cool. Then it’s time for that corporate pay pig to get to work like the rest of us. Anything else is unnecessary pomp and circumstance.
THOSE WMDs. America finally has a global soccer star… We tried six methods for baking a potato and found a clear winner… The Hard Crowd: Coming of age on the streets of San Francisco… Trainers say HIIT is the best way to burn belly fat; here’s what science says… The next six months will be vaccine purgatory.