Gail Collins: Imagining the Inaugural

Imagining the Inaugural

By GAIL COLLINS
Published: January 16, 2009


Right now you may be asking yourself: How am I going to celebrate Barack Obama’s inauguration?

You may, of course, have something else on your mind entirely. Like what the chances are that the next time you get on a plane, geese could fly into both engines. Or what the heck geese are doing in New York in the middle of winter when their relatives who worked hard and played by the rules had all gone south months ago.

Or you may just be wondering how that rescue in the Hudson River would have gone if it had been led off by the Department of Homeland Security rather than New York Waterway’s director of ferry operations.

I can’t help you, people. Today I am on inauguration duty.

While there is some debate about the best inaugural address in history, it’s pretty clear that the worst was the one delivered by William Henry Harrison, who went thwacking through a tangled thicket of classical allusions for an hour and 45 minutes. (Harrison’s editor, Daniel Webster, claimed it could have been worse, and that he had killed off “seventeen Roman proconsuls, as dead as smelts.”) The weather was terrible; Harrison came down with a cold, then pneumonia and was dead within a month.

Given current beaten-down expectations, our normal approach to Tuesday’s address would be to wander around muttering “well as long as it’s better than William Henry Harrison’s...” But Barack Obama is a celebrated speaker, and our hopes are unusually high. So where are you going to be when it all happens? The options are many, including:

1. Go to Washington with the rest of the world.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/opinion/17collins.html