|
Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
January 22, 2009
The Glorious 20th, So Very American!
There is an annual
festival in Sri Lanka known as the Esala Perahera. It has everything,
including a parade of richly-decorated elephants, drummers and dancers,
food and clothing stalls, and all sorts of entertainment for children.
But above all, it has people hundreds of thousands of them. The
organizers told me it was a million, but people always inflate crowd
numbers, don't they?
I wandered, a sole
Westerner through the throng, amazed at its security as much as its
size. This, I thought, could never happen in America. If we had half as
many people, there would be incidents. By incidents I mean stampedes,
violent crime, tension between racial groups and teenagers just behaving
badly. Sri Lanka, I thought, even in the midst of its civil war with the
Tamil Tigers in the north of the island, is a place of peace; a civil
place, where you can be outnumbered by hundreds of thousands and still
feel secure, respected and inviolate.
Tuesday made a liar of
me.
The largest-ever
gathering of Americans to descend on Washington came for many reasons,
but above all to celebrate America. Nominally, the millions (is that an
exaggeration?) came to inaugurate Barack Obama this slight
African-American who has come to Washington from Chicago like some 21st
Century Lochinvar, ready to unite the tribes and lead them away from
their tribulations.
But it was not Sir
Walter Scott's percussive poem that flooded my mind as I was watching
Obama's inauguration, but the lines from the gloriously jingoistic
speech that Shakespeare gave his Henry V to deliver on the eve of his
great victory against the French at Agincourt: . . . And gentlemen in
England now-a-bed/Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here/And
hold their manhoods cheap . . .
The outpouring of
feeling on the Mall was spiritual; one of those outpourings that
occasionally grips human beings collectively and transcends politics,
race, religion, philosophy and the other manifestations of our tribal
rigidities. It was an outpouring of something deep in the human heart,
that inner need to celebrate as well as to mourn. It was the happy side
of the same thing as the sadness that gripped the world when Princess
Diana died. Then it was a need to cry, to acknowledge the pain of the
human condition. On the Mall it was the need to celebrate, to rise above
our lesser selves and feel a oneness with possibility.
I was five years old
when World War II ended in Europe. But I remember the parade in Cape
Town, South Africa. I remember waving my little Union Jack (it got
torn), my father looking so handsome in his Royal South African Navy
uniform, and the mood. Oh, the mood. Blacks and whites, English and
Afrikaners put aside all of their bitter history to hug, kiss and dance.
They were jubilant.
All these years later,
there was something of that feeling in Washington not only because
many had repudiated the excesses of George W. Bush, but also because
collectively we had put aside the racism of our history for something
very, very American: A new beginning.
The celebrants on the
Mall knew they would look good in the eyes of the world and that made
them feel even better. Who doesn't want to be well thought of, even in
Old Europe?
It was only one day,
but what a grand American day. Bigger than a gigantic gathering in Sri
Lanka, not quite as wonderful as the end of war, but a vaulting day for
the spirit. American exceptionalism is a concept used more for nefarious
purposes than honored when it is at hand. It was at hand on Tuesday.
© 2009 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
Click here to talk to our writers and
editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.
To e-mail feedback
about this column,
click here. If you enjoy this writer's
work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry
it.
This
is Column # LK081.
Request permission to publish here. |
