By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 21, 2001 ; Page F01
It felt like the hardest thing was to be a simple bystander, a mere wet American passerby with his little flag and the nifty digital camera he got for Christmas and an egg-salad sandwich wrapped in cellophane in his overcoat pocket.
This one was strange. It felt, and maybe it will never stop feeling, like two distinct worlds would do anything to ignore each other on this Inauguration Day, two realities drifting apart, deaf especially to a third reality: the optimistic language of grandstand politics, podium words, TelePrompTer truths.
People were wet and cold to the bone, blush-eared and wet-doggy-nosed. Nearer to the Capitol, the behavior was pleasant enough, but with that look of Let's get on with it and Hey, watch it with the umbrella there. From the front of the ticket-holding crowd, gazing back over your shoulder across a block of the gray masses, you wondered, when did we start looking like the Soviets? Or is it the rain, the black umbrellas? The look on some faces was that of hired extras getting direction: Now look more American, more concerned, more hopeful. People, please.
It was as if the sky above the whole of Washington was concrete, like an unloved sports stadium slated for demolition sometime soon. The majesty works better under blue sky, which is how history generally prefers to remember it.
Some years even the helicopters sound more cheerful, like they're driven around by pep squad leaders, like they should be pulling banners behind them advertising crab cake specials. This year the chopper noise came from occluded, misty places, a noise suggesting caution or siege. All over town, you got the feeling that someone was about to ask for your papers, to see some ID. The underlying vibe was unrest. Sirens wailed constantly in a fuzzy distance. It sounded like something more interesting was always happening two blocks over, at any point.
After a while there was music, a collegiate choir way, way up there, domeward in the late morning fog, singing alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. (Praise, praise, praise.) With the spit from above, it was comforting. Angels aware.
Women in damp, floppy woolen hats and wide-legged jeans who've read a bit of Noam Chomsky yelled at other women in full-length fox coats who pretended not to hear them, because they were trying to pick their way with dainty resolve through patches of mud and grit, because their husbands had gotten a few steps ahead of them, and it was important this year to stick to your own crowd.
"Your coat is [expletive] ugly," a woman yelled to a piece of quickly moving fur. She was holding a sign: "President Cheat!"
"I can't hear you," the fur-coated one taunted. She was dialing a number on her cell phone.
It was the first time in forever that you had to know who your crowd was.
Around noon, drizzle verged on snowflakes, which then never materialized, and the new president gave a speech that more or less suggested the line that divides us should not exist at all.
Which of course it does. Them, us. Us, them.
On Inauguration Day it seemed like everyone had business here, for or against, such endless agendas. They all had a "Hail to the Thief" placard, the fervent Magic Marker words melting like green tears on their frozen knuckles; or they all had jewelry and Burberry plaid umbrellas and statutory smiles. Or they had posters of aborted fetuses. (The ones with these fetus posters are always men. Why?) Or they had American flag neckties and giant Texas flags.
Both worlds seemed vaguely irritating, for reasons you can't quite describe. It felt like we were fearing fear itself, which, dang it, we know we're not supposed to do on Inauguration Day.
It felt like fear was okay for a while, until we figure the rest out.
While we wait for the shoe to drop, you could say.
The upswing to take a downturn, you could say.
That's what the weather meant, though no one wanted to say it. The nasty weather was too easy, too ripe for a soundbitten metaphor; too Bronte, too Frost, too Dostoevsky, too much like those old pictures of war protests where it rained and rained. Wet hippies. Too haiku or too much like funeral weather in TV miniseries, where you huddle under the tent and sing "Amazing Grace." Too easy to bend how the day looked to your own interpretation: Facing the weather! It means we're tough and ready America (A'murica) ready to face anything. Or, Protect yourself from the weather! It means uh-oh, watch out, bad news ahead.
Saturday was everything in its grand and impressive place, the stuff you need for an inauguration -- the Marine Band, the choirs, the reverent prayers where you hear the wind in the microphone, the groups of student council teenagers who come from halfway across the country by chartered bus (playing truth or dare the whole way), the slow approach of police lights down Pennsylvania Avenue, and staccato whoops of sirens escorting the most important man in the world.
A helicopter made a quick exit over the east side of town and people waved, because they thought it carried the former president. (It didn't.) Some cheered and some booed and it felt like we were the Munchkins waving at the pink bubble. "Go away, forever," one man shouted. ("Come back, come back, don't leave us," an intrinsically opposite man shouted.)
People began to smell like wet overcoats, like the insides of gloves, or like a crowded ski haus. They sought warmth in Au Bon Pain and Starbucks, even the people who wanted to stick it to the Man, to the Man and his corporate coffee.
Everything was wrapped in plastic: television cameras, expensive cowboy hats, loudspeakers. Choir singers wore see-through plastic ponchos over their robes. Police agents looked like action figures. Beaded drops of water hung on everything, dripping off pierced-eyebrow jewelry or covering meticulous hairdos like dew on a spider web.
It felt like things were going to change, though maybe not the way anyone wanted them to, not the winners, not the losers. It felt like the lefty-lefties were a whole lot angrier than the official picture of the day was going to portray them as being. It felt like the right was going to be able to roll their eyes at them anyhow.
People stood on port-a-potties on Pennsylvania Avenue so that their clever anti-Republican sentiments could be more clearly read. It looked like it might be fun to stand on a port-a-potty.
Stick-and-bucket drum corps of the disenfranchised roamed aimlessly, trying to drown out the cherub-faced marching bands of the Fighting Whatevers. Some of the protesters were too young to remember a Republican president and you got the idea that they're going to start doing something about it, which will mean that they'll form movements, or maybe rock bands, in garages, which will mean the end of boy bands, which will mean the end of Carson Daly.
It hasn't felt this way since those anti-Reagan posters used to show up in subway stops, since rock bands used to destroy their amps. It felt like this would trickle down, this anger, that there would soon be people staging die-ins or love-ins or bed-ins or that federally funded artists would soon be tempting excitable congressmen with pictures and paintings of things inserted into private parts.
The Bush supporters were fabulous, too. When they prayed, they prayed. When they teared up, the tears were real. Never has the gang watching the parade from exclusive balconies and rooftops above seemed more cheerful and patronizing in the parental sense, more eager to steer the world and toast the day. They let themselves get wet, they tasted victory, they gave off a contagious optimism.
People chanted, "This parade sucks. This parade sucks."
The president drove by and probably didn't hear them.
The odd and perfect thing about power: not hearing them.
The odd and perfect thing about democracy: screaming, screaming, screaming because it feels good.
It felt like we were buckling down, that all our talk about new things and new economies and new technologies and new centuries would at last shut up already.
It felt like it feels when something happens at work, something involving upper management, something we don't all agree with, but the lady who hands out the paychecks finally says, over by the Coke machine, well, that's how it is and we're all going to survive it, so do like me and get back to work. As takeovers go, it was ugly, but it was civil and everyone lived, and sooner or later, nobody would care quite as much as they did on the rainy day it happened.
