Apotheosis in Washington

The Apotheosis of Washington, U.S. Capitol

 

 Fellow Citizens: I am again called upon by the voice of my country to execute the functions of its Chief Magistrate. When the occasion proper for it shall arrive, I shall endeavor to express the high sense I entertain of this distinguished honor, and of the confidence which has been reposed in me by the people of united America.

Previous to the execution of any official act of the President the Constitution requires an oath of office. This oath I am now about to take, and in your presence: That if it shall be found during my administration of the Government I have in any instance violated willingly or knowingly the injunctions thereof, I may (besides incurring constitutional punishment) be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony. 

—George Washington’s second inaugural address, 1793

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

—Article Two, Section One, Constitution of the United States

Thirty-five words in front of a judge or a notary public. This is the pomp of presidential inauguration, and everything else is circumstance.

I will not watch the presidential inauguration Tuesday. I have no disrespect for the man who will be our new executive, but I refuse to glorify the office he will assume.  The president is a citizen, a magistrate, and nothing more, and his assumption of office is a thing we ought not observe.  

No man, no matter how high his office, how strong his mandate, how historic his victory, deserves the exaltation our new president will receive this week. No matter, though, for today’s president is no longer a man: he is hope bringer, protector, decider, curator and Commander-in-Chief of our National Destiny. The celebration surrounding the modern inauguration is as fit for our Imperial President as it is for caesars and kings and rulers by divine right. For the religious, this sort of adulation is an affront to God; for Americans, it is an affront to our republic. 

Once, presidents shunned ceremony, and took care to avoid ostentation. George Washington’s second inaugural address was just 140 words, delivered before a small assembly of judges, cabinet officers, and members of the Continental Congress. It was shorter even than the speech he delivered in 1789, and for good reason: Washington was careful with the precedents he set as the first president of a new republic. He rejected “your Majesty” in favor of “Mr. President.” He resisted a second term and ardently refused a third. His modest inaugural was designed to promote government of laws over men.

Thomas Jefferson was even more humble—and more determined to reject the trappings of kings. In 1801, he walked from his D.C. boarding house to the Capitol, gave a quiet address, and walked back home. That night, the third President of the United States declined a seat at the head of the dinner table.

Today, a presidential inauguration is train rides, black ties, dinners, concert balls, Marine Bands, motorcades, balloons, parades, speeches and invocations and benedictions and ceremony and celebrity—first $33 then $44 now $150 million worth. It is a spectacle built out of lego, made into holograms, broadcast to rapt millions watching Jumbotrons on the national mall. 

There is a fresco painted in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol titled “The Apotheosis of Washington.” There, the president sits in purple robes alongside Victory and War and Science and looks down on men.  The tourists shuffle through and look up and take pictures. After all, it looks beautiful.

(photo via flickr user H4NUM4N)

Loomings

I am sitting in a stiff chair in the back of the church, squinting at a golden reef that grows all the way to the ceiling. The ikonostasis is a swarm of shining ornaments inlaid with dark images of dour saints. Two priests wearing black robes, curious flat-topped hats, and stern beards stand in front of it, singing solemn lines from the Orthodox liturgy.

Another steps out from behind the wall, carrying a silver orb dangling from a coiled chain. He faces one of the icons, throws forward his arm, and swings the incense burner inches in front of an ancient portrait of Mary, one of the largest images near the center of the screen. The chain clanks terribly. He tugs it back and forth four times, each swing closer to the peeling portrait than the last. I flinch in the back.  I’m the kind of guy who still shoves his hands in his pockets around porcelain figurines of Santa Claus and cheap Wal-Mart flatware. Flailing a fiery silver softball around these relics is a job too terrible to comprehend. But as I inhale the perfume, the first good smog I’ve smelled in weeks, and listen to the clerics’ chant, all vowels and strange scales, the nervous thought subsides and I take a deep breath.

A different noise shakes me from this moment of peace, a soaring wail that starts like an old lawnmower. The müezzin at a nearby mosque is calling adhan, but unlike the Orthodox priests, he is blessed with the near-divine power of electronic amplification. He stumbles like a bluesman across the quartertones of the Islamic scale, and for a few minutes, the Muslim call to prayer plays counterpoint to the quiet chant of the priests. The lofty stacatto of the müezzin drowns out the steady Christian chant, then blends with it and breaks again. It’s a thrilling moment. I sit up, smile, and steal a glance at the other students (we’re the only ones here besides the clergy). My friends are lost in thought.

Suddenly, the müezzin cuts out, an abrupt fortepiano that leaves behind only the murmur of the priests. I’m still thrilled, but I also feel a little embarrassed.  Did that really just happen? It’s straight out of the notebook of a hack. Muslim-prayer-call-over-Christian-ritual-combining-in-unanticipated-harmony is the sort of trite extended metaphor an amateur travel writer or a clueless journalist might craft to describe Turkey as a “land of contrast where East meets West” or a “crossroads in the quest for identity.” But it really did just unfold before my ears.

I have been living in Turkey for nearly two months now, and I am getting used to moments like this—times when tired clichés suddenly become quite vivid. Another one struck a few weeks ago, as I stood under the dome of Ayasofia—the greatest structure in the world in the time of the Byzantines, later conquered by the Ottoman army of Fatih Sultan Mehmet, and overrun today by Konica-toting German tourists. Yet another before that, while I was peering at Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s silk pajamas, enshrined for posterity in a glass case at Anit Kabir, geographic epicenter of the personality cult that follows the leader to this day.

I am living in Ankara, Turkey’s capital. From the air, the city is a sea of drab tan apartments, interrupted by the occasional megamall, mosque dome, or bureaucratic building. From the ground, it is more vital: a dusty and crowded and noisy and hot and alive city that seems to have sprouted fully formed from the ground no earlier than 1930. A look last week at a fading photo album of early Republican Ankara confirmed my suspicion—despite the succession of civilizations that have inhabited Ankara, from Hatti to Hittites to Phrygians to Romans to Selcuks to Ottomans and on, in modern times the city began as a collection of official offices surrounded, more or less, by dirt and desolation.

Now, things couldn’t be more different. Ankara still feels artificial, since it is sopped in the presence of the Turkish state. But it’s also colorful, modern, and filled some of the friendliest folks I’ve ever met. This has made living in a foreign country easier than I expected—in many ways, Ankara is just like home.

In many other ways, it will never be. I am often an American insect crawling on another culture, and as hard as I may try to be a student or a traveler, in my heart and head I know I will be leaving soon. I am a tourist. I know that I will never be able to express myself in Turkish as precisely as I’d like, and fear that I will always be a polite, dumb toddler occupying the body of a 20-year-old. All this combines in an ineffable feeling of aloneness—a persistent awareness that I am a stranger, whether or not I am in a strange land.

For the rest of this year, I’ll be trying to understand this place, to stumble through clichés and stave off solitude by writing here. I hope I’ll be able to share a bit of it with you.

I managed to grab my voice recorder and capture a couple minutes of the call to prayer over the Vespers service. Click above to listen.

Globalization 1, crappy beer 0

Now that Budweiser has been officially acquired by Belgian firm Inbev, the last of America’s most iconic beers is now owned by a foreign beverage behemoth. That leaves Pabst Brewing Company, makers of inexpensive swill for dockworkers and ironic hipsters alike, as the biggest brewer in the United States. But as Travis Daub notes at FP Passport: “Pabst doesn’t even brew its own beer anymore. All 29 Pabst beers, from Schlitz, to Lone Star to Colt 45 to the legendary Pabst Blue Ribbon are outsourced to SAB Miller, based in South Africa.” Don’t be fooled by the red white and blue colors on the can: Pabst is a globalist turncoat!

So who are the remaining True Patriot Brewers? Daub offers this list, from the Brewer’s Associaton:

Pabst Brewing Co.

Boston Beer Co.

D.G. Yuengling and Son Inc.

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

New Belgium Brewing Co. Inc.

High Falls Brewing Co.

Spoetzl Brewery

Widmer Brothers Brewing Group

Redhook Ale Brewery

Pyramid Breweries Inc.

(Strikethrough mine, since PBR isn’t sufficiently ‘Merican)

What’s most notable isn’t that all these brewers are relatively small, but that they all make pretty darn good beer. If our national character must be distilled down into a six pack, I’d much rather it be Sam Adams than the watery mediocrity pushed by the big three brewers. Who says globalization destroys culture? It’s sure not happening in the beer aisle.

Nannies gone nuts

Apparently, Aztec alcohol policy was a bit schizophrenic:

Aztecs liked fermented sap, but had a legal drinking age (52) higher than their average life expectancy—although every four years they’d hold a New Year’s festival called “Drunkenness of Children,” at which all citizens, including toddlers, were required to drink.

From this entertaining review of “Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol.”

Grand new patriarchy?

Ross and Reihan expected the most incisive criticism of “Grand New Party” to come from libertarians. Kerry Howley has obliged:

Privileging one, dominant idea of the family comes with costs that R&R never really grapple with in their breezy book, and those costs fall almost exclusively on one gender. Through the tax code, R&R wish to change the relative prices of women’s options, rendering childlessness more costly and early motherhood less so. They want the federal government to stake a position on the proper role of women, and that role involves a heterosexual marriage with children. While conceding that this is politically infeasible at the moment, R&R write that “we should be willing to stigmatize illegitimacy by tying a tax relief to responsible parenting.” (Responsible parenting=parenting by legally married couples.) This is a policy that punishes poor women unable to find marriageable men, gay and lesbian partners unable to access legal marriage, and any other number of people who are responding rationally to their environment, doing the best they know how for the kids they have.

I haven’t yet read the book (seriously, $23.95?) so I’ll refrain from commenting on specific policy proposals, but I will note that the article it’s based on is a smart one, despite the fact that it “threatens to deny some individuals the minimum portion of respect required by even the most austere and undemanding conception of liberal equality.”  I think this is a leading indicator of what may turn out to be a broader political repolarization, on both sides of the aisle.

And as long as I’m on liberal equality and gender, check out this humorous and thought-provoking book review by Sandra Tsing Loh.