Inaugural belies hard realities ahead

WASHINGTON — This may well be the strangest — and most contradictory — inauguration in all of America’s admirable history of the peaceful passing of power.

On the surface, everything has the tempting shimmer of sudden difference, of newness, of Barack Obama’s beloved “change.” For us wordsters, there are even new words being deliberately introduced into the dictionary of American experience.

The Obama camp has already virtually obliterated the word “liberal” from the civic parlance, so hated and reviled by many on the right and even in the middle. Take care, my fellow citizens, the new word is “progressive.” You’ll be hearing it a lot.

When Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton spoke before her Senate confirmation hearing this week in an impressive tour de force, she too had new words. Effectively throwing away the used-up old foreign policy words “hard power” (the use of the military and of force) and “soft power” (diplomacy, culture, commerce aid and health resources), she introduced, not only her new self, but “smart power.”

“Diplomacy will be at the vanguard of our foreign policy,” she said at one point, and at another: “We must build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries. Foreign policy must be based on a marriage of principles and pragmatism, not rigid ideology.” Countries considered rank enemies and nothing more by the outgoing Bush administration, like Syria and Iran, would now be the “targets of transformational diplomacy.”

As for troubled Afghanistan, she firmly backed up “her” president, calling it Obama’s “highest priority” and characterizing his war against the Taliban and al-Qaida as one of “more for more” — more U.S. troops, apparently to be transferred this spring from Iraq, and more support from other countries. Clearly here, the entire scenario of American interventionism in odd parts of the world was not going to be changed.

‘Transformational change’

Also testifying this week at his Senate confirmation hearing was Gen. Eric Shinseki, nominee to be custodian of veterans’ affairs, who averred that his term would deal not with “incremental change” but with “transformational change.” He would, he pledged, transform the Department of Veterans Affairs into a pro-active “21st-century organization” to truly care for the growing cadre and needs of the veterans of America’s growing number of wars.

So there is already a sense of the change that America’s president-elect emotively described and called for repeatedly during his long campaign.

Meanwhile, headlines bespeak a long weekend of glorious celebration, beginning with the inaugural balls and ending with the new beginning — the swearing-in of the nation’s 44th and first African-American president, while an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people jam the streets of a city with a population of roughly only a third of those numbers. (Where will they all land? Nobody knows!)

Here, too, at the moment that Barack Hussein Obama puts his hand on the Lincoln Bible and swears to defend and protect and lead the United States, America will proclaim the wondrous end to an era. For those of us who worked in or wrote about the civil rights era, this picture of the gifted young African-American president taking power will be backed up by old civil rights leaders. The Rev. Joseph Lowery, comrade of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Congressman John Lewis will provide the palpable, present, proven link between the past and the future.

The Rev. Lowery, who will give a prayer at the inauguration, has described the civil rights elders as the “Moses generation,” who opened the figurative waters of the Red Sea in America for the “Joshua generation” of Obama. “I could see,” the respected black minister said when he first, and skeptically, met Obama, “that he had a reverence for the past and a vision for the future.” And amen.

Depressing reality

But when the singing is over and the bridges are reopened, the dour and depressing reality will set in for the Obama administration, and we will see more clearly what is lurking behind the curtain of history and what the next four years are going to be about.

Universal Press Syndicate