In Norwegian, the word for inauguration, innsettelse, shares a root with bisettelse, the word for funeral. On the day after Joe Biden was sworn in, my friend Roger in Oslo joked that he’d watched the whole bisettelse on TV.
At a time like this, the only options for a sane freedom-lover are revolution, drugs, and gallows humor.
I watched the bisettelse, too. I thought Lady Gaga did a spectacular job with the National Anthem. She was a terrible choice, though. Her vivacity served only to underscore, by contrast, the fact that the new occupant of the White House is a walking corpse.
While he was delivering his address, I was so focused on the question of the day—would he get through it without zoning out?—that I barely noticed how vapid and mendacious the speech itself was.
But it was both of those things, in spades—vapid and mendacious.
It was ironic to find oneself listening to such a piece of drivel after four years during which the media told us, repeatedly, that Donald Trump spoke at the level of a middle schooler—and spoke too roughly and bluntly, in a style that was scandalously “unpresidential.”
True enough. He shot from the hip. He didn’t waste his audiences’ time with platitudes, with pap. Unlike Barack Obama, Trump didn’t fancy himself an orator come down from Olympus to turn mere words into glorious music.
[Read It All]
See Also:
(1) National Guardsmen ‘banished’ to D.C. parking garage, forced to leave Capitol
(2) FBI Probing Allegation That Woman Stole Laptop From Pelosi’s Office to Sell It to Russia
(3) CNN Demands Cable Companies Blacklist OAN and Newsmax TV
(5) KY Republicans Censure Mitch McConnell After His Outrageous Attack on President Trump
