rejoice!

Rejoice!! Tomorrow we will have a real president. After eight years of the guy who stole an election, we will finally have a president who won a majority of the votes. After eight years of a guy who pronounced it "nuke-u-lur" we will have a president who can pronounce multi-syllabic words, knows their meaning, and can use them with ease in syntactically varied sentences. After eight years of a president who lied, committed war crimes, and ran an administration based on ideology and political favoritism we will have a president who will listen to dissenting voices and make thoughtful decisions based on genuine information. Rejoice. Tomorrow we make one more step in America's long road away from a thousand isms. Rejoice. Tomorrow I will believe the arc of the moral universe is long, but it does, indeed, bend toward justice. Rejoice!

I am ever struck by the profound essentialness of symbolism. Yesterday’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial welcoming the Obamas to Washington was, of course, rife with it. But even with a replay of Marian Anderson’s famous rendition of My Country ‘Tis of Thee from the selfsame steps after she’d been denied permission to sing at Constitution Hall, even remembering Martin Luther King’s powerful words delivered also in front of Lincoln’s statue, even with all the readings from former presidents and moving verbal reminders of how far we’ve come, even with all that the most powerful event of the afternoon – more powerful even than the handsome, young, black president-to-be speaking briefly against the backdrop of real marble columns – was an almost 90-year-old Pete Seeger singing not just the happy fellowship verses of Woody Guthrie’s famous song, This Land is Your Land, but all the verses. Even the verses that talked about Americans suffering during the depression, about promises not kept, about abuse of power – he sang those too.

The ban commercial television had held against Pete Seeger was long ago, but he’d rarely appeared since the fifties. He was one of only a few artists who never sold out and never gave in through so many eras of dissent. Time has finally made its circuit. Now he sings as the conscience of music. His voice is weaker now, but his grandson, Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, sounds remarkably like him. The three of them, both Seegers and Bruce Springstein, led the assembled masses, a large young person’s choir, the attending dignitaries, and even the president-elect in singing all the verses – the ones of promise and the ones that point out how far we have to go – of the great anthem. They told the full truth, both by standing there and by singing the complete song. For profoundly symbolic moments – this one wins my vote.