Ruminations on Coronation

And so it is official: the deification of Barack Obama has been ratified.

Tomorrow, the 19th of January, marks the beginning of President Obama’s tenure in office, and the Chancellor of UC Berkeley has graciously invited all to communally celebrate watch with an appropriate air of gravity as the swearing-in is broadcasted on a jumbotron. Refreshments will be duly served. With this final step, the separation of Church (of Obama) and State (of California) has officially been undone.

It’s not the celebration of Jesus 2.0 taking office that bothers me, or even so much the obscene expense the event must entail: it’s the sanctimonious tone with which the event is being touted – as if the reason we’re all invited to watch Barack Obama get sworn in is because he’s going to be the next president of the United States, and not because he’s set to be the millennium’s first Democrat in the Oval Office. I was in tenth grade in 2004, and even though my brother was at Cal at the time, I can’t say I remember what the environment was like in Berkeley when George W. Bush officially began his second term; still, I don’t think I’d be going too far out on a limb in saying it probably involved far fewer flags, Pibb Xtra, and jumbo televisions, and far more hunger strikes and empty threats to defect to Canada.

And yet this goes beyond the everyday worship of the Democrat, by a wide margin: never since the arrival of LeBron James in Cleveland has one man been so universally hailed as a messianic figure in America. The assumption is that Obama is set to fix all our problems in one fell swoop, and to do so with a heretofore unseen level of forthrightness and dignity, at that. Indeed, in the eyes of many, the man has seemingly become both an American hero and the greatest President in our history without so much as having been sworn in. Of course, this is not to trivialize his feat: it simply cannot be a coincidence that he’s the first black American to have ever been elected. However, I would remind the reader that no one hailed John F. Kennedy as an American hero upon his swearing in as the first Catholic President – and if you think that in the heady days of the civil rights movement Irish Catholics were not still subject to tremendous racial discrimination, you’re deluded.

I’m struck by the adjacent celebrations of the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the inauguration of President Obama. The former is the man I thank god existed – a true American hero, and a man with a clarity of vision and strength and stability of spirit that all Americans should strive for. The latter is a President-elect who, despite undoubtedly being one of the most notable black Americans in the nation’s history, is nonetheless not (certainly not yet) among the most admirable black Americans in the nation’s history. Yet in all the hubbub over the last week or so, with Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Steve Carell, Tiger Woods, and countless other celebrities of legendary-to-dubious stature celebrating the arrival of an as-yet unproven politician in office, have any of them - or anyone on TV, for that matter - stopped to pay tribute to the man chiefly responsible for ensuring that this nation would indeed “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” to see a black man elected at all?

Only time will tell what our one-term Illinois Senator with so befuddlingly little to prove does with his tenure in office. Regardless of what the world ends up thinking of him, it’s comforting to know that he’ll always be Berkeley’s adopted native son and Savior; in times as uncertain as these are purported to be, it’s one of the few things one knows he can depend on.