Two quick inauguration thoughts:

1) I'm amazed at how unprofessional every single television announcer sounded today. Their remarks consisted of the same dozen one-from-column-A observations—"This truly is a great day in our nation's history" or "he has an enormous task ahead of him" or "such a gifted public speaker"—repeated ad nauseam. Even this eventually degenerated into childish gaping: "There's Bill Clinton," "There's Air Force One," "There's the Washington Monument," "Lincoln Lincoln Lincoln." I began to suspect that the commentators had little idea what was going on, like the guy who can only say "yep" and "mm-hmm" while the mechanic is explaining what's wrong with the engine. Now, I don't know that I could have done any better, and I do admittedly love the way it humanizes them, but these people's job is (ostensibly) to interpret history for us as it happens, to act as a kind of filter through which raw events become something like comprehensible. And yet in the face of actual history they become babblers like the rest of us, cluttering up the event rather than elucidating it. Please, news anchors of America, don't be afraid of dead air. Shut up once in a while. That said, all the inept commentary was kind of a nice reminder that events actually happen. I know that sounds like a stoner epiphany, but hear me out. The news is so often given to us in a sanitized, packaged form, and at times it is hard to remember that this slickly narrated, neatly organized story is actually part of the messy real world, with no easily discernible beginning or finish, the world we experience ourselves every day. To hear the announcers fumble for words was refreshing in a way, a sort of aural equivalent to removing the forest of on-screen graphics (which I think are called bugs) that attend all news shows (which, by the way, would be amazing).

2) Our new president will get most of the press today, and rightfully so, but I think the moment that most affected me this morning was seeing George W. and Laura Bush board the helicopter that would take them away from Washington. I generally agree with those who call his presidency one of the most destructive of recent years, but I couldn't help feeling for the guy, thinking about the cavalcade of emotions he must have felt—relief, sadness, pride, regret—while watching the city, whose center he had been just a few hours ago, now receding beneath him, a physical reminder of how quickly things can change.