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Come Thursday morning, George W. Bush will be inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States, and there are several suggestions, most of them silly, about how to honor this occasion.
For several months, my email in-box has been cluttered
with invitations to join Not One Damn Dime Day.
The
idea is to protest the war in Iraq with a 24-hour
national boycott of all forms of consumer spending.
This, they say, will remind those in power that they
work for the people of the United States of America, not
for the international corporations and K Street lobbyists
who represent the corporations and funnel cash into
American politics.
And so I was asked to please do what you can to shut
the retail economy down
on Jan. 20.
I know a fair number of retail merchants. In American
tradition, small-town Main Street merchants are the
backbone of the Republican party. In reality, some of our
merchants are convinced that there's a way to make
666
out of George Walker Bush.
They've been
struggling to stay in business ever since Inauguration Day
in 2001, and some have lost the struggle.
So I don't see how depriving the survivors of income for
a day helps any worthy cause. On a bigger scale, retail
clerks are at the bottom of the wage scale. So if Not
One Damn Dime Day
succeeded in stopping the retail
economy on Thursday, then presumably some Wal-Mart clerks
-- not exactly the high and mighty decision-makers of
America -- might get sent home early and lose a few hours
of pay.
What a show of solidarity. And what you don't buy on
Thursday, you'll probably buy on Friday. Corporate America
isn't going to give a damn what you do on Not One Damn
Dime Day.
There are also plans, I have read, for people to attend the Inaugural Parade and turn their backs to the procession as the president goes by.
That seems petty. Here's this giant festival that costs about $40 million, and you travel 1,800 miles to get there, but then you turn your back on part of it? If you had arranged to see something similar, like one of those old movies about plutocratic decadence as the Roman Empire collapsed, would you close your eyes, rather than watch the spectacle?
Inaugurations certainly have changed since 1801, when
Washington, D.C., hosted its first inauguration (Washington
and John Adams took their oaths in New York and
Philadelphia). Thomas Jefferson walked up to the Capitol
attired as a plain citizen without any distinctive badge
of office,
took the oath, gave his address, and
returned to his boarding house to eat.
Even though many of us won't be able to attend this
year's extravaganza, we can still participate. The national
Republican Party has a great idea. I received an email from
Chairman Ed Gillespie asking if I would host an
inaugural party in your home.
That sounded interesting, so I clicked on the link to the Frequently Asked Questions about holding an inaugural party. Alas, it didn't get along with my browser, and so I'll have to offer these suggestions for hosting an Inaugural Party on Thursday:
Location: Your house, if you still have one. Foreclosures in Colorado went up last year.
Time: May not be critical, since conflicts with jobs have been reduced in the past four years. The unemployment rate was 4.2 percent at the first G.W. Bush inauguration in 2001; it was 5.4 percent last month.
Dress: Any shade of black will do.
Food: While roadkill or a Dumpster dive is an appropriate way to celebrate this administration's economic accomplishments, we ought to support Colorado agriculture by cooking a pot of gourmet pinto beans from Dove Creek or baking potatoes from the San Luis Valley.
Drink: Even if the prospect makes Sterno look inviting, don't serve it. Try an affordable fortified screw-top wine, aged in transit -- something like Mad Dog 20 should go well.
Activities: Ask guests to bring drills, then pretend
they're in a wildlife refuge. Or take up a collection for
your favorite billionaire. If there's a lull, play find
the weapons of mass destruction.
Hosting an Inaugural Party, as the national GOP proposes, sounds like a wonderful idea -- just as long as you go about it in the proper way, so that you'll be ready for another four years.
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