We’re glad.

Despite witnessing the unprecedented sycophancy of the past few days. Despite the fact that our friends are walking around with silly grins on their faces like they’ve been popping tabs of ecstasy. Despite having to listen to breathless journalists in Washington D.C. hyperventilating as they spoke about being a part of history. “I think I just saw the top of his head! Yes that was it! This is historic!”

It’s better than the alternative.

I’m only speaking for those of us in New York and L.A. I know there are a lot of you in flyover country who don’t know what I’m talking about, but you have to understand what it is like living among people in “the business.” We’ve been surrounded by bitterness so long, we just want everyone we know to be happy for a little while.  (more…)

Considering all the price gouging going on with hotel rooms in DC, Obama’s inauguration is apparently history in the making. But as we observe this epic, monumental, never-been-done-before achievement, what exactly are we celebrating? If Toni Morrison is to be believed, William Jefferson Clinton “white skin notwithstanding,” was our first black President. As Morrison’s got both a Nobel and a Pulitzer, I for one am not going to argue with her. And Obama, being bi-racial, is only black in the strictest sense.

It’s not even correct to say that Obama is the first minority to hold the highest office in the land. Every white guy ever elected is co-owner of that distinction. As far back as the first census in 1790 white men were just 41 percent of the population and have been trending downward ever since (thirty-two percent in 2007).

So, if it’s not really about race or minority status, maybe the big deal we feel churning in our collective guts is something as bold as this: that Barack Obama is our first truly American president.

Can you have a heritage more American than Obama’s? The literal marriage of the immigrant and native. Born in our most diverse state. One without an ethnic majority, but where people of mixed race make up some 20% of the total population. There is nothing about Obama’s background that isn’t truth to the tired saw of the American melting pot. (more…)

Look, I recommend it.  Watching him do everything short of wear a fake beard and top hat is going to be tough for anyone who didn’t buy into the cult of Obama.  If, like me, you don’t think that this is somehow America’s great new chance at being “cool”….if you know that unsung heroes within the Bush administration have been fighting against human trafficking for lo these many years while Ashton Kutcher apparently waited until now to get really excited….if you know a campaign for a “within our lifetimes” addition to Mount Rushmore when you see one…well, drink with me, won’t you?  Drink, and let us hope the ‘morrow has mercy, because they won’t.

UNLESS you work for the RNC.  In that case, you old dinosaurs, you must watch soberly.  You have to sit through the whole self-congratulatory festival of “we-were-once-the-ones-the-One-said-we-were-waiting-for-but-now-everything’s-just-awesome-and-look-at-all-the-famous-people.  Watch and weep at the pretentiously magnanimous interviews and the well-shot “candid” appearances of celebrities.  Witness Bruce, Garth, The Jonas Brothers, and the thousand other young artists you could neither name nor get on the phone. (more…)