Inauguration Day 2001

Saturday, 20 January, was a day from hell, and if you are among the fifty million or so American voters, as I am, who think of the past election season as a bad dream (from which we have not yet awakened), then the cold misery of this year's Inauguration Day will strike you as exacting poetic justice. The day for me was a "first" in a few respects, and let me count the ways: 1) I did not watch this inauguration on television, as I have customarily done for the last few decades, because I was in it; and 2) I spent about five hours of the day outside, in a rain poncho over a pea jacket over a smaller bomber-style jacket over a sweater, a pair of navy-issue trousers, and thick socks in a pair of what a friend tells me are called duck boots, woolen cap, and leather gloves, yelling my head off, alongside several thousand other Americans of all stripes: "Hail to the Thief!" "The People Have Spoken (All Five of Them)," "Bush Says ‘Death Row,' We Say ‘Hell No!'" "Bush Says ‘Subliminable,' We Say ‘Abominable,'" "Ain't No Power Like the Power of the People, ‘Cause the Power of the People Don't Stop," "This Is What Democracy Looks Like, That Is What Hypocrisy Looks Like," and more. In the nation's capital, about a spacious block from the intersection of 3rd and Maryland, the Supreme Court of the United States sits poised like a battleship on the horizon. That image of an impregnable fortress, guarded over that day by a considerable police presence, ready to crack heads, I suppose, impresses my imagination indelibly and accords quite well with the way I was dressed and exactly how I've felt since 7 November, when the American electoral process came out of its clothes and ran naked down the nation's streets; by the millions, we were appalled. For whatever good it was going to do, we had come to the capital of the Free World by the busloads and the carloads to register a profound grievance with the U.S. Supreme Court.

My travel companion and I started out that morning from Owings Mills, Maryland, where we had stopped off at my niece's for the weekend. We rode metropolitan transit about thirty minutes into the city and the inaugural hordes. But well before we reached our destination, it was clear to me that nothing quite like the moment we were witnessing had ever happened before—people on the inbound Green Line, at least in the car I was riding, could somehow sense which inauguration another was headed for. A couple of guys across the aisle from me even rehearsed the Florida vote count and the scandal of the chad—hanging, dimpled, pregnant, shadowed, punched, kicked, and otherwise—as more than one passenger, I suspect, might have tried to guess, as I did, just how contained our anger was or even should be. Having negotiated the massed crowds along Maryland, walking in the opposite direction, we arrived at the Supreme Court only five minutes before the chief justice administered the presidential oath of office. We even heard the gun salute blasting the air around the Capitol. But intending to join the march sponsored by Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network and the demonstration in the behalf of voters' rights and Florida's disfranchised, we were momentarily confused when we encountered a motley array of protesters, scattered along the southern boundary of the Court. While there was plentiful activity on this front, none of it looked very organized to me, and despite the fine "woofing" being carried out by a young woman with a splendid pair of vocal chords, my sense of dispersal was strong: Where was that march for which I'd come? Shortly after a woman, dressed in magnificent mourning weeds, handed me a black cotton, gold-rimmed, handmade handkerchief, inscribed "Democracy Is Dead, Election 2000," we turned a corner, aiming...