COMMENTARY

Burn, baby, burn

700 words

A photo of Dick Staub is available via https://religionnews.com

By DICK STAUB

c. 2009 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Is president-elect Barack Obama’s extravagant inaugural the equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burned?

Just this week, Obama warned Americans about the sickness of our national economy. Sober-minded lawmakers announced that job No. 1 is getting the nation back on its financial feet.

Yet Obama’s inaugural team is on track to raise more than $40 million for the most opulent inaugural party in history. To be fair, such excess is bi-partisan: President Bush also raised $40 million for each of his inaugural events.

Were this truly a party for the people, one might say it is a national celebration. But what drives the cost of this event skyward is not the public swearing-in ceremony, but rather the exclusive private parties attended by the high-flying inaugural bankrollers. Nearly 400 individuals have donated the maximum of $50,000.

Among the elite are financier (and Democratic donor) George Soros, actors Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson; producer Jeffrey Katzenberg; and directors Ron Howard, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis.

It can be argued that this $40 million is private (not public) money and that Hollywood glitterati have the right to use their money however they wish. But how is this transaction different from the pay-to-play politics of disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich?

According to news reports, these $50,000 donors “get access to inaugural events, including candlelight dinners with appearances by members of Congress and the Obamas and tickets to an official ball, the swearing-in ceremony and parade seating.”

These hypocritical congressmen, who are accorded the celebrity of royalty and mingle with the wealthy at candlelight dinners, are the same congressmen who self-righteously lectured the CEO’s of Ford, GM and Chrysler for traveling by private jets to hearings where they asked for mere billions of the $750 billion taxpayer-funded bail-out.

These are the same politicians who are wringing their hands about the unemployment numbers and Americans going without health care because they can’t make ends meet while their children go to bed hungry each night.

Most disturbingly, this is a president-elect who promised change in Washington and who is fond of quoting Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg address tapped into the great themes of an American system that is egalitarian and not elitist. Our nation is dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal” and that this “nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

What signal is sent in an inaugural celebration enjoyed by the few in a nation where those being celebrated are the servants of all citizens, not just the elite?

Lincoln’s second inauguration was no festive affair as war, division and economic turmoil consumed the nation. Weeks of wet weather preceding Lincoln’s second inauguration assured a soggy, sober event. Pennsylvania Avenue was a sea of mud and standing water.

Thousands of spectators stood in the mud on the Capitol grounds to hear the president who in just more than a month would be assassinated. His speech was short, only 701 words long.

Lincoln understood this was no time to party. The nation faced huge challenges, and the gravity of the situation demanded a certain austerity.

Lincoln understood that partying is an escape, not a virtue, in troubled times, a temptation not an opportunity.

When Moses went up the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments, the children of Israel grew weary of waiting for him to return. They forged a golden calf and celebrated its arrival with a drunken party.

As in so many tragedies, a tinge of humor inevitably creeps into his language as Moses hears revelry in the distance and sadly observes, “It is not the sound of the triumph of winners, nor is it the sound of the cry of defeat of losers; But the sound of singing and wild celebration I hear.”

This year’s inaugural is not a symbol of audacious hope; it signals more of the same. As it was in the days of Bush, so it is in the days of Obama. Party on, dude. Burn, baby, burn.

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)

KRE/DEA END STAUB