Perspective

Looking forward to Barry O's inauguration and the expected crowds, the government has officially declared that Washington D.C. will be a disaster area on January 20th.

I think that's a little over the top, openly declaring it to be a disaster area I mean, even though I started thinking of D.C. as pretty much of a disaster area at about the time Lyndon Johnson won reelection when I was a sophomore in high school in 1964. I was pretty ill informed back then. As the years went by I became better informed. I did enough reading about American history to attain some perspective and realize how naive I was back in high school.

Now I know that Washington D.C. has been a disaster area since at least July 4th of 1826 when both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died and the corrupt rapscallions down there realized there were no more of the founders around to look over their shoulders. July 4, 1826; that was the date when they started losing all shame. Not that they had a heck of a lot of shame to lose, because they were the natural product of democracy. And American Democracy, like all democracies, was doomed from the start. The amazing thing is how long it's more or less lasted. Even more amazing is that it seems well enough established to have at least a a certain amount of limping life in it, thank God.

For Winston Churchill was right on the money on the subject. "It has been said," he famously pronounced, "that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

Which sort of gets me back to my point about officially declaring Washington to be a disaster area. It's much too late in history to take that step. And it's much too early in Barry Obama's contribution to history to make his inauguration seem like the reason for doing it.

Meanwhile, here's a pretty funny article by Robert Ferrigno of National Review that puts some perspective on the changeover from George Bush to Barack Obama.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWQ0YTk4YWY5ZDU5ZWE4ZGU1YTk0YWU3NzYyNzY4OTM=