So, I went to the Inauguration. It was the first time I had been to one. Since I got the invitation at the last minute, it was not as well-planned as I like. The timeline:
3:00 a.m.: Get up.
3:20 a.m.: Leave Philadelphia with "silver" ticket.
~5:30 a.m.: Learn from MD Dept. of Trans. signs that Greenbelt Metro station's 3,399 parking spaces are full and am advised to go to the College Park station.
6:00 a.m.: Arrive at College Park.
6:30 a.m.: The farecard machines go down and hundreds of people are lined up out the door. Metro staff open up the gates and everyone pours onto the trains.
7:00: Arrive Chinatown Metro station. They let us out without paying.
~7:20 a.m.: Line up on 3rd & D Streets NW with 10,000 others waiting to get in.
7:45 a.m.: To cheers, we are released into the I-395 tunnel.
8:15 a.m.: End up on the other side of the Mall, and are directed to get into a line that stretches back ... and back ... and back. End of the line is around Virginia Ave. & 6th St. SW, creeping toward the gate at 3rd St. & Independence Ave. SW, about a half mile.
10:30 a.m.: Gate in sight at 3rd & Independence.
10:40 a.m.: No one is getting in. Rumint is that silver is full and no one else will be admitted. Midwesterners and West Coasters start to give up and leave. The East Coasters start to get mad.
10:50 a.m.: Chants of "Let us in!" start. People are waving their tickets in the air. Things start getting ugly. A big, tough-looking guy plows through the crowd next to me, yelling, "Nigger coming through!" The white people don't say anything, but another African-American guy - not as big - turns around and stops him:
"Going through the gate," he says, meaning by main force. "What are you all gonna do, stand here? I'm going through. Fuck it."
"Not today, man. Not today."
The argument or the will of the crowd makes the tough guy stand down, but he's also fired us all up. He's right.
11:00 a.m.: Program on the mall starts. More people in the crowd abandon ship, but the rest of us surge forward toward Independence Ave. The cops are outnumbered and start backing up to avoid being overrun. People push the barriers apart and break through. A cheer goes up. The cops relent and start clearing the barriers out of our way. We spill out onto 3rd Street and eventually end up dead center of the Mall. Clear line of sight to the podium, but can't make out individuals except on the jumbotron a few hundred yards away to our left.
11:20 a.m.: President Bush announced and booed. First singing of, "Nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, goodbye."
~11:35 a.m.: Rick Warren. Gay guys near me make cutting remarks.
11:40 a.m.: The Queen of Soul. The PA system doesn't do her justice.
Skipping a bit here because it's boring.
12:06 p.m.: Barack Hussein Obama becomes 44th President. People go nuts.
The speech, like the one in Invesco, doesn't really do much for me. Again, people at home enjoy it more than people there.
12:31 p.m.: Speech finished, I speed off to the Waterfront Metro station where they let us through without paying again and ride back to College Park.
4:30 p.m.: Arrive back in Philly, and realize I haven't eaten or drunk anything all day. Go to Plough, remedy that. And here we are.
The next time the first black President gets inaugurated, I will do things differently.
So it turns out that a lot of people with better tickets than mine didn't get in at all. The most plausible explanation seems to be that they just gave away too many. Each individual member of Congress has an incentive to get as many tickets as possible, and they don't care about the countervailing consideration - there ain't that much room. It's the Tragedy of the Commons: Each maximizes their own return, and the result is the good is destroyed for everyone.
I don't understand why you're not completely wiped out. I came home today and feel asleep at 1 pm or so and just now woke up.
Posted by: Roxanne | January 21, 2009 at 06:52 PM
It's nice to hear you got there...I was wondering.
Posted by: PennyDreadful | January 22, 2009 at 01:37 AM