Note: As a student of the U.S. presidency, I’m
chagrined that we haven’t been treated to a first-rate
inaugural address since John F. Kennedy delivered his
ghostwritten masterpiece on January 20, 1961. You have to
agree that forty years is a long time to go without
oratorical gratification. To compensate for this dearth of
declamatory drama, I’ve concocted my own inaugural address
despite the dwindling likelihood of my ever being elected
chief executive. If I were somehow mistaken for an actual
president-elect and allowed to take the oath of office, here’s
what I might say to the waiting nation:
Mr. Ex-President, Mr. Chief Justice, honored guests, my
fellow Americans:
I stand before you today humble yet proud, ambivalent yet
resolute, small yet tall. I have taken an oath to preserve,
protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,
even though all I remember offhand is the preamble. Upon
this very spot where Lincoln urged us to bind up the nation’s
wounds, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt told us that the
only thing we have to fear is fear itself, where JFK asked
us to ask not, where Jimmy Carter said many fine things that
nobody can remember, I pledge myself -- before the assembled
crowd, before the vast television audience, before the
invisible Cameraman who videotapes all our deeds for future
reference -- to honor the great office entrusted to me by
your state electors, judges and ballot-counters. I say to
you now, my fellow Americans: I will not shrink, I will not
fold, I will not wrinkle in the service of my country.
I have assumed the presidency at a pivotal and
essentially paradoxical point in American history. On the
one hand, we stand alone as a world power, a titan of
technology, a mammoth of mammon, a commanding cultural
influence upon all nations civilized, uncivilized and
post-civilized. In short, we rule. We lead, and the world
follows. We laugh, and the world laughs with us. We put on a
show, and the world lines up at the box office. Our military
and our universities, our laboratories and our healthcare
facilities, our carbonated soft drinks and our branded
sportswear are the envy of every nation. Somewhere at this
very moment, twelve thousand miles away on a remote hilltop
in Sumatra, a family of ten is clustered around a television
set enjoying "Baywatch" and consuming an
extra-large bucket of KFC chicken. That’s influence, my
fellow Americans.
But let me speak plainly, without pusillanimous
prevarication: I must share with you my honest apprehension
that too much of our recent success has been built upon sham
and flummery, and that the sweet watermelon of our triumphs
might contain the slippery black seeds of our decline.
You might ask why your newly elected president, the chief
publicist of American potency and defender of our national
self-regard, would choose to make an honest confession that
he fears for our country’s future. You might ask why he
would feel the need to make an honest statement at all,
especially during his inaugural address. Let me tell you
why.
We Americans are traditionally an extroverted and
unpretentious tribe. We laugh at ponderous French
philosophers and dour German Expressionists, assuming we’ve
heard of them in the first place. We prefer the crisp light
of a fast-food restaurant to the dark haze of a Rembrandt
self-portrait. We favor the practical over the profound, as
we always have, as perhaps most of us should; after all,
doers don’t have time to be dreamers. But lately, my
fellow Americans, I’ve come to believe that our souls are
in peril, that they’re in danger of turning into a hard
and opaque plastic substance like our credit cards and cell
phones.
Listen to me: I love America. I love it the way I love
dogs, daydreams and the prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I’m
not here to ease your minds about the state of our nation; I’m
here to provoke you, irritate you, rouse you from the warm
and cozy featherbed of national complacency. You see, my
fellow Americans, I fear we’re slowly and unwittingly
abandoning the virtues that made us not only a great nation
but a good one: a fundamental decency of character,
skepticism toward the bogus and the pretentious, a fine
balance between self-reliance and neighborly concern, a
preference for baseball above all other sports and, not
least of all, simple American horse-sense. We might not be
aware of it, but we’ve been making choices that are
leading us away from our roots, away from our best selves.
What kind of nation are we choosing to become? Let me tell
you what I see.
I see Americans distracting themselves with the products
of popular culture. I see children hypnotized by electronic
games, transformed into catlike creatures intent on swatting
anything that moves. I see their older brothers and sisters
adopting the language, music and attire of streets they’d
never be brave enough to visit. I see them cultivating a
studied insolence popularly known and venerated as
"attitude." I see their clueless parents cringing
in fear and perplexity. I see most of us applauding and
worshipping mediocre celebrity-gods, those flimsy successors
to Zeus and Aphrodite who, thanks to our support, amass more
wealth in a single month than most of us do in a lifetime.
How readily we forget that our pop culture is an artificial
creation of the entertainment industry, not an expression of
our own souls. How easily we mistake energy for talent,
glibness for charm, sarcasm for wit. Smart one-liners can
disguise a dumb culture. Always remember, my fellow
Americans, that celebrities aren’t better than you -- they’re
simply more famous. I’d urge you to stop reading about
their charmed lives and start creating your own.
What kind of nation are we choosing to become? I see
athletes, those former symbols of heroism and clean living,
now fattening themselves as the overpaid, overindulged
courtesans of big money. I see the schoolchildren who
worship them, growing up ignorant and insolent in schools
that no longer take pleasure in the rigors of teaching. I
see a generation of students who don’t know Homer from
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow... who manage to slip through the
system without being able to compose a grammatical greeting
card message. Worst of all, I see turncoat university
scholars dismantling the monuments of Western civilization
to serve a political agenda -- an agenda dictated by their
own hysterical resentments and borrowed beliefs. They teach
propaganda instead of poetry, class war instead of classics.
Political correctness reigns in academia to the point that
students can be failed or expelled for not parroting the
party line. We need more students and professors banding
together in the cause of free thought, standing up before
the intellectual tyrants and shouting "Humbug!"
Our colleges and universities must break the stranglehold of
the ideologues and once again become gardens where the
healthy green shoots of true scholarship can thrive.
What kind of nation are we choosing to become? I see a
nation of a thousand subcultures, ingrown and inbred: MBAs
and performance artists, bikers and rare book collectors,
computer hackers and health-food fanatics, rock climbers and
Rastafarians. I call it the boutiquefication of the American
spirit. We’ve become fragmented and fussy, more attentive
to our little storefronts than to our common welfare.
Individualism within a single nation is healthy and
commendable; conformity within a thousand sub-nations is
not. Furthermore, I see a people divided by the narrow
passions of special interests: women pitted against men,
blacks against whites, gays against straights, pro-lifers
against pro-choicers, fundamentalists against heathens.
Those who battle for the progress of their own people tend
to forget that no group of Americans has been exempt from
suffering, and that no individuals within those groups can
be blamed for the inequities of the past. It’s time for us
to stop the fashionable flogging of white Protestant males
for the sins their ancestors may have committed; remember
that they also fought the Revolutionary War, drafted the
Bill of Rights and invented the electric light bulb. Even
the victims of prejudice can be prejudiced, just as the
prejudice of others made them victims in the first place.
Prejudice is the psoriasis of the human condition: it’s
unsightly and it never completely vanishes, but with a
little care we can keep it under control. We must resolve to
stop identifying our fellow citizens by the badge they
happen to be wearing on their lapels. All of us are
individuals, not interchangeable representatives of a tribe.
Look to your neighbor’s soul, not his badge. Look to your
own soul as well, and keep your badge in a drawer.
What kind of nation are we choosing to become? I see
Americans in the workplace, funneling their skills and
energy into their jobs, ten or twelve or even sixteen hours
a day, beyond what any company has a right to demand. Why do
our corporations expect their people to produce beyond their
capacities? Because they must appease the moneyed
speculators who gamble with the company stock. Investor
loyalties are notoriously fickle these days, so a company
must continually push harder and longer to meet
expectations. A larger and even more disturbing question
remains: Why are so many employees so eager to sacrifice
their personal lives for their company? Management has
successfully enlisted their enthusiasm by transforming the
workplace into an athletic field, complete with teams and
rallies and peppy motivational slogans. In fact, it seems
that "company" has almost replaced
"country" as the primary allegiance of our
workforce, as transient as that allegiance might be. I say
to those who fight valiantly for the advancement of their
companies: save a little of that fighting spirit for your
country as well; we never fire those who show us loyalty.
What kind of nation are we choosing to become? I see an
ominous and growing gulf between those who have and those
who don’t, those who succeed easily and those who struggle
continually. It’s the sort of gap that existed in most
societies, ancient as well as modern, shortly before they
toppled from a combination of popular resentment and inner
rot. We’ve never experienced a violent social revolution
in America, and we never WANT to experience one -- now, in
the next hundred years, or beyond the next ice age. So how
do we narrow the wealth gap while still recognizing the
right of successful people to achieve their dreams? In any
free society, there will always be those who rise through
their own efforts, those who have success handed to them,
those who fail and those who never try. We can guarantee
only opportunities, not results. We can’t tear down the
gated communities that shelter the winners. But we must
strive to trim some of the overabundant plush and
perquisites enjoyed by those who gain entrance to the
achiever’s club. And we must always reward effort, even at
the humblest levels. I feel strongly that anyone who works
full-time for a company deserves to earn at least ten
percent as much as the highest-paid executive. I feel so
strongly about it, in fact, that I plan to fight for the
implementation of both higher minimum wages and -- for the
first time ever -- reasonable compensation limits throughout
the business and entertainment world. No longer will
overpaid investment bankers win holiday bonuses equivalent
to the annual salaries of two dozen high school teachers. No
longer will we have to watch inadequate CEOs escape after a
few years at the helm with golden parachutes worth twenty or
thirty or a hundred times the lifetime earnings of a
hardworking secretary or clerk. It’s not a comprehensive
solution to the growing gap between the rich and poor, but
it’s a start.
What kind of nation are we choosing to become? I see a
people transfixed by the allure of merchandise and
technology. We strive to buy the things our culture tells us
we need: colas and luxury cars, big-screen televisions and
handheld electronic gadgets full of buttons and data. We
Americans like to push buttons; they give us the happy
illusion that we can control our lives. That’s why we’re
so in love with gadgets, needed or not. We’ve come to
insulate ourselves with technology, forsaking the chaotic
world of sights and smells in favor of clean electronic
desktops with our favorite haunts all neatly bookmarked.
With a simple click of a mouse we can choose our
environment, chat with inaudible friends, check our stock
prices or buy a new computer to replace the one we’re
using. In America we’ve even gone so far as to define
ourselves in terms of the merchandise we buy: we wear
product logos and designers’ names proudly on our persons,
as if we have no names of our own to show the world. Why
have we turned to material goods for status and solace? For
many of us, our faith in God has faltered and we no longer
find consolation there. We turn to contemporary artists and
writers who no longer speak to us, who have forgotten how to
communicate in terms of recognizable human emotions; they
ignore us or desecrate our values, so we look elsewhere for
meaning. We find it in merchandise. We wear those designer
labels. We crave exotic foods whose names only sophisticates
can pronounce. We desire a truly uncomfortable degree of
comfort. In the end, we try to remake ourselves into
something we’re not, and we break with our own vital
roots.
I say to you, my fellow Americans, this is the kind of
nation we’re choosing to become. Would Lincoln feel at
home in postmodern America? Would Washington or Jefferson or
Louisa May Alcott? Can you picture Mark Twain lecturing to a
university faculty today, his audience frigid with the
intellectual ice of political correctness? Can you imagine
Ben Franklin’s opinion of multi-level marketing schemes?
Can you see Teddy Roosevelt pacing the aisles of Toys R Us
in search of action figures to pacify his young sons? Would
Will Rogers like the men who run Wall Street?
In the America of today we find idealism and cynicism,
amiability and animosity, lust and weariness, ambition and
resignation. We find innocence and degeneracy strangely
mingled. The one traditional American virtue that still
flourishes today is the spirit of enterprise. But what kind
of value is our enterprise producing? Material abundance,
yes. Diversion, certainly. We’re a people perpetually
entertained but never satisfied; we’re obsessed by the
pursuit of happiness now more than ever. All of us deserve
to be happy, but we can’t get there by drinking Pepsi or
watching Oprah or even reading self-help books. In fact,
despite the best wisdom of Thomas Jefferson we can’t
really pursue happiness at all. We have to live in a way
that generates happiness as a by-product. We need to slow
down, take a leisurely walk, pet a dog, fly a kite. We need
to engage our souls in worthy projects. We need to get
reacquainted with ourselves and our neighbors. If we want to
know where we’re going, we have to remember where we came
from.
Most politicians would promise you solutions the way
self-help authors hold out the certainty of happiness. Let
me tell you this: only a fool or a charlatan is certain of
anything. Politicians are careerists who calculate
everything to their advantage, including their choice of
friends and dinnerware. Don’t expect politicians to solve
your fundamental problems. The government can build you a
highway or ease your tax burden, but none of us should
expect the government to patch up the holes in our lives. If
you’re frustrated or unhappy, you have to do some
thinking. Unlike most previous presidents, I’ll make it my
duty to make you think. I’ll be asking plenty of important
questions, and I’m not sure if I’ll have the answers.
All I can do is make speeches, set the tone and hold up a
map so we can see where we’re headed.
Above all, I want you to think for yourselves. Be
skeptical, even cynical. Read more, know your own heart and
don’t fall for every cultural fad that comes your way.
Hold tight to a core of personal beliefs, however
unfashionable you suspect those beliefs might be. Risk being
called a naysayer rather than leaping with the lemmings.
Your values are your anchor; never abandon them simply
because they’re out of favor.
Before my administration is out, I would like to lead our
beloved nation back from the edge of our moral and cultural
precipice, a crisis engendered by our very success. But, in
a larger sense, it is not for me to lead; it is not for you
to follow. I dream of an America made up not of leaders nor
of followers, but of free, stubborn and opinionated citizens
who think for themselves, act from their own brightest
impulses and know when they’re being hoodwinked.
We must labor not under the illusion that the road ahead
will be easy. At the same time, we must fear not that it
will be hard. With virtue as our compass and knowledge as
our road map, with technology as our steering wheel and
inner fortitude as our filling-station, we will find the way
to America’s best destiny so help us God.
