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Chronic Complainer

Also In This Issue:

There's Something
About Kirsten

There's far more to Kirsten Gillibrand than meets the eye, including the championing of her U.S. Senate appointment by Chuck Schumer, who's turning out to be the most powerful New York politician in years, if not ever.

HE IN!

Mike Hein's historic inauguration ceremony ushers in a new and more accountable form of government for beleaguered Ulster County -- we're pulling for him anyway.

Nobody’s Business
As their parent company goes into receivership, Taconic Press (weekly newspapers covering Dutchess and Putnam counties and The Independent (Columbia) go the way of the dinosaur, creating a gaping hole in the community journalism landscape in the Mid-Hudson region, and a golden opportunity for someone else to move in and screw up just as bad.

Sick Sudoku Solution
The answer to what puzzles you is here!

In the
Dec./Jan. Issue:

Indian Winter

Since WAMC has been bringing up the subject of American Indians in the aptly named Empire State of late, it seemed timely to weigh in with this old chestnut from the vault, if only to educate Joe Donahue, Sarah LaDuke and company that things were more complicated than they've led listeners to believe, and that the mighty Iroquois weren't the only game in town.

Nobody’s Business
Welcome to Tax Hell, USA!

Toward a Property Taxpayer's Bill of Rights
Nora Post tells it like it is.

Sick Sudoku Solution
The answer to what puzzles you is here!

In the
Oct./Nov. Issue:

Wikman's War

A modern-day Don Quixote figure tries his hand at river piracy to make an obscure point.

This Debate’s for You!

Doesn’t anybody else notice that the big Presidential-looking eagle seal behind the debating candidates is THE ANHEUSER BUSCH LOGO!!!? (without the big ‘A’ ). There’s a reason for that.

Celente was Right
The Hudson Valley’s resident prognosticator had it right on the money way back in August 2007: we’re toast. Buy gold, guns and ammo, and don’t give up that self-storage unit just yet. You’ll probably be living in it.

Nobody’s Business
What if Barack Obama really is the Antichrist?

“All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”
-- H. L. Mencken

News Links
WAMC Northeast Public Radio
ReadMedia Newswire
Ulster Publishing (Mid-Hudson)
Daily Freeman (Upper Mid-Hudson)
Kingston Community Radio
Poughkeepsie Journal (Mid-Hudson)
Journal News (Westchester/Putnam)
Times Herald-Record (Orange, Rockland, Sullivan; Ulster)
Albany Times Union

Blog Links
Kingston Citizens
Blaber News
Cahill on Kingston
Ulster County Politics

Other Interesting Links
LieKiller.com
Mt. Losemore.com

Interact with Us
E-mail our editor

Or
Comment, Connect or Blog at
Chronic Complainer

Publisher and Editor
Steve Hopkins: steve@hvchronic.com

Associate Publisher Emeritus
Paul Joffe:
pauljoffe@pauljoffe.com

Contributors
Molly Eagan and Paul Joffe. More To be announced. I look forward to working with others who are on deck. Writers may feel free to contact the publisher and make a pitch, or throw something up on the Chronic Complainer (see above) that catches our jaundiced eye. All inquiries are welcome!

Report from Washington

By Molly Eagan

Setting Aside Childish Things

A born anarchist’s quest for patriotism at the Obama Inauguration

As George Bush and Dick Cheney entered the platform of the Capitol on Tuesday, Jan. 20, the crowd broke into song: “Nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, hey hey, goodbye!” It occurred to me that this was not just symbolic of a crippled, outgoing administration. Their exit and the crowd’s song represented an end to the indifference of youth, especially as expressed in the ’80s and ’90s. My peers (and at times myself) were often more interested in who would win Survivor than who would win in the U.S. Senate. It often felt like there was nothing we could do to change things. And here we were, having done something.

I was right behind the reflecting pool, which was frozen solid. Behind me, a million mittens clapped in the frigid cold. The Capitol was dotted with people. I could see the arched doorway through which Obama would walk, but a television camera on a crane blocked a clear view. Around me, people were swaying with anticipation. I felt heavily the responsibility of witnessing history.

At 6:30 that morning as the sun came up, people began slowly converging from side streets into the mass that would fill the Mall. I walked from Dupont Circle (about three miles away), and it was as silent as a vigil. Near the Washington Monument, people milled around, throwing shoes at a giant blow-up Bush, cheering at the MSNBC booth, and buying bedazzled t-shirts. Small pockets of crowds formed, chanting, “Obama! Obama!” People were actually nice to each other, exchanging greetings, stories of where they came from, and how important this day was in their lives. Christine Johnson had taken a bus, which had broken down at one point, from Chicago with her two kids. “This is the best day of my life,” she said. “I never thought I would see this day!” And Joan Rice of Ellenville exclaimed, “A black man in the White House! It’s a beautiful thing!”

I was brought up a revolutionary (not a terrorist, for all of you who don’t know the difference). My parents were married in 1968 during the takeover of the Columbia University administration building, protesting the Vietnam War. They said their vows by candlelight and were pronounced children of the new age. But the new age turned sour with the reign of Ronald Reagan in the ’80s. And for this, and many other reasons, I was taught to question the American flag. To my parents it was a symbol of the blood we’d shed around the world.

So there on Inauguration Day, the first time a volunteer held out a little American flag on a wooden stick, I couldn’t take it. Despite the promise of a new administration, which hadn’t yet had the chance to prove itself, I didn’t see myself as a flag-waver. But Old Glory seemed to follow me wherever I went. Further down the mall, I saw it in a port-o-potty. Then, I almost tripped over one on the steps of the Smithsonian. It beckoned me from the rung of a gate in front of the Native American Museum. Still, my mother’s voice echoed in my head. I wasn’t ready to take it.

Closer to the Capitol, the idyllic scene on the Mall turned to chaos when Harriet Dixon of Atlanta stopped telling me about her childhood in the South and started using her cane as a weapon. For an hour, we were gridlocked, and I was sure I would spend the duration of the inauguration staring at the back of the brown coat smashed against my face. But Terri Gittens from Kingston said standing in the crowd felt like everyone was finally “together,” and that we could “finally shed all those things that held us apart.”

Nearby, a man quizzed his 8-year-old granddaughter on American history. She rattled off the birth and death dates of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. “So that our children may …?” he questioned her. “Be free,” she answered.

I had also been taught about history from an early age. While other children were going to the playground, I was visiting New York City galleries, looking at photographic evidence of the latest violence in El Salvador. At an awards ceremony at my grade school gym, my parents were the only ones who didn’t stand during the Pledge of Allegiance. We went to demonstrations the way other people went to church – once a month if we were feeling particularly guilty about something the government was doing, which was often, as Reagan was funding mass killings in the Contra wars. Lessons learned in childhood are hard to shed.

As I stared down at the trampled grass between the feet of the people around me, a flag lay on the ground, its white stars stained brown. When the crowd swelled, my feet almost rose off the ground as I was carried forward, anchored by a tall Black man in front of me who held his arms out behind him in case I fell. We moved forward again and a few minutes later again, for about an hour, until I was finally squeezed through the gate to my section like a funnel.

In 1994, when I was 18, I got dressed up in a miniskirt to vote for Bill Clinton. (I’d seen him on MTV!) But eight years later I was at George W. Bush’s second inauguration, protesting, after he stole the election. My generation, it seemed, had also stolen terms like “revolution,” branding them for products. I often went to protests alone, leaving my disinterested peers behind. As John Mayer said, we were “sitting around waiting on the world to change.”

My parents always told me that the legacy of the ’60s would reassert itself – that the generation they had given birth to would make them proud. And as I stood hunched against the cold among the millions of cheering people, I felt proud for them. Around me, a sea of flags waved, and people cheered as Obama took his oath. Most closed their eyes and stayed quiet as he spoke. Tears came from a woman’s eyes as she held tight to her husband.

I kept waiting for Obama to say something like, “I want to give a shout out to my peeps standing in the cold!” But that was something Bush might say. Obama was too presidential. Yet as an agnostic, I did appreciate his nod to those of us “non-believers,” which made me feel included. And his acknowledgment of the “petty grievances, false promises, and worn-out dogmas” of the Bush administration made George visibly squirm. His numerous referrals to the working class – those who “toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth,” and “the men and women who struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw” – brought applause. I got giddy when he spoke of restoring science to its rightful place.

A woman in a wheelchair, who said only that her name was Ann, held out her flag to me when she saw I didn’t have one. I took the flag and watched it stand stiffly against the background of the Capitol – its square of stars folded under. I shook the flag to try and make it wave, and the folded corner of stars shook loose from underneath. It rattled on its little wooden stick and then waved slightly, blending into the blur of flags around it. It felt strange to become one of a million patriots cheering our president. It was something I never thought I would do. I still remain wary of any administration, but in that moment I felt ready to shed my childhood anarchism. The same goes for my father, who has grudgingly acknowledged that we are “living in a Capitalist democracy.” Despite some extreme leftists who compare Obama to Hitler, and the extreme right who want to see him fail, my father feels some sense of hope. I believe my mother, if she had lived to see it, would give our new president a chance, too. As for me, I am definitely ready to move on.