“We want to see the Wizard!”
“The Wizard? But nobody can see the great Oz. Nobody’s ever seen the great Oz. Even I’ve never seen him!”
“Well then, how do you know there is one?” —The Wizard of Oz
This is the end.” The man in front of me in the dark uniform steps toward me and repeats himself, but the sentence sounds so ominous that, for a moment, I’m completely dumbstruck. The end?
|
READ MORE FROM OUR INAUGURATION FEATURE • Celebrating Obama with Monroe • Barack in the John Paul Jones • What your dreams of Obama say about you • QCC hails our Organizer in Chief |
It’s the day before the Inauguration, and I’m in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, making my way through photographer Richard Avedon’s “Portraits of Power” exhibit. I arrived in Arlington at the home of my friends Danny and Christina at 7:30am. By 9:30am, I’d walked to the Russell Senate Building to pick up my ticket to the “Orange Section” seats for the 44th swearing-in ceremony. Ticket in hand, I headed west towards the art gallery, stopping to take a photo of some Texas Democrats in front of the White House fence and encountering a teenager singing to herself as she passed by me. “We’re off to see the Wizard! The wonderful Wizard of Oz!” Then: “I wouldn’t go out in this cold for the Wizard.”
“This is the end,” the Corcoran employee repeats, then explains that, to experience the exhibit correctly, I can’t simply jump to the last portrait. So I start again.
There’s a succession of portraits from the Civil Rights Movement—a young Martin Luther King III, the meaty paw of heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, Malcolm X. A 1976 photo of Ronald Reagan, who looks vaguely like Cary Grant. A few shots from Avedon’s “Democracy” series from the 2004 Presidential campaign—Jon Stewart feigning worry, Karl Rove radiating smug. Sean Penn’s fingers bearing the word “THINK,” and a U.S. Army Sergeant staring out of a face scarred by a chemical plant explosion in Baghdad. Tin men, scarecrows, lions and pilgrims. And then, the end.
The photo facing the exit is a color shot of Barack Obama, from Avedon’s “Democracy” series. In the portrait, his forehead is smooth, his chin hints at a five o’clock shadow. He wears a blue dress shirt so light that it looks glossy, with two buttons open to expose his neck. The great and powerful Wizard of Oz. He looks too skinny to be President, I think.
Not to fly off over the rainbow, but my time at the Inauguration was an epic of sorts—a journey from home through obstacles and barriers toward some ultimate confrontation with fate. Not unlike Barack Obama’s, in fact. With a few differences: My quest involves a single day, 1.5 million people, and no clear rewards until it’s over. You don’t just skip ahead to the end of a quest—you struggle to reach it and hope that it brings the resolution you wanted from it.
On the morning of the Inauguration, I wake up at 5am to Danny’s cell phone alarm. It’s Roger Daltrey of The Who, screaming his triumphant scream near the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Eee-YEAHHH! There are six people sleeping on the floor around me, fellow travelers, and the couple’s cat is tucked into the crook of my knee. Obama’s swearing-in is six hours away, but it’s time to move. We’re off to see the Wizard.
The roughly six-mile walk from Arlington to the Capitol takes two hours of constant motion—on a bike path along the Potomac, across the Roosevelt Bridge and across Interstate 66, which is empty of cars, streaming with people and looks a bit like something from Mad Max at this surreal hour. Metro traffic converges with pedestrian traffic at Seventh Street and Jefferson Drive, and the herd that I’m moving with stops, shudders and begins to stomp a bit impatiently.
I head east a few blocks, then turn up a small street and head farther north until I spot a more orderly grouping, a row of security checkpoints and a sign: “Orange Gate.” My entrance to Oz. I wait in line for another 90 minutes, ahead of a man named Tony who spent the night with his family in his office building a few blocks from the Capitol. One of his girls shouts “Follow the yellow brick road” as we move steadily in a long, spiral-shaped line through security and towards rows of brown folding chairs.
I take my seat next to a man named Calvin Booker, a vice president for Public Affairs for Waste Management, who came from Atlanta with his wife. The man seated behind me is a Chicago art dealer who specializes in post-World War II abstractions. Dikembe Mutombo, the center for the NBA’s Houston Rockets, walks down a nearby aisle to a seat somewhere behind me. The TV screens flanking the Capitol flash other unlikely pilgrims, live-action portraits: Jay-Z, Beyoncé and P. Diddy; Arnold Schwarzenegger; Muhammad Ali. We’re all here to greet the great and powerful Oz. And then…
This is the end. Even at this early hour, the nearest seat to the Capitol in my section is still 100 yards or so away from the building, and I know that I’m not getting any closer. I’m here among folks who survived the freezing pilgrimage, but we’re moments from watching an event that millions more will watch from their living rooms. With better food, warmer temperatures and, presumably, a better view of Obama.
What can I tell you about how the event played out? The devout pilgrims that walked D.C.’s yellow brick road witnessed the same talking points that news networks picked up for evening broadcasts—Chief Justice John Roberts’ botched oath, Obama’s comments about extending hands, unclenching fists and leading once more, Aretha Franklin’s flamboyant, glittering hat. The crowd around me booed Joe Lieberman, cheered for Ted Kennedy and gave outgoing president George W. Bush a mixed response. And, quite possibly, you heard us on TV.
With 1.5 million other people, I froze and shook and walked for miles to see something that would’ve happened whether I’d attended or not. I spent a good deal of the event looking up at TV screens that showed the massive crowd at my back, already anticipating the multihour trek back to my car, through souvenir flags, food wrappers and dust.
But at the moment that Obama, the wizard himself, stepped to the microphone for his address, something happened that was impossible to experience anywhere but in the thick of the crowd that converged on D.C. From two-and-a-half miles south, from the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, came a tidal rush that sounded like a thawed, gushing Potomac River, a frothing wave of chanting that reached the front of the U.S. Capitol—a refrain like Dorothy Gale’s great “No place like home” chant. O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!
At the end of the yellow brick road, Dorothy wakes up and finds that she never quite made the journey she imagined. If Dorothy never went to Oz, then she alone dreamt up the Wizard—concocted a dream and a leader that would teach her something about herself. And when Obama looked down from the Emerald City to the Inauguration crowd, he saw 1.5 million who created him as a leader for the same reasons, and traveled to D.C. to remind him that their dreams are very real.
