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Russell Tice informs us that we’re being watched, recorded, analyzed and stored for eternity.

Before I get into today’s events, allow me to provide a quick recap of last night’s Netroots Nation party. In brief: free sushi, Howard Dean, Dan Beaver-Seitz, and some cool new friends. Glad I went.

Got to bed last night at around 1 or 1:30. Woke up at 5:30. Did some mental math and realized I could get to my security checkpoint sooner if I walked (rather than biking, my original plan), due to the opening time of the bike valet. Was about to leave when I realized I hadn’t taken into account breakfast (or lunch or dinner for that matter). Raided my host’s pantry from some graham crackers and was off… in the dark.

Four miles later and now after dawn, I found myself in a line consisting of silver ticket holders like myself that stretched for nearly five blocks. It wasn’t much past 7 at this point and the gates wouldn’t be open until 8. And so it was that the standing began.

When the line eventually began to move, it did so with a vengeance — I found myself nearly in a jog. The queue devolved into a large huddled mass closer to the checkpoint, but eventually I squished through. “Security” consisted of someone glancing at my camera, unzipping my coat and administering a half-assed patdown. Had the spare camera lens I was carrying been grenade I doubt they would have noticed.

The silver ticketed area — steerage, really (but better than not having a ticket at all) — was neatly sliced in two by Third St, with the portion closer to the capitol more or less pushed up against the reflecting pool. I managed to work my way near the front of that section. After taking some photos I determined that the 400 ft closer or so that this position got me didn’t allow for radically better photos than being back where I could see the Jumbotron, so I decided to retreat and enjoy the ceremony on the big screen, leaving the ceremony photography to those capable of getting a shot of Obama bigger than a speck. Better to record my experience at the event than the event itself.

It was cold and there was a lot of standing around (or boucing around for those of us too cold to remain stationary), but folks were in good spirits and there were few complaints. Eventually the ceremony program got started with a youth chorus warming up the crowd before dignitaries were shown filing in. Camera shots of different folks elicited polarized reactions from the crowd, most fairly predictable: boos for GOPers like Gingrich, cheers for Democrats like Carter and “turncoats” like Powell. Even Kerry received significant applause. John McCain got no reaction whatsoever, though when the camera showed just Cindy a chorus of boos and hisses went up. Sen. Ted Kennedy probably received the most boisterous response of anyone not surnamed Obama. A rousing rendition of ‘hey hey goodbye” was sung anytime W appeared on-screen for more than a fleeting moment.

The ceremony itself was surprisingly short and uncomplicated. Sen. Feinstein, as chair of the inaugural committee, played ringmaster and kicked things off with a few remarks. Before you knew it, Joe Biden was the vice president.

The highlight for me was actually near the beginning of the performance of “Air & Simple Gifts” by Perlman, Ma et al. A few moments after they began playing, a flock of seagulls (note: not A Flock of Seagulls) took off from somewhere between myself and the Capitol (perhaps the reflecting pool?). Their silent flight through the still morning air during the musical interlude just seemed to capture the serenity and hope of the entire thing. I regret that I didn’t get a photo of the birds.

Anyway, though not handled particularly elegantly, Obama took the oah of office from Chief Justice (oh how it pains me to write that) Roberts, and delivered his speech which I thought was good but not his best nor one that will go down in history as particularly notable. I was surprised by how short it was.

After his speech, folks began pouring out of the area, despite the remaining agenda items. I stuck around for the benediction before making my way toward the exit.

Getting in was easy compared to getting out, but eventually I managed to do so. I’d heard the Smithsonian museums were all open, so I fought my way through the crowds and lines and eventually made my way to the second floor of the Air & Space museum (they’d blocked off the escalators due to overcrowding but I took and elevator). The whole place felt like a refugee camp, with small clusters of very cold and very tired people huddled everywhere, sleeping, eating and resting. It was very odd.

After warming up there for a while I set off back to northern (aka “fake”) Virginia. It was a long walk back, notable for it’s almost war-torn, post-apocalytic feel. Police officers, army soldiers, flashing lights and copious amounts of trash were everywhere, but the crowds were beginning to thin. At first I was annoyed at all the litter — which mostly consisted of newspapers and wrappers for hand & toe warmer packets — but then I realized there was nary a trash can in sight (due, I suspect, not to some oversight but rather their being a security risk). Equally disquieting was the closed streets and bridges upon which pedestrians could roam freely — it gave the area a very “after disease wipes nearly everyone out” kind of feel.

I ultimately made it back to Rosslyn, grabbed a bite to eat, and headed to bed for a long and well-deserved nap. The rest of the day was spent resting, recuperating, checking news of the parade, and viewing my photos. While there are a number of balls, galas and other parties happening around town this evening, I failed to score invitations (or fancy enough clothes) to attend any. Would have loved to attend the Google gala.

i woke up this morning to the sound of birds singing outside the window. no shit — birds. i’m trying hard not to find undue significance in every little thing i see today, but it’s seven degrees. nothing should be alive out there, much less creatures capable of making music.

has it only been a year since we sat in that booth at the brewpub, waiting for obama’s iowa caucus victory speech to begin?

it had been a day like this one, bright and clear and cold as hell. night had fallen hard, and early, as it does this time of year. amy and i were still warming our fingers and toes after the trek across town from our caucus location. it was amy’s first iowa caucus, and she still wore the sticker numbered “1,” proof  she was first in the door out of the hundreds who at our precinct, and a mark of pride for a newly registered Democrat. as we learned over the next few days, she was one of thousands statewide who’d attended their first party caucus, pushing turnout numbers to all-time record heights. this was no surprise, based on what we’d seen in our neighborhood: a veritable riot of twenty- and thirty-somethings, absolutely on fire for barack obama. i had seen enough caucuses to know something was up.

charlie arrived shortly and settled into a beer. he gave a similar account of his precinct across town. rubbing our hands together and sipping pints of OCBW honey hemp ale, the three of us sat there watching the results and pondering the meaning of it all.

this time last year, i wasn’t an obamaphile. i had generally favorable impressions of the guy, sure, but i was still holding fast to that skeptical-pessimist posture we’d all learned to adopt, like whipped puppies, over the past seven years of bitter experience. who the hell was this dude, anyway? i wanted to believe that the smart antiwar candidate whose buttons adorned the backpacks of my favorite students was viable. but this wasn’t 2000 or 2004, and i was in no mood to dick around with another pyhrric victory of a doomed-liberal campaign. even with the tentative victories of ’06, the wounds were still too fresh.

that uncertainty was echoed by a friend we ran into at the caucus, a long-suffering lefty of our parents’ generation who’d “been burned too many times” by charismatic and impressive Democratic leaders who tended either to become corrupt and ineffective over time, or to be assassinated before ever getting the chance. her perspective lent a sad poignancy to the spectacle of the political neophytes who surrounded us that night, too hopped up on optimism and adrenaline to even fathom the outcome that seemed most likely to us at the time — another humiliation for progressives, and a white house ultimately occupied by, if not a republican, then another weasely self-serving empty suit of a democrat who would continue carrying out bush’s disastrous policies from sheer inertia. still, it was hard not to be a little intoxicated by all that energy, unexpected as it was, not to wonder in the back of the mind: what if?

i wish i could say i allowed myself to get swept up in the obama movement then and there, but it took a couple more months. the only outcome i had hoped for on caucus night was a decisive defeat of hillary clinton, who struck me as exactly the kind of pro-war, corporatist political parasite who would guarantee another four years of the odious status quo. (i needn’t have worried; at our precinct, at least, hillary didn’t even reach viability, her supporters all but laughed out of the auditorium with zero delegates to show for their troubles.) throughout 2007 i’d been more or less equally impressed by obama, edwards, richardson and biden, and was prepared to caucus for obama if it came down to a close contest between him and clinton. but i also liked john edwards’ message and wanted to see him stay in the primary race a while longer, so when the register poll that week showed obama with a strong lead it seemed safe to caucus for edwards. (i’ve since come to regret that support, not because i give a shit about his pissant marital infidelities, but because of his monstrous act of political malpractice — when i think about the fact that he would’ve allowed himself to be the democratic nominee in 2008 knowing that bombshell could drop at any time and blow the whole election, i could kick the bastard’s teeth in.)

 back at the brewpub, watching the coverage and comparing notes with friends reporting in from other precincts, a picture was emerging: the obama thing was bigger than we’d thought. he wasn’t just winning decisively among the same old caucus stalwarts who dutifully pull on heavy coats and boots every four januaries and trudge out into the night to pick a candidate. obama was driving huge turnout among new, never-followed-politics-before voters. lots of them. that was my first inkling that in some ways maybe it didn’t matter who barack obama was or what he stood for; the important thing, the interesting thing, was the movement he represented. the people who’d been primed for politicization by a decade of republican farce and atrocity and were just waiting to be mobilized.

more precincts reports rolled in, interspersed with bemused commentary on the evening’s proceedings on the GOP side — miserable attendance, and a surge of support for mike huckabee, of all people. you could almost feel the collective shrug as the room’s attention drifted back to what was obviously the Real Story. we ordered another pitcher. charlie fiddled with his iPod, trying to pull down county-by-county numbers from the pitiful wifi signal that would waft into the pub from time to time. edwards and clinton, in turn, each marched out and delivered chipper concessions, eagerly looking forward to new hampshire.

by the time obama took the stage, there was silence throughout the bar. people on their way out stopped and stood there in their winter coats, listening. i don’t remember much of what he said, but the way he said it and the way his crowd responded was like nothing i’d ever seen before. the word “alchemy” comes to mind. i’d heard he was good, even seen him work a crowd in iowa city the year before, but this was something altogether singular to behold. and it hit me like a frying pan to the head.

“he’s going to win,” i said, twisting around in the booth to see amy and charlie. “he’s going to be president.” it wasn’t  a prediction. it was a sudden jolt of crystal-clear perception, spoken with the slack-jawed guilelessness of one who has just processed the punchline to a joke told five minutes earlier. a simple extrapolation of facts and processes already in motion: right time, right place, right guy. and he was simply too smart and competent to fuck it up.

there followed several weeks of campaign sturm and drang, during which my impressions of obama as a political supergenius grew stronger, though i still withheld judgment as to whether this was necessarily a good thing. for a while there i suppose i rooted for him more out of animosity toward hillary clinton, who had morphed before our eyes from an unreliable, underprincipled and entitled but otherwise more-or-less capable leader, into nothing short of a political horror show.

but that’s water under the bridge. obama made a believer of me in march, when i heard the “a more perfect union” speech — an epiphany already well documented here. a few other moments from the campaign stand out… the feeling i had, watching the speech in berlin, that it might soon be possible once again to venture out into the world with a U.S. passport and my head held high. the calm and reason he exuded amidst the abject panic of september’s bank implosions. the people i met while out door-knocking in godforsaken flooded-out little post-farm-economy towns and shitty section-8 apartment buildings along the highway, or humping voter registration forms up and down the ped mall. and the eyeball-popping euphoria of election night, after ohio was called… all indelible memories. but this morning, watching the inaugural festivities on TV, wishing i was there in the capitol freezing my ass off with ben and the gajillions of others who are witnessing this moment firsthand, it’s last january that’s on my mind. it’s cold — ungodly, unmercifully cold — but spring is coming.

happy new year, america! i love you all.