inauguration, and why facebooking about gitmo with teenagers is a tricky but rewarding business

Despite lacking a working television, I was determined, on Tuesday, to watch the inauguration proceedings live. I didn’t want have to wait and watch everything later on YouTube. Because the Internets are so modern and cool, I assumed this would be no problem, but I did have a moment of panic right at 10 a.m. CST/11 a.m. EST when I could not get the CNN.com/Facebook web streaming to budge. The nice thing, though, was that I could immediately rant on Facebook, whereupon my Malaysian friend Flory who has a more global perspective on media told me to try out the BBC site. So I watched the whole thing narrated by the Brits, which was fun, and appropriate, given that I am an America-hating terrorist Marxist and should really just move to Europe with all the other godless liberals.

Ahhh. Isn’t it nice, how stale and dated that joke sounds now?

I heard a few commentators grouse, at least mildly, about how somber Obama was, how withholding of the “soaring rhetoric.” I was genuinely surprised by the criticism, as I found the speech no less than cathartic and got teared up about ten different times and was generally just ecstatic about the whole deal. I suppose that’s why they asked former speechwriters to critique it, rather than asking sops like me. “Stephanie _____, what did you think of the inaugural speech?” “I thought it was [sob] so [weeps] wonderful…”

Of course, sops like me have lived through the past eight years too. I was grateful for Obama’s bracing sobriety, because I had all but forgotten that politicians were capable of being honest about how badly things suck. What scared me most about the Bush years was not that everything was falling apart, but that everything was falling apart and the president denied it. No instance of human suffering was too profound for him to blithely trivialize it with a shit-faced grin and a smirky remark. What was horrifying about Bush was not that he was evil, but that he was indifferent. There is a point, I suppose, where indifference and evil amount to the same thing.

I don’t know if I could choose a favorite quote from the speech, but it might be this:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more.

I don’t know what the American networks did, but the BBC zoomed right in on George W. Bush’s face during that bit, and sat there for awhile. He looked like he was stoically enduring a rectal exam. Either that or he was thinking, “Expedience? Wazzat mean?”

(That, however, was not my favorite visual. That would be a tossup. There was John Lewis taking his wife’s hand (I assume it was his wife) to stand and applaud when Obama said, “a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.” And then there was Malia watching her dad give one of the most monumental speeches in modern American history through the little window in her digital camera. Maybe she was making a video. You know, in case no one else got around to it. We as a nation are in for some relentless cuteness from the White House in the years to come.)

And then, just so we know that he meant it, he ordered the closing of Gitmo. Of course, we shouldn’t get complacent and assume it’s all taken care of because an executive order is just the beginning and a lot of difficult questions remain etc etc but still! People! Practically the first thing he did was this! I could not possibly ask for anything more encouraging on Obama’s first day. (Aside: reading Glenn Greenwald’s Salon blog, the source of that link, is SUCH a buzzkill. It’s like castor oil for starry-eyed Obamatons. I hate it. He is, so far as I can tell, nearly always right. Right as in correct, that is. I read everything he posts. My first reaction is usually, No, Stephanie, no drinks until five.)

Cue the Republican relatives, whom, as I’ve stated earlier, were never a problem before Facebook. And really, it’s not like we get into it or anything. My cousin’s wife left a fairly innocuous message on one of my happy post-election status updates that was something to the effect that the entire world was watching and he had better not screw up. I mean, seriously, that’s as heated as we get. None of us wants politics to mess up our relationships.

But then last night her 17-year-old son had a status update: “closing GITMO is stupid anyone agree w/ me”

Oh, suck. When things like this happen, I have no idea which voice is that of my better nature. Is it the cautionary one? The one that says that nothing I write to him in response will override the influence of his parents and his church and Fox News and for the sake of family harmony I should just let it pass? Or the one that says that this boy is seventeen and he is smart enough and strong enough to hear some challenges to his views and be forced to think about them a bit more than perhaps he wants to, and if his mother doesn’t like what I have to say, she will probably forgive me?

Let’s get one thing straight: I love this boy. He is such an innocent. I have loved him since he was a baby and at the risk of sounding unbearably old, he is still a little kid to me, a sweet boy who carried gifts at my wedding and always hugs me even at height of surly adolescence. He once sent me an Obama piece of flair on Facebook even though he wanted McCain to win, because he knew I liked Obama. He is a dear. So it is no problem to keep the rage in check with him—there is no rage.

Of course, I ended up writing something; otherwise I wouldn’t be telling this story. Two quick paragraphs are all Facebook gives you. I told him that they torture people at Gitmo, that some of them are teenagers, that there are undoubtedly some nasty folks there but that they need to be brought to justice in trials that the world will respect. I told him that many people around the world think that America has forsaken decency and justice because of Gitmo. I told him that an open legal system is one of the things that makes America great, and that if we forsake that, we are not much better than the Romans were in the time of Jesus.

What I wanted to say was, “…our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” Someone beat me to that punch, though.

I don’t know how he processed my reasoning, but I think I probably made his guts churn. His next status update stated that he “regrets that last status update,” which made me feel a little guilty. Then he thanked me for my point of view, which was, I think, pretty classy.

But something was still nagging at me. I wanted to challenge for him this paradigm whereby torturing is something that we do to “protect the nation” and if we don’t torture, we put ourselves at risk. (“we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals...Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up—“ Oh, right. I did mention that bit.) Because one of his friends was mentioning a “cool 24 subplot” that presented this exact supposed conundrum, I gave him the link to an article by a retired Army intelligence officer about how 24 lies about the efficacy of torture. (I did not use the word “efficacy.”) I gently suggested that he and his friends should discuss it, and then I promised to stop being teacherly and leave him alone about this stuff.

I don’t know if I did the right thing in pushing him, or not. It felt like the right thing to do. Apparently the news is now drenched with fear-mongering Republicans trying to terrify people about all the evildoers who will now be brought to American soil and how closing Gitmo is going to endanger us all—you know, Variation Three Zillion on the standard crap. My little Facebook challenge probably won’t amount to much in the face of their assault.

Still, I can’t help feeling this: that if I have shown him that there are passionate people on the other side, people who believe strongly enough in the goodness of our cause that we are willing to state our views in adamant moral language, I have done both him and liberalism a service.

Thanks, President Obama, for helping me out with the language part. I’m pulling for you.