The uncomfortable comforts of Joe Biden’s opening TV special

Celebrating America, the 90-minute concert / marathon / appeal for national healing that aired on Wednesday night to end Joe Biden’s opening festivities, had no reason to exist.

Some moments were solid. John Legend’s version of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” shot up. (I love a well-placed horn section.) Justin Timberlake and Ant Clemons took a propulsive approach to “Better Days” that wandered in and out of the Stax Museum in Memphis.

Other moments were less than solid. As incredible as the real fireworks scene looked on TV, Katy Perry’s performance on “Firework” showed her in a not particularly good voice. Tom Hanks has been strangely rigid all night, in a way that America’s father rarely does. And how the hell did someone film three ex-presidents (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama) having “an impromptu chat” without realizing that they were horribly lit? You could barely see their faces because of the shadows.

But also, like, who cares, you know? Unless you’re a mega-stan for one of the artists who performed (or Joe Biden, I think), you probably weren’t paying much attention to the details of the special, or watching it all. (America’s No. 1 cable news network, Fox News, didn’t bother to broadcast it, opting instead for its regular night-time schedule.) Celebrating America it existed because there was always an opening special – usually with some musical performances and some speeches and some inspiration. Even at a time when social distancing regulations make big celebrations literally impossible, the show must go on. Does anyone have better ideas?

And, anyway, isn’t that some kind of metaphor for America now?

Business as usual, in unusual times

Eric Thayer / Getty Images

Celebrating America he had a particularly difficult tonal balance to strive for. It could not be so bleak as to be disheartening for a nation that expects better days, nor so promising as to be disheartening for a nation that lives just the opposite of those better days. The special type according to “neither” and “both” at the same time, which was as strange as you might expect. Mainly, the special was there is. It was something you could activate to remember a time when everything seemed vaguely functional.

Joe Biden’s election to the highest office in the country sparked all kinds of tense conversations, both in public and in private, about what this really means. Is America the country that elected Obama twice (and Biden once) or the country that elected Trump once? Is it a country of center-left technocratic idiots being dragged slowly to the left by an increasingly loud leftist movement or a country of furious white resentment that forces everyone to throw themselves off a cliff?

But the answer here is also “neither” and “both”. Very clearly, the US elected Obama, Trump and Biden in three consecutive presidential elections. Therefore, we are both versions of the country described above. But we’re neither, either, because the Electoral College gives Republicans a substantial enough advantage that Biden’s massive victory in the popular vote could be easily wiped out by a handful of different votes in a handful of states. After all, the winner of the popular vote in 2016 was Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate. The truth is more complicated than a simple or / or.

This “both or none” distinction was present throughout the Induction Day, which always looked like a newly elected president and his team doing their best to pretend that everything was normal, although very little was normal. Yes, they insisted, the challenges we face are substantial and, of course, they recognized, we are as divided as we have ever been as a nation. But look! The peaceful transfer of power still exists! Don’t pay attention to the uprising that happened two weeks ago!

The point is: nurturing a sense of cautious hope is probably the right strategy. I have no illusions that Joe Biden will accomplish anything that I believe would really move this country forward. But for anyone on the left side of the political spectrum, simply not having Donald Trump in the White House brings with it a sense of relief. Say what you want about Biden, but he knows where the keys to everything in the government lie. He will (hopefully!) Do a much better job of distributing the Covid-19 vaccine than the previous administration. This, in itself, will be a worthy achievement.

But I’m not sure that Celebrating America sold anything to me except “Joe Biden is not Donald Trump”. And that is true – it is not. But shouldn’t there be more than that?

A sigh of relief makes sense at this point. But we cannot lose sight of America’s identity crisis.

Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images

Celebrating America – and Inauguration Day in general – were full of people talking about America fighting some of its greatest enemies of all time. And, verbatim, these people were referring primarily to the Covid-19 pandemic, which is killing Americans at an impressive rate. But, subtextually, it was not difficult to read the TV special specifically as a nightly sigh of relief from several celebrities and the normal people who showed up to perform them. “Oh, thank God,” I can only assume that they exclaimed after that sigh. “Trump is no longer president.”

I feel that sigh of relief deep in my bones. I do. Trump threatened so many things and so many people that are deeply important to me, and one of Biden’s first acts in the Oval Office was to sign an executive order protecting the labor rights of queer people across the country. That’s nothing! This will help many of my dear friends and loved ones! This is tremendous!

And yet there is also a vague and widespread sense of fear, felt by many of us who believe that Trump was not a single figure in American politics, but the figurehead of a massive and furious movement that will not disappear suddenly. That fear takes the form of many of the people who helped Biden win the presidency by taking a step back, looking at the Trump years and saying, “Huh. That was strange. Thank God it’s over! ”Before continuing their lives.

The work of politics is long, agonizing and tedious, and requires a constant, constant, constant defense of the country you want to see, not just the one in which you live. I don’t blame anyone for taking a break from it. We all we must take breaks to rest and be with your loved ones and human being. And hope is needed: believing that the world can be better than it is now is essential, and these flames only remain lit if you continue to feed them with the little beauties of everyday life.

But for now, it’s worth listening a little less to the parts of ourselves that say, “Huh. That was weird! Thank God it’s over! ”And listening more to people who seem to have barely clung to the edge of the cliff in the past four years.

Or, to put it another way, we must focus not only on the inauguration itself or on a star-studded and perfectly pleasant TV special, but also on the barbed wire around the Capitol, so that no one tries to invade it again. We must focus on the National Guard troops, with firearms ready, ready. Viewed from a point of view, America is a country that is undergoing another peaceful transfer of power; seen from another, it is a country that can barely keep together. When the rituals of democracy are more important than democracy itself, it becomes very easy for democracy to erode.

America is a shared story, told by all its citizens together, hopefully leading to the same ends. But the past four years have more than taken home the idea that we they are not all living in the same narrative. If you have Celebrating America on Wednesday night, you must have seen Sean Hannity complaining about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its supposedly horrible content.

The special was good, I think (ok, it was very boring), but it seemed to exist mainly because it was to exist. I am not convinced that you can create unity by acting as if the practice of the right rituals makes America a foregone conclusion, a shared ideal that prevails through everything that is presented to you, an end that is also the means.

Acting like America is a foregone conclusion is a smart idea in the short term, because it helps Biden to take power in a historically unstable moment. This reassures people who have gone through very. It makes us feel safe to bet on the continued existence of the country for at least the next four years, but then what? If we are really falling apart the way we seem to be, it will take much more than faith to change things.

America continues to exist because it has existed since any of us lived and because the alternative is too horrible and unthinkable. But it probably needs to change substantially – as in ways in which we can fail to recognize it, just a little – to survive in its current form. So what it is? Both? Nor?