Last Wednesday went off so brilliantly there’s still a kind of giddy shine on everything.
And I don’t just mean the schadenfreude that comes with being a Californian watching hundreds of people having to spend hours out of doors in the D.C. snow flurries.
Though there is that.
Sen. Bernie Sanders sitting on his folding chair wearing his silly, toasty Vermont mittens has launched a thousand Instagram memes. I mean, our neighbors Linda and Bert even Photoshopped Bern onto the sidewalk in between our homes.
But it was a day full of a lot more than feeling happy to be a Californian.
It was a day — and has been every day since — that made you happy to be an American.
Honor and art were back after four years of absence.
Some of the art was a little, well, giddy. Am I just misremembering when I seem to recall that Lady Gaga’s wackily massive red skirt made it so hard for her to walk down the stairs that her Marine escort had to carry her instead? Probably.
But the honor coming back — good Lord, that felt good.
As I had longed for in this space a few months ago, on that very Wednesday President Joe Biden brought us back into the company of nations by rejoining the Paris climate accord the lamentable former president had crazily taken us out of.
Or, as Greta Thunberg tweeted that day, “So glad that USA has finally rejoined the Pittsburgh Agreement. Welcome back!”
As I don’t keep up with the wit and wisdom of Sen. Ted Cruz, it took me awhile to realize that she was mocking the Texas solon’s foolish tweet: Biden’s “more interested in the views of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh.” While I don’t agree with the line of thought that this means Cruz actually believes the Paris agreement only lessens global weirding for those who live in the City of Light, I do believe that being pro-worldwide climate disaster is unlikely to be a good thing for either the citizens of Steel City or Cruz’s plummeting political career.
Some of the stuff we found out once the former president slinked out of town after a sendoff attended by dozens, to be welcomed by dozens more in his new home state, is sobering rather than giddy-making.
The main shocker of course is the fact that Biden and his administration are inheriting not just a botched plan for distributing coronavirus vaccines. They found out Wednesday that there was no vaccine distribution plan to improve upon. Zero. “There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch,” one new White Houser found. That isn’t just dereliction of duty. That’s criminal negligence.
That real art is back was personified by Los Angeles’ own It Girl, unknown Wednesday morning and the most famous poet in America Wednesday night, Amanda Gorman. Her poem “The Hill We Climb” and its delivery were fabulous, heartening, bright as her mustard overcoat. But I was especially thrilled to know what my literary-community pal and LitFest Pasadena colleague Lisa Beebe tweeted after the poem had rocked our world: “She’s a WriteGirl!”
@WriteGirlLA is an extraordinary nonprofit in which mentors meet one-on-one with teen writers and work with them on everything from journalism to poetry. Gorman, youth poet laureate of the nation, was still a WriteGirl when she was youth laureate of Los Angeles.
“Where can we find light in this never-ending shade?” Indeed. We can’t undo that horror we have endured. It is: “The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.” But for now there’s this giddy shine on seemingly everything.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
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