There are many reasons why Wednesday's inauguration was so moving - starting with that it happened at all, undisturbed. One friend has enthused about the power and joy of the arts embraced by the inauguration, from paintings to poetry. Another swooned over how this most Catholic of inaugurations also represented the best of Catholicism. (Amanda Gorman is Catholic, too!) All are moved, I think, by the explicit and effective reclaiming of the Capitol from the tawdry attack on it two weeks before, an act of reconsecration.
I remain struck by how the entire Mall was transformed, first with the
monument of lights for the four hundred thousand American COVID dead around the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial, and then by the fields of flags - state and national - along the mall, 191,500 of them. The sea of flags (so many, and yet barely a third of four hundred thousand) was meant to represent the people whom safety considerations prevented from attending the inauguration, but I'm sure I wasn't the only on to be reminded of a cemetery on a day of remembrance. We will all one day be among the dead, this seemed to me to remind us, but also: the dead are with us. Silent witnesses, they were the privileged audience of the inauguration - ancestors.
