I experienced the inauguration of Barack Obama with the people. Not those privileged enough to have tickets to the momentous event, but the four million or so that carried themselves through a locked down Washington DC, attempting to get as close to the action as possible. We began our walk on the morning of the 20th in South East DC and pushed through a sea of Americans, navigating our way through the crowd, jumping fences and darting past field trip groups with matching sweatshirts. Stress and apprehension whittled our group of six down to two, my friend Tom and I, as we managed to plant ourselves on a packed patch of grass about a quarter mile from the monument. We struggled for a view and stretched our necks to catch the loudspeaker speeches that were carried in and out of coherence by the freezing wind. It was worth the stress. And we weren’t the ones working.
A remarkable aspect of the public response to Obama since he entered this race has been the incredible amount of merchandise bearing the man’s name, and his inauguration was the single most crowded marketplace I have witnessed. Everything from calendars to scarves to family portraits, and of course a countless array of T shirts, was available for purchase. Vendors old and young, black and white, male and female, all touted their merchandise, the majority of which will undoubtedly sit in attics across America for the rest of time.
These independent business people selected their spots carefully. Wherever a mass in motion was funneled under a bridge, down a narrowing street or past a temporary barrier, they were perched, each with a unique product and a pitch to go with it. From the predictable “Obama T shirts! You are experiencing history! Commemorate this event with a T shirt!” to the less conventional “Jump start our economy one purchase at a time! Help Obama help you!” (That last one sounds great, but we were pretty sure these guys didn’t pay taxes on their earnings from this.) Some sellers trying to avoid the high competition areas paced the less populated streets. We became caught in the middle of a stare down between an older woman and a young man selling buttons on opposite sides of a sparsely crowded sidewalk. “Get your Obama buttons!” the man said. “Better buttons!” said the woman. There was a pause. Finally the man, thrilled at his own ingenuity, exclaimed “Best buttons! Get the best Obama buttons around!”
In an attempt to differentiate, many T shirt designs got straight up weird. In one family portrait, the Obamas looked suspiciously like the Cosbys. Others had the new president wielding boxing gloves and knocking down Bush, McCain, and even Bin Laden. Customers, touched by the madness of things, fished out tens with their frozen fingers to own these minute pieces of history. There were plenty of buyers for all, granted you had your personal selling down. My favorite was the man who skipped the bit about his product and simply asked passers by “What size you need?” As we passed a row of vendors in front of the White House, a elderly man with nothing to sell read what was on the minds of myself, Tom, and likely many others who realize constantly that, despite the future progress that this new president represents, our time taken out to watch him be sworn in came at an opportunity cost. “Damn. We could’ve made some money today”.
