To the backdrop of the 1960s pop classic, It’s My Party And I’ll Lie If I Want To, the world has stumbled blearily through its first week of what will become known as the Trump era.
Like the decor inside some of his buildings — lashings of gilt overlaying acres of chipboard — it’s going to be difficult to gauge what is real and what is artifice in the new administration. And it’s already apparent that these “post-truth” times are going to be rich in political theatre.
Crushed Democratic Party voters no doubt think it all a tragedy, but at least the inauguration itself was comedy. Albeit of the cringe-making kind.
Forget trying to measure up to the solemnity of past inaugurations. Forget trying to find the statesmanlike words that live on to inspire and define an epoch. For, traditionally, inaugurations are defining national moments.
At Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration, with victory imminent in the civil war to end slavery, Lincoln eschewed triumphalism in favour of reconciliation: “With malice towards none, with charity for all … let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
In the Thirties, Franklin Roosevelt steadied an America mired in the Great Depression: “First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself...”