Did anyone else watch the State of the Union address last night?
I started on C-SPAN, thinking I wanted it without the commentary. I quickly discovered, though, that I missed the comfort of the commentary and switched to NBC.
I’m not sure if it was just there, or everywhere, but the cameras captured the day’s news perfectly - Obama and Kennedy huddled together smiling and nodding, often with no one else in the frame, and Clinton, a woman in red in a sea of others dressed in black, obviously surrounded by people, but clearly alone. She reminded me a bit of me at the prom, holding my head high and trying not to watch as the guy who I had really wanted to ask me was all over the freshman volleyball player he brought as his date.
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There’s something strange and disheartening about watching Bush give his cheerful, upbeat speech full of good news and promise for an even better future and then hearing the many interruptions for applause. I kept wondering, “Is there something wrong with me that I don’t see it that way?” I had to go back and check the polls on his approval ratings, opinions about the war, the economy, and the direction of the country. The distortions, the omissions, the half-truths (I blogged about his misleading use of mean instead of median) got to me, and when at ten p.m. my son wanted to switch to Anthony Bourdain, I had no reservations about letting him change the channel.
The applause do get old. To pass the time I always get a kick out of who’s clapping and/or standing, and who sits them out. Because the Democrats would never refuse to applaud something that had to do with soldiers, veterans, or terrorism, there was a lot of combining those words with statements that probably made most Democrats’ blood boil… yet they stood and clapped so as not to be called out.
It is a strange and disheartening ritual, or at least when it’s being carried out by Bush.