My Way, Balls, Hats, Rings, Throws and Related Matters

When the Trumps appeared on the stage at the Inaugural Balls they visited and turned them into dance floors they danced the key dance of each ball to Frank Sinatra’s My Way.  I want to return to the lurics of that song and its meaning a little further down. But for now I would like to acknowledge the joyful significance of the balls themselves.

The inaugural balls like the rest of the events of the transition process have a profound history in  the United States of America. A glimpse of inaugural history itself  as related to the balls is available here. The balls this year were of special interest to me because Paige and Katie Rees who played in L’Angelus (one of my favorite bands in the past and who appear in the video I posted at this link) played at one or more of the balls in their new group Pelican 212. which also includes some of their siblings but not Stevie who has his own group and was a key component of L’Angelus.  I thought the performance was very worthy and if the young trumpeters sort of stole the show that was alright as well. I had quite a few pictures of L’Angelus performing live over the years but they are one of the may casualties of my somewhat disordered life in that I cannot access them now. A few are embedded in videos and others are only on devices I cannot currently operate. But they are a part of the fabric of this region. That was the highlight of the Friday night  D.C. activity for me — watching them on CNN.

Inauguration Protests were going on and they still are. Such things are not new with Donald Trump’s Inauguration. After Nixon’s second Inauguration there were many protests and there have been others as one can read here. These people are protesting however against a man coming in to his first term and therefore who has not done much — that has happened before as well. But it is different than a second term protest. Perhaps it relates to the song by Sinatra which President Donald Trump chose as his ball theme. Huge numbers of Americans roughly know some of the words, those words are as follows:

I’ve lived a life that’s full
I’ve traveled each and every highway
But more, much more than this
I did it my way

Regrets, I’ve had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption

I planned each charted course
Each careful step along the byway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way

That sense of Trump going his own way is captured there. And perhaps accounts for how so many can oppose him so vigorously already while other support him with enthusiasm. he certainly was using the Sinatra version and not the unacceptable Sex Pistols version. Of the white women who voted in the recent election 53% of them voted for Trump. And although he lost the woman’s vote as a whole he only lost it by about the same margin that Hillary Clinton lost the white woman vote. But there will be an effort to express broad feminist discontent on the day I am posting this.

Saturday the twenty-first of January 2017 there is a Women’s March on Washington being held. There are other simultaneous large protests going on and this day in the District of Columbia is supposed to have people numbering about half a million protesting various things that includes the Black Block anarchists who object to and oppose any kind of government on principle. A perspective on how all this opposition relates to the Inauguration is available here. The women’s march is a bit better organized and more focused than some other protests. Perhaps it is notable that the single minded obsession with Abortion that sometimes colors discussion of such things seems less in evidence this time, partly because Trump’s role and position as regards those issues is less clear. But All see that he could be part of bringing in a new era and they are concerned about it.

Of course one expects a new President of the United States to bring in a new era. There were of course a lot of people celebrating the events of the Inauguration and the center for this sort of thing were the Inaugural Balls. But Trump began the song he and Melania and his family danced to with the opening lyrics that some would find disqualifying for such a song:

And now, the end is near
And so I face the final curtain
My friend, I’ll say it clear
I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain

It is hard not to at least notice that this is the lyric and that he included it in the play at the balls. However, there was a small viewership and we were informed in advance that the Trumps would only make an appearance at three balls, far fewer than most President of my lifetime. Perhaps in part this is because trump was less beholden to large contributors for financing his campaign. Nonetheless one notices that along with other signs of tension and negative views of the current situation this lyric is there.

This blog does not only cover events, it is also a discussion of things I propose and some of them require an end to the way things are to an unusual degree. Could Trump be hoping or wishing for such transformations? I’m not going to be able to report that I have found a great deal of clarity about the next step for our society in very practical terms. But I have been working on the problem of the next number of steps. I would consider being more direct in seeking to influence things and perhaps getting on a ballot if my life in general had not been in such distinct decline for so long. The Kaleidoscope of the America I see does not feature me throwing my hat into the ring in any fully open way for anything very significant  any time soon. I am closer to homelessness than the White House. But I do not dismiss the Gotterdmarung in the Trump Ball dance as insignificant. Nor do I pretend not to have labored to prepare for a possible resurrection should the current state of affairs collapse.

HyperFocal: 0

Nobody can fully know another human being and this country is full of human beings each living out their path. Any serious crisis in a society would move us on to different paths. Given the fact that my life has not seen much success in a long time there is no reason to believe it would see success in the future shuffling. But given that I have always been involved and active in making thing happen and have had some influence it is not impossible that those trends would continue as well. The pictures that will come into focus over the next four years are not all predictable now.But life is always a dance…