I’m always struck how our cultural narratives are formed. Obama creates a “team of rivals” just like Lincoln, and “everybody” rushes to read PBS’s favorite pop-historian D.K. Goodwin’s book. Meme signed sealed and delivered. Except Lincoln wasn’t much different from most19th century Presidents, who made up their cabinets with bigwigs from their party, including those they’d run against for their party’s nomination. In Lincoln’s case, and this is the part of the story that has been lost in the endless repetition of “team of rivals,” his cabinet turned out to be barely functional; half way through his first term, Lincoln described his team as being “on the brink of destruction”; and three of the four “rivals” were gone by the end of that first term. Is this the model Obama really wants to follow?

We seem to favor baby history, baby talk, baby religion. I listened closely to “Pastor Rick” Warren and heard his version of an easy-listening Christianity, an embarrassment to theology. Lincoln, like most 19th century Presidents of our secular republic, didn’t have a cleric bless him at his inaugural. Warren’s for keeping gays and lesbians second-class citizens, so I’m not sure what he was doing up there, anyway, besides obstructing the struggle for human dignity.

Then I listened to John Williams’ specially-commissioned piece of hackwork. Whose idea was it to get this Tinseltown cliché-monger to write an inaugural tune? And why did he have to travesty the classic Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts”? Aaron Copland turned that beautiful song into a sweet music, Williams made it another bad movie score. The real musicians who performed Williams’ cheap variations should have tossed out his faxed-in sheets and played Copland. What a profound misreading of Shaker ideals Williams gave us!

Since I shut the media off about two thirds through what I thought was a lackluster speech by Obama, I missed the inaugural poem, which I hear was sub-Whitmanesque. (I’ve read it since, but like most contemporary poems, it looks dead on the page.)