Obama in the Lion’s Den

by Jim Washburn

Lamination has ruined me. Once upon a time, if there was someone I wanted to see in concert, I thought nothing of showing up at a venue at 4 am and waiting in the fog until tickets went on sale at ten. I was at a Springsteen concert once in the ’70s at the Forum when a friend who published a Bruce fanzine heard a rumor that tickets were going on sale the next morning at the Roxy for a “special thank you concert for his fans.” So I drive straight to Hollywood from the concert—en route, KMET did indeed announce the show—and I spent the night on the Sunset Boulevard sidewalk, 38th in line, and was one of the last two people to buy a pair of tickets. My girlfriend arrived and spent the whole day in line No. 2 for us to get into the show that night.

A side note, since three decades later Springsteen fans are still getting screwed on tickets: We were limited to two tickets, meaning that only 78 of the Roxy’s 500 seats went to the fans Bruce was purportedly thanking; and since I only got my antepenultimate place in line via a tip-off, probably none of the regular folks who’d responded to the radio announcement actually got to buy tickets to the show. They spent a cold night on a hard sidewalk for nothing, while all the other seats went to “the industry,” you know, the people who never see a ticket line, who have their people call someone else’s people, who all make their money off the chumps known as fans. Thank you, fans!

I bristled at this and similar concert injustices for years. Then I became a rock critic, and “the industry” started sending me free copies of every album, and good concert tickets were a cheerful phone call away. Some venues gave us free preferred parking; others a seafood buffet.

Once upon a time a road manager discovered, “Hey, look! This machine laminates stuff in plastic! Hand me a shrimp!” Eventually they figured out they could laminate backstage passes and such, and a new form of social ranking came into being. There would be one color of “backstage pass” on a string around your neck that would only get you access to a crowded tarmac full of people pissed off that you weren’t famous because they sure weren’t; at the other extreme, one annual four-day music fest used to give an all-access pass that was genuinely all access: Literally the only thing preventing me from strolling onstage and picking Tony Bennett’s nose was the fact that I just didn’t want to very much. 

Now that I’m a recovering rock critic back among the unlaminated masses, I find my tolerance for waiting in lines has vanished. I’ll walk out of the supermarket if the line’s more than five deep, and I wouldn’t sleep on the sidewalk in front of the Roxy again if I were homeless.

This lack of queue stamina was brought home when I tried to get tickets to see President Barack Obama speak at a town hall event in my hometown last week. It had been rumored for days that he’d be making a stop at the Orange County Fairgrounds, a mile from our Costa Mesa home. Tuesday’s local paper, the Daily Pilot, confirmed he’d be there the next day, and that 3000 tickets would be given out that very morning ay 10 am.

The average Pilot reader still thinks Herbert Hoover got a bum rap, so if the paper was the only source announcing the ticket handout, I figured there might be a chance of getting a pair if I sauntered over to the fairgrounds by 9. No such luck: the line was thick as a mamba snake, and went on and on, then around a corner and on and on. Some people had camped there in tents overnight. I did a rough head-count and it looked like it was probably over 1,500 heads. At two tickets per, that made it unlikely waiting in line would pan out. (And, we later learned, only 1,300 seats were available, not 3,000.)

I walked the line, front to back, not so much with a thought of joining its tail end as I was hoping someone would recognize me and give me a cut in line. There is an important pantomime when someone lets you in, where you attempt to express to those nearby, “I have just returned from the restroom,” or “I am returning with invisible coffee.” The important part is looking like you’re returning, so you might also pantomime having a corncob pipe and amphibious landing craft.

Alas, no one knows me anymore, so the Washburns weren’t going to be watching Obama without commercial interruption. I was glad, at least, that so many folks in historically conservative OC would show up on such short notice to see the new pres. I just would have been more glad had I been able to cheat a couple of them out of their place inside.

Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

Of course there were protestors waiting outside when Obama did arrive Wednesday. Freedom, not Socialism read a typical sign. A mother was there with her kids, one with a sign reading, Gimme a free Corvette when I’m 16, red please, and the other with one saying Gimme free cocaine cuz I wanna grow up like you. The mother, I gather, believes Obama unchecked would create a vast libertine socialist welfare state, that or she’s raising her kids to be coke whores.

Conservative commentators are on the warpath—when aren’t they?—complaining that Obama should be back in Washington dealing with the AIG bonus “crisis” instead of hiding out amongst the population. How to respond? Well, to begin with, it’s a fiasco, not a crisis. As offensive as it is that taxpayers are further enriching the same fuckers who drove our financial system to collapse with their ephemeral derivatives, the money involved is less than half what we piss away in Iraq daily, less also than your typical Pentagon weapons program cost overrun. It might be a PR crisis for the White House, but not for the nation.

And Obama wasn’t exactly ducking the subject. He brought it up himself first thing to the Costa Mesa gathering and said exactly where the buck stops: “Blame me.”

I would also remind conservative sputterists that their last president was in California during two notable crises. When 45 million East Coast Americans were without electricity in the biggest blackout in US history in 2003, Bush was in California, intent on his mission, he told one audience, of raising funds for his party. That’s also what he was doing when Katrina hit, and kept right on doing it as the city foundered. So maybe shut up already.

Unlike Bush, Obama’s not out here doing his party’s work, but his nation’s. Sure he’s selling his budget, but that’s the point. As happens in democracies, he needs the public solidly behind him, because he’s got special interests and political cowards aplenty opposing the only path anyone’s offered out of this mess we’re in. You can find the full text of what he said here, thanks be to the LA Times.

Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

Even with our slowly shifting demographics, OC is not exactly friendly territory for Obama. Doing a town hall meeting here is tantamount to Bush doing one in San Francisco, which of course Bush never did. Nor did he ever have a “town hall meeting” that was anything like a town hall meeting. Rather, they were thoroughly stage-managed events, with only the party faithful allowed in the door, and with all questions pre-screened or pre-fed to participants. (Anyone remember the “impromptu” chat Bush had via satellite with servicemen in Iraq, where the pre-show feed revealed the troops were being coached on what to ask him?)

The only screening that went on in Costa Mesa was that the people who got there first got in, damn their eyes. Inside, they came up with their own questions, put their hands in the air, and Obama called on them. I can’t think of too many sitting presidents who put themselves in the position of fielding blind questions from unknown persons with the cameras rolling. (I saw the meeting on television, no thanks to TV stations. The few that covered it would cut away mid-sentence for commercials or for other news, leaving one working the remote in the hopes of finding a station that, in these troubled times, thinks the President of the United States should take precedence over Judge Judy.)

Another thing about Obama that’s all the more remarkable for how little it’s been remarked on is the health care forum he hosted in the White House the other week. Consider for a moment the meetings the Bush administration conducted to forge its energy policy: they were held in such secrecy that even eight years and several lawsuits later the names of the participants remain a secret, though it’s a stone fact no public interest groups or environmentalists were included. At Obama’s confab, it wasn’t just like-minded sycophants, but representatives of the insurance industry and many of his Congressional Republican opponents, again asking Obama whatever they wanted. That is practically unprecedented in American politics, more akin to what Britain’s Prime Minister has to face in Parliament. The difference is that Obama’s doing it voluntarily. He walks right into the lion’s den, this guy does.

Comments

No comments.

Comments closed.