Obauguration, London Style

A few nights ago I found myself having dinner in a pub near Notting Hill. A young American girl was tending bar and talking excitedly about inauguration day. "Yeah," she said, "I don't have to work, so I'm planning to drink champagne all day long!" She was excited, she said, because someone she'd helped to elect (she'd voted for Obama and donated to his campaign) had actually been elected - only she was a little bummed that the election didn't really affect her life, now that she wasn't living in the States anymore.

I and the other patrons - primarily a staggering handful of local drunks - held our tongues, but I'm pretty sure we all knew better.

Because of course Obama's election will affect her life, as it will those of people all over the world, not just those living in America. That's why I believe everyone who is not an American citizen should get precisely one-half vote in our presidential elections. It's only fair - it might not matter to me who the prime minister of Iceland is, but it really does matter to most people in the world who the president of the US is. And most people out here in the rest of the world know it. The London papers have been all over this thing - not only giving the inauguration itself wall-to-wall coverage with a level of detail and insight that you wouldn't find even in most American newspapers (in fact, I rather wonder if the Daily Oklahoman is covering the inauguration at all), but also running multi-part inserts on things like "The Lives of the Presidents" and so forth. The same is true of the TV stations which, when not showing some snooker tournament, have been running special after special examining Obama, the American presidency, and American politics from every conceivable angle.

There were, as you might expect, many Obama happenings around London today. Krispy Kreme Donuts offered a free americano coffee to anyone who came up to the counter and said "yes we can!" The irony being, of course, that there's nothing remotely American about the americano, which is just espresso and hot water - it's what British cafes serve when they don't have actual drip coffee makers, and it's usually a very poor approximation. Madame Tussauds, to celebrate the unveiling of their new Obama statue, kicked it up a notch by offering free admission to anyone with an American passport (that's a savings of 25 pounds, folks). TGI Fridays, which has a distressingly large presence here, advertised "The World's Largest Inauguration Party," which would include a simultaneous toast of Jack-and-Coke at 9pm and free Friday's buttons for everybody. And, perhaps most intriguing of all, the Hard Rock Cafe promised that an "Obama lookalike" would appear during their screening of the event. One can only imagine what that might have turned out to be.

I, being a good research monkey, attended none of these events - though believe me, gentle reader, I was sorely tempted to do so, that I might then be able to report to you what I saw and felt. I did, however, allow myself to knock off an hour early and watch the inauguration in a nearby pub - a pub several blocks away that I'd scouted out the day before, after learning that the pub closest to the British Library (the Euston Flyer) was only planning to show the inauguration if there wasn't any football on. By which, I believe, they meant soccer.

And I'm afraid there's not much more to report. The pub was full of American college students, everyone clapped in all the right places, was silent in all the right places, and began losing interest around the time the poet laureate came on. The BBC announcers may have misidentified the song Aretha Franklin sang as the "national anthem," and they may also have dwelled a little too long on how high the risk was that Obama would be assassinated, but otherwise it all went fairly smoothly.

I guess there was one thing. For the first time that I can remember in all the time I've spent abroad, I didn't feel ashamed to be an American. No, that's not quite right: I actually felt proud. Not only of the guy standing behind the podium on TV, but of all the clapping, laughing, drinking Americans sitting happily around me. Firmly, unmistakably proud.

But I'll concede that I may not have felt that way if I'd spent the day at TGI Fridays.