So does a $170 million price tag buy you the bestest inauguration ceremony in the history of these United States of America? Surprisingly, no. It was a day of mediocrity and mess-ups:

† People are talking about Aretha Franklin’s hat because if they talked about her singing, they would be forced to admit she turned in the worst performance of her legendary career:

Perhaps it was the cold, but her lungs had no power. Perhaps it is her age, but she’s lost her vocal range. Here’s what Bloomberg News critic Norman Lebrecht thought:

On this day of liberty, Aretha sure took a few.

Could you imagine anyone vocalizing riffs on the “Marseillaise” while President Sarkozy took his tricolor? Or venturing a variation on “God Save the Queen” -- same tune, different values -- while Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth sat there waiting to be saved?

It was a crowning glory of the 44th President’s Inauguration Day that a great if worn singer could depart from the script and follow wherever her soul might lead in “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee,” performing variation after variation, with a vocal arpeggio for desserts.

When Jimi Hendrix bashed out “The Star Spangled Banner” in 1969 and Marvin Gaye gave it the “Sexual Healing” treatment in 1983, political America was scandalized. In the 21st-century and the Obama presidency, heritage is up for grabs, even at a presidential inauguration.

The freedom to make what we like of a solemn anthem was taken by Dame Aretha with a lordly wave of a gray-coated arm. Top notes went missing and the mike caught a half-screech, but the karaoke style was surely a sign of things to come. “Yes We Can Sing!” Try it tonight.

Oh, and BTW, in Lebrecht’s opinion “the classical quartet written for the occasion by the surely un-cool Hollywood composer John Williams ... came off like a dirge. … Williams was utterly unequal to the task.”

† As everyone knows by now, Obama and Chief Justice John Roberts both flubbed the 35-word oath of office. Maybe it was bad karma: The Associated Press reports that “Obama was one of 22 Senate Democrats to vote against Roberts' confirmation to the Supreme Court in 2005 - the first time a Supreme Court justice has sworn in a president who voted against him.” (BTW, it was binding and legal – but Roberts administered the oath of office again in the Map Room of the White House Wednesday evening just to be on the safe side.)

BTW: Bush’s term lasted five minutes longer than it should have, since the inaugural program was running that many minutes behind schedule.

† Editorial writers, pundits and speech writers alike agree that Obama’s inaugural address was not particularly memorable:

Former Bush 43 speechwriter Michael Gerson:

Given President Barack Obama's background, his inaugural address would have been memorable even if every word had been a Flag Day platitude. Unfortunately, too many of his words were platitudes. … 

[T]he first literary goal of an inaugural address is to express familiar American ideals without resorting to distracting cliches. And Obama generally failed this test. There were too many "rising tides" and "gathering clouds" and "raging storms" and "nagging fears" and "dark chapters" and "watchful eyes" and "dying campfires" and "icy currents." Wages had to be "decent," and markets "spin out of control."

New York Magazine political analyst John Heilemann:

Barack Obama’s election against daunting odds was a testament to many things, but not least his remarkable capacity to rock the mike. On Tuesday, he delivered the most watched, most anticipated, most historically significant speech of his life in front of a crowd so massive and so joyous that it took your breath away. …

Yet the speech … was less than thrilling in itself, perhaps by design. Its structure was formal, classical, the substance largely abstract. There were no anecdotes or narratives, personal or otherwise. There were few rhetorical flourishes, no gratuitous bids for Barletts [sic]. The language was spare, at times even pedestrian -  telling Americans that "we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America," for example.

The Stiletto also had a beef with all the historical inaccuracies – which is what you get when a 27-year-old writes your speech. To begin with, 44 Americans have not taken the presidential oath; 43 have.

Washington Post columnist George Will points out another one:

"We remain," the president said, "a young nation." Which, even if true, would be no excuse for childishness. And it is not true. The United States is older, as a national polity, than Germany or Italy, among many others.

Will also quibbles that Obama “overstated the scale of our difficulties with his comparison of them with those the nation faced in the almost extinguishing winter of 1776-77.”

Yes, but far worse is that he understated the tension between safety and constitutional ideals that has occurred on several occasions when our country has been at war – not just under President Bush:

[W]e reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. …

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

Obama clearly was referring to President Bush’s policies of indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, and jihadis at Gitmo, waterboarding and warrantless wiretaps, but he and his speechwriter either forgot or dishonestly chose not to mention that FDR committed the most egregious constitutional abuses in this nation’s history. To cite just two examples: He put Americans of German, Italian and Japanese descent (AKA “enemy nationalities”) into concentration camps for the duration of WWII, and he conducted a secret trial and executions of several Nazi saboteurs who were intercepted before they could carry out a plot to commit what we now recognize as acts of terrorism against U.S. military and government installations and Jewish-owned stores. That’s how FDR “faced down fascism,” but there was no mention of any of it.

† The inaugural poem sucked. It should have been lyrical and profound, but was labored and pedestrian. Forget rhyme, there was no discernable meter:

 Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

Someone should have told poet Elizabeth Alexander to take out her pencil and erase. Here’s Los Angeles Times book editor David Olin’s take:

Relying on prosaic language - "Each day we go about our business," the poem opens, a strange sentiment for an occasion that, on so many levels, was not about business as usual …

The intention, clearly, was to present a chorus of American voices, an expression of the way "[w]e encounter each other in words." Yet, except for a stanza evoking the struggles of black Americans, Alexander's "Praise Song" simply didn't sing.

† Ironically, Rev. Rick Warren was supposed to be “the designated bigot” but his invocation was uplifting, awe-inspiring – and joyous:

Almighty God, our Father, everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of you alone. It all comes from you. It all belongs to you. It all exists for your glory. …

Now, today, we rejoice not only in America’s peaceful transfer of power for the 44th time. We celebrate a hinge point of history with the inauguration of our first African American president of the United States. We are so grateful to live in this land, a land of unequaled possibility, where the son of an African immigrant can rise to the highest level of our leadership. And we know today that Dr. King and a great cloud of witnesses are shouting in heaven.

Now consider by way of comparison Rev. Joseph Lowery's anachronistic and racially divisive benediction:

God of our weary years, god of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way, thou who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our god, where we met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee …

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right.

Lowry starts by quoting the last stanza of “Lift Every Voice & Sing” (AKA “the Black National Anthem”). But he left out the end of it:

May we forever stand,

True to our God,

True to our native land.

As The Stiletto has pointed out before, the Black National Anthem is a pledge of loyalty to Africa, not to America.

And leaving aside that The Stiletto doesn’t know what in the world Lowry means by “yellow will be mellow,” she finds it odd that he should speak of “working for that day when black will not be asked to get in back” on the very day that a man whose father is black has assumed the highest office in the land and is the first among equals.

Finally, considering that Obama won with a seven point margin over McCain (53 percent to 46 percent) and got 44 percent of the white vote (as compared to Kerry’s and Gore’s 41 percent each), why does Lowry still look to a future when white “will” embrace what is right? White Americans did not vote for McCain just because of Obama’s race. Can Lowry and other civil rights leaders give the accusatory guilt-trip a rest already?

Editorial Note: In a Wall Street Journal op-ed columnist John Steele Gordon writes:

Mr. Obama will be the country's first African-American president, but he is actually far more than that. He will be the first president whose ethnic identity is not linked to the extreme northwest corner of Europe. All 42 men who have been president of the United States up to now were either British, Irish or Dutch in ancestry - except Dwight Eisenhower, whose ancestors came from the Saarland, in Germany, which borders the Low Countries. Most of the 42 had colonial ancestors (including Eisenhower, whose antecedents came to Pennsylvania in 1741), and would therefore qualify as WASPs, to use the not-altogether-complimentary - or accurate - acronym coined in the 1960s.

So the inauguration of Mr. Obama is being seen, rightly, as a moment in American history when the idea that "Anyone can grow up to be president" is becoming more true than it had been previously. American democracy is being significantly deepened and widened by his accession to the presidency.

Yes, but he is even more than “the country’s first African-American president.” He’s America’s first biracial, first generation American president. The distinction is important to The Stiletto, because she too is a first-generation American – and members of her family are biracial. Frankly, The Stiletto thought she'd have to wait a lot longer than this to see a non-WASP man – or woman – elected president, much less the child of an immigrant and/or of mixed racial heritage.

Like many Americans, Obama was forced to "choose" one race over the other on census forms, school applications - dozens of official documents that mark one's passage through life. Here’s what Jennifer Brea, a writer for EbonyJet.com whose mother is white and father is Haitian, tells CNN:

[S]he felt pressure to claim one race growing up. She never quite felt like a full citizen.

Obama's biracial background and his "exotic" upbringing relieves her of that pressure. Obama will help other blacks who come from multiracial backgrounds and immigrant communities to be comfortable in their own skin, she says.

"It's changed everything," she says. "You can sort of be whatever you want in all of its complexity, and it's something to be proud of."

The Stiletto thinks Brea is jumping the gun. Now that he has the bully pulpit, if Obama can fully embrace his racial duality he can change the way we count and categorize people so that they no longer have to deny one half of their heritage. Until then, nothing will change in the day-to-day lives and self-definition of biracial Americans.

Reality Check: Part II

The Iranian government seems already to have written off its hope for change under President Barak Hussein Obama^* (second item), and are even encouraging anti-Obama demonstrations, like the one last week in Tehran supporting Palestinians in Gaza.

A top Iranian intelligence official also warned the U.S. to stop spying on his country, reports The Washington Post: