I heard the same thing which was why I tried to watch it. I hope it got better than the half I listened to, because all I heard was mush. An ordinary man trying to wear the gumboots of the giant of American politics.
For folks who want to hear "America together" and "beacon of light" stuff, it was probably stirring. But that kind of thing doesn't move me at all. I find it empty.
I am interested in the reality that the GOP is Trump and McConnell. You can't coddle a scorpion. There's no path to a friendly relationship. They will take advantage of that naivety again, just like they did with Obama. So if Biden is thinking he can govern like a Dem if only he can find seven or eight Republican senators to work with, remember that McConnell stole the Supreme Court, not by accident but because he is an immoral cheat who is trying to control US law for two decades. And the GOP senators went along. That's who they are. You can't expect them to behave in a new way. They will obstruct everything they can and they will have the Supreme Court to impose their agenda.
How's Biden going to deal with this obvious truth? He didn't tell me.
And America is no longer the global shining city it tells itself it is, if it ever was. Whatever good qualities it has, and it has some, America's also a country that has inflicted massive damage on the world over the last twenty years.
If one can get past the dewy eyes and clenched jaw patriotic idea Biden seems to have, America might also account for its lies to the UN to start the Iraq War, its justification of secret rendition and torture, its undermining of the international response to climate change, its distribution of worthless debt via US financial markets to the whole world (and its prime responsibility for the Great Global Recession which followed), its unregulated, exploding oil platforms in the Gulf, its damage to free trade, its encouragement of Putin (either via Obama's fake red lines or from the Trump Oval Office), and so on. That's the recent track record.
I am hoping one day a president will come to grips with what America is, not what it dreams itself to be. It has good qualities. But it seems blind to its faults. And so it never corrects them.
It will take a far more insightful man than Biden to figure out that America's most worrying, longstanding, bipartisan flaw is its mirror. The desire to see itself as fairer than anywhere and to congratulate itself over and over like it's actually true. When, in fact, it behaves with breathtaking selfishness on the world stage, much of the time.
There are so many sacred cows in America but American exceptionalism is the biggest, fattest, stupidest one in the field. I'd like to see it turned into hamburgers.
Lincoln read Shakespeare's tragedies. He knew where vainglory leads. One day, I hope to hear an American president say that the US is a country, like everywhere else. Not worse. Not better. Faces the same problems. Makes its own choices, sometimes wisely, sometimes unwisely, but does its best in an unpredictable, often hostile universe.
I look forward to the day when I can praise America because it doesn't praise itself enough. That day won't come under Biden. Sadly.
He held the American mirror in his hand. He did so, of all places, at Gettysburg. The one place in which any American might pause for reflection.
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