BLACK MAN GIVEN WORST JOB IN WORLD

Even though I think The Onion got it right with this headline when Obama won the presidency last year, I'm filled with a sense of promise now, for the first time in nearly fifty years. I'll be glad when the inauguration is over, though. Memories of assassinations obtrude, despite the fact that Obama's very success is testimony to the changed American society over that period. No event since 1960 has evoked such positive feeling. I look forward to the fulfillment of Robert Frost's benediction on the occasion of John F. Kennedy's inauguration: 

A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.