I got the news as I was driving into work to—Barack Obama would be visiting Decorah this evening at 5:15 pm! That was some very exciting news. It would be nice to see the President of the United States in person, although since I’d been away most of the weekend and hadn’t heard much about what was going on in Decorah, I’d be a bit behind the proverbial 8-ball as far as trying to see him.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry. They gave out a limited number of tickets to the town hall meeting President Obama held, and all of the recipients were people who lived in the town of Decorah. I have no idea how they were distributed, I have no idea when they were distributed, and I have no idea that you even needed tickets to show up at a town hall meeting. I kept thinking that perhaps the tickets should have been put in items at the Co-op organic grocery store to make things interesting. It wouldn’t be the most efficient way to distribute tickets, but I can guarantee the co-op would never have such a good day of sales.
I arrived in Decorah later than 5:15. More like 6:00, without being able to exercise or just relax and unwind at the end of a long day. Which is another way of saying I was tired, and ready to have dinner somewhere. Since I had heard that the White House had rented every room of the venerable Hotel Winneshiek on the main downtown street, I thought it might be best if I had dinner in the hotel’s restaurant, a neat high-end place called Albert’s. Albert’s is known for its ribs, and the restaurant on the whole is “award-winning,” according to the site, although they never get around to revealing exactly what award it has won. At any rate, if you are in Decorah and go to Albert’s, do try the ribs. They’re very good according to friends, and eventually I will get around to trying them myself and let you know what I think. However, when I sat down for dinner that night I was not in the mood for a heavy dinner. Soup, a salad and a sandwich served nicely, and I am happy to say that Albert’s serves wonderful French onion soup, an excellent-looking mixed greens salad, and a rib meat sandwich that is topped with cole slaw but still tastes wonderful. It’s nice to go to an expensive restaurant and feel as though you have actually gotten your money’s worth from it. Even better, it’s actually open seven days a week! This may not seem like a big deal for someone living in the Twin Cities or Chicago or New York, but trust me when I saw that in Decorah, a restaurant open at any time on Sunday is wonderful.
After dinner at Albert’s, I hung around in the lobby until a secret service agent politely told me that I wouldn’t be able to snap a picture of Obama. He was actually polite about it, I should point out and not just because I don’t want to wake up one morning to discover Navy SEAL Team Six pointing several submachine guns at me and suggesting that I write more encouraging things about the Secret Service. No, he was actually polite. Definitely firm, though.
One of the great parts about a high-ranking government official coming to visit is getting to talk with the supporting cast, as it were. These Secret Service people are very thorough in their attempts to secure the area for the President. They were in Decorah for a week and a half examining the area for security. Still, you can tell from their faces, it’s not enough. These people are paid to protect the President, to counter every single potential threat imaginable, from the crazy running up with the pocketknife to the terrorist organization with a large bank account and a high-powered rifle. When you think of it, it’s them versus an entire town, where the next threat might come from anywhere. And if it comes to it, they need to be able to lay down their lives for the President. I know most CEOs presume their lives are more valuable than their employees, but still, if a CEO ever wanted to get his VP of Sales to take a bullet for him there would be some yachts changing hands. For Secret Service agents this is a job requirement.
So I got to the street, where a sizeable crowd was gathering. I had no idea where Obama would be showing up, and several people confirmed that no one in the crowd had any idea either. We were waiting for him to maybe make an appearance, the same way other people would wait for Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, only this crowd was much less cool.
As I milled around I heard a drum, a bass drum beating regularly from somewhere. No one else paid any attention to it, and the high school marching band was probably still practicing for the football season. Not to mention it didn’t seem Obama was going to come out any time soon. So I walked in the direction of the drumming.
I found the drummer one block away, sitting on a bench, playing a drum that looked for all the world to be homemade, down to the wooden drumstick with a leather band wrapped around the end. The drummer was an old man, dressed in extremely well-used clothes. To be honest, he looked homeless. But what kind of homeless person carries a bass drum like that? The man was a mystery, and when he saw me taking his picture he looked up at me.
“Wanna play?” he said.
It’s not often a potentially homeless man asks if you want to play his homemade bass drum. I suppose I could have turned him down, but something made me walk over and take the offered drumstick as he beat it with me for a couple of times. As it turned out, he was beating out a simple heartbeat, what he called the rhythm of Mother Earth.
The man, whose name was Michael, took out a cigarette and had a smoke break while I kept the heartbeat of Mother Earth going. We talked about a few things, and while I’m reasonably sure that Michael has some kind of mental disorder, he was also pretty nice. He and I discussed how Obama seemed to be a priest-king, that a lot of mayors and governors performed functions you would otherwise thing spiritual leaders would do, and that priest-kings had been around for awhile, and that kind of thing just didn’t go away overnight. I asked Michael what he would like to ask President Obama if he had the chance, and Michael thought for a minute then replied he’d like to know if Obama visited him in his dreams the night before, because the Obama he had dreamed about seemed different than the other times. Michael said he’d start by asking if Obama believed in dream travel, and if Obama said “no” then he probably hadn’t received a dream visit by the President. Personally, I thought that was a pretty good strategy.
After a few minutes, Michael had finished with his cigarette and I wanted to get back to the crowd, which was again growing. I let him tap out a couple heartbeats on the drum with me, and then walked back to the hotel.
As it turned out, after a lot of hoopla, the President would not be making an appearance, to the great disappointment of the crowd. I’m not entirely sure what was going on there, but my guess is that the Secret Service people thought there was too much of a security risk. I base this on the fact that on the roof of the hotel there was originally two Secret Service agents, scanning the area with high-powered binoculars. Later on, there were four of them, all watching, all pointing, all talking to one another.
The night wasn’t quite over, however, since the local Tea Party came to give their side of the story. Among their signs were one criticizing Obama (or, “the government”) for charging too much in taxes. Another claimed Obama wasn’t spending the tax money he had well. As I tried to figure out how they could tell their tax dollars were being misspent while at the same time wanting to lower their taxes, the leader began to speak. He started by telling everyone that he wasn’t some slick Washington politician, that he was a concerned citizen, and that he was going to tell everyone what the Tea Party was all about. If you’ve ever seen one of those campus pastors who don’t know the difference between projecting your voice and screaming, then you have a pretty fair idea of what this gentleman was like. His voice swelled in volume as he documented the multiple, multiple wrongs the government had inflicted on the citizens, including the two wars in which we are currently. Curiously, he also had a button on his baseball cap that said “King for Congress.” Steve King, by the way, voted for the war for Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. I wanted to bring that up, but the members of the Tea Party were being laughed at and heckled, mostly by college-age people who seemed to have a hard time believing that the leader actually believed anything he said Perhaps mentioning he was supporting the wrong candidate would be too much for his ego to take.
Still, I did try to help. When the Tea Party leader asked why the liberal media hated the Tea Party, I jumped right in. “It’s because they hate ball caps!” I shouted. Since almost all of the Tea Party members were wearing ball caps, you’d have thought this would be a good answer. Apparently, it was not.
I left with the Tea Party leader’s voice still reverberating between the buildings, and I thought he should really take credit for Obama not coming out. I don’t know how long they were out there, but they probably left like everyone else once the crowd dispersed.
For my part, I was disappointed but not upset. After all, it hadn’t been a given that Obama would do a meet and greet, and strictly speaking I wasn’t even part of the town. It had been a lot of fun to see all the people gathering around, at least half of the town, and even the Tea Party had been interesting in a pro-wrestling bad guy sort of way. The heartbeat of the world seemed to follow me home.
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