Peggy Noonan might not be to everyone’s tastes, but she does a good job of bringing pre-inauguration Washington to life. She describes stores full of Obama memorabilia, motorcades whizzing through town and a cab driver who wrote an inaugural address in the hope that one of Obama’s minions might get into his cab–which, of course, happened. Most of all though, she exhorts people to put aside their cynicism and just enjoy this historic occasion:

And this has grown old, and maybe it’s the last time to say it, history moving so fast, but there’s something we all know so well that we are perhaps forgetting to see it in the forefront. But a long-oppressed people have raised up a president. It is moving and beautiful and speaks to the unending magic and sense of justice of our country. The other day the journalist John O’Sullivan noted that 150 years after slavery, a black man stands in the place of Lincoln in the inaugural stands, and this country has proved again that anything is possible, that if we can do this we can do anything. That is a good thing to remember at a difficult time.

What is required for full enjoyment of an inauguration, from opening prayers to speeches to marching bands is, in the great 19th-century phrase, the willing suspension of disbelief. If you don’t put your skepticism aside, you will not fully absorb and experience the drama.

Suspend Your Disbelief ( WSJ)

America’s latest Russia envoy has an interesting background. Not only does John Beyrle have decades of experience in the former Soviet Union (and apparently the envious gift of being able to speak “flawless Russian”) but his father Joe was something of a minor celebrity in Russia during the 1990s, when he was belatedly awarded “four medals for service in the Red Army” during the Second World War. This from the New York Times:

Joe Beyrle, who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, had been terribly battered during seven months in German captivity. He managed to escape, on his third try, and fled through Polish farmland until he could hear the artillery fire of the eastern front, which sounded “like a welcome from God,” he told [biographer] Mr. [Thomas H.] Taylor for his book, “The Simple Sounds of Freedom.”

He hid in a hayloft, sucking on straw until it was soft enough to swallow, as the Red Army seized the farm, machine-gunned the German couple who lived there and fed the bodies to their pigs. He came out with his hands up, offering the Soviets a damp pack of Lucky Strikes.

When they offered him safe passage home, he said he would rather stay with the battalion. Why, they asked, dumbfounded. His answer was, “To fight the Nazis, fight them with you,” Mr. Taylor writes.

The war ended for him a few weeks later, when a German bomb blew him off a tank, and his commander — a woman he knew only as “the Major” — leaned over him and told him, Proshchai, tovarishch — Goodbye, comrade. Joe Beyrle returned to Muskegon, where everyone’s war stories were gradually papered over by ordinary life.

New U.S. Envoy to Russia Echoes Father Who Fought for Soviets (NYT)

Incredible to think that this man has served as president for eight years.

Today’s New York Post has great coverage of the US Airways crash in the Hudson. There’s a detailed story on the incident itself with lots of photos, a map of the flightpath and a profile of the pilot, Chesley B “Sully” Sullenberger III, who just happened to be a safety expert and experienced glider–which comes in very handy when you lose both engines on a 169,000-pound plane over New York City. But the real highlights are the accounts of how individual passengers survived, including a man who found himself neck deep in 36-degree water inside the aircraft and another who swam ashore. The funny thing is, I was only about a mile away when the whole thing happened, yet the first I heard about it was when I got home an hour or two later and glanced at Twitter to see that someone in Manchester, England, had posted about it.