No one tell James and Tyrone Coleman, District kids aged 13 and 11, about Craigslist. The Coleman brothers, you see, won the Presidential Inauguration Committee’s essay contest and will receive two sweet seats near the White House to watch the Inauguration Day parade. WUSA excerpts from their darling essays on community service.
What the sweet, innocent Colemans might not know is that it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and no good turn goes unpunished. Scalpers are making some serious change on the Change that Barack Obama is promising. The Hill’s Bob Cusak reports that inauguration parade tickets — those 5,000 bleacher seats made available over Ticketmaster and sold in seconds — are fetching amazing sums on Craigslist. By the number of $1 tickets being offered, it doesn’t seem that anyone who paid merely $25 will actually wind up in the bleachers. Don’t tell James and Tyrone, but $600 is a lot of Xbox games.
Feinstein’s legislation to ban the sale of inauguration tickets failed, but isn’t scalping in public (is the Web not public?) already illegal? Some scalpers have found a creative workaround to selling over face value than the “$1” blind auction system. Instead, scalpers are naming the price but not selling tickets. This scalper and several others are instead selling the photograph of Barack Obama that the seats will afford you. One dentist is offering braces in exchange for a good parade view, a barter worth about a thousand bucks per ticket.
Why shouldn’t Inauguration Day parade bleacher tickets illustrate the laissez faire principles which our nation holds dear? It’s the scumbags Ticketmaster clients in other places who have zero intention of coming to D.C. for the inauguration who burn me. Sure, it’s probably illegal in some way that no one cares about, and definitely unfair in a whiny civic sense. But mostly, it is just too much. This election is already an incredibly commoditized affair. Everyone but the Coleman brothers is cashing in on Obama’s image. Now we gotta get fleeced for the opportunity to look at him?
Image by mofo
