Not long ago, my wife decided we should have "family movie night." I hate most kids movies, but I agreed anyway. Parents should know what crap their kids are watching, especially if they can't stand it.

The advantage of "family movie night," however, is that we, the parents, can have some say over what gets watched. This week we watched Mary Poppins.

It's not a perfect movie, and it's really long (2 1/2 hours) for an audience whose ages are six and four. Still, there are plenty of droll moments, the incomparable antics of Dick van Dyke and the almost astonishingly youthful visage of Julie Andrews.

And then there's the setting, 1910 London. Mr. Banks, the dad, sets the scene with Edwardian elan, extolling the virtues of King, gentlemanly life and the untrammeled British pound. History buffs will remember what happened a short four years later, something that might possibly be foreshadowed by certain plot points in the movie.

War. Ruin. National insecurity.

Sitting in 2009 America, I found myself wondering, "Man, where's Mary Poppins when we need her?"

Then I remember the Mary Poppins from the book, who was mostly medicine without the sugar. She was an often malevolent force--something occasionally hinted at in the movie--who seemed to embody the notion that kids will latch on to anything that gives them attention. Many reviewers have latched on to this, stating fairly authoritatively that the Mary Poppins series is simply a treatise on absentee parents.

Maybe. And if so, then America does indeed have its Mary Poppins. Barack Obama is in town, and like Mary, he'll stay until the political winds change (or his time is up, of course). He's got the medicine, and if you believe his inaugural address, very little sugar.

But we've been wandering around without guidance for so long, it's hard not to like anyone who takes charge, even if we don't like the taste of the cure. Oh, we'll pay a bit less in federal taxes now, but that won't comfort us when the bus schedule is cut in half and county taxes go up by 25 percent.

Indeed, we're in for dark days ahead. There are no safe jobs and there are no safe places to live. Everywhere is getting hit hard, and this year will be much worse than last. The key will be to simply keep moving, not unlike an awful lot of people who braved the cold to attend last week's inauguration.

Hey, I do have one piece of good news. Here's the disaster tab from last Tuesday:

A few thousand folks with tickets who didn't get to their seats in time
62 hospitalizations
One lady on the Metro tracks (no serious injuries)
0 arrests
0 deaths

As one who hopped a bus downtown and watched the ceremonies on the Lincoln Memorial side of the Washington Monument, I experienced no trouble at all. We got on our Metrobus a bit after nine and make it back home by 2:30. We weren't in the cold long enough to have any serious problems. It was great.

And so were the crowds. People were happy, helpful to others and generally a pleasure to be around. Not everyone was pleased with the tough-love aspect of the speech, of course. Time to put away childish ways (The "new paradigm"; "Reagan proved deficits don't matter!") and get down to work? Sounds a lot like what the Mary Poppins of the books might say.

It's been a tiring week. It's been an even more tiring eight years. And after all that, we're now supposed to buckle down?

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

Jon Worley is not well.