That's Denzel Washington on a jumbotron near the Washington Monument, right as the concert/reading/celebration/Lincoln-fest was getting underway today at 2:30 pm. (Sorry for the late report; Eli Sanders, who has the anywhere-in-the-world live-blog technology, couldn't get in.) It seemed like kind of a sparse crowd at this point in time, until you remembered that the show was happening at the Lincoln Memorial, which is nearly a mile from the Washington Monument. And pretty soon after it had started, even this area nearly a mile away was packed.

There were tons of celebrities, as advertised. The stars included Bruce Springsteen, Queen Latifah, Tiger Woods, Tom Hanks (who seemed like he was playing a president in a movie), Samuel L. Jackson, Marisa Tomei (random), Jack Black (ditto), Stevie Wonder, Mary J. Blige ("There she IS!!!" the lady behind me, who was very excited, screamed), U2, Usher, Shakira, Sheryl Crow, Bon Jovi (somehow, he endures), Garth Brooks (did a rousing version of "American Pie," followed by a rousing version of the Isley Brothers' "Shout!"), James Taylor (certain people cried while he sang "Shower the People," because certain people were standing next to their dad, who listened to James Taylor a lot when certain people were very young, a dad who, even though he voted Republican, drove his son into the city to be with him on this day and put his arm around him at exactly the right moment), Steve Carrell, Jamie Foxx (did an extraordinary impersonation of Obama), and Beyonce. But the real star of the show was history. The readings were not what I feared they would be when I read in the paper this morning that people like Queen Latifah would be giving "readings"; they were, like, someone coming out to read two sentences by Abraham Lincoln, or a few sentences by MLK, or someone introducing a video clip of the most famous thing that ever came out of JFK's mouth, or the most famous thing that ever came out of FDR's mouth ("ask not..."/"we have nothing to fear..."). The crowd, who was loving it, loving the at-a-glance, rolled-in-famous-people history lesson, murmured along to the passages they knew.

Here's Mary J. Blige (insert some sort of Obama-related "No Drama" joke here; I can't come up with one):

(Though it looks like there's nothing behind this jumbotron except open park, much further in the distance is the Lincoln Memorial; the perspective here is from far off to the side. As if to further dramatize the day's emphasis on the passage of time, there was a not-insignificant passage of time, at least five or six seconds, between what the lips of the speakers were doing on the jumbotron and the sounds that were coming out of the speakers.)

As Tom Hanks was reading something Lincoln had written, a flock of low-flying birds (out of frame) was flying toward a low-flying commercial plane. One thing you probably won't see on the telecast is that the Lincoln Memorial is right under the flight path to Reagan National Airport. Dozens and dozens of planes landed during the show—a sight that still, after a century, is breathtaking. I only ever managed to capture smallish planes with my cell phone camera, but big ones were landing too.

But it wasn't until I saw a plane descending over the 16th president's head that it occurred to me that it's not nothing that none of these planes are slowly turning, pointing toward the earth, and purposefully crashing into us or one of the buildings nearby—that, in fact, since the one day that happened around here nearly a decade ago, it hasn't happened anywhere. Really, wouldn't it be relatively easy to shoot a plane out of the sky? Or stick a bomb under a wing (have you looked out at the seemingly cavalier high schoolers running the tarmac operation from the window seat of a plane lately?)? Or, forget planes, how about just walk into a mall in any old city with a bomb strapped to oneself? Is it not kinda, sorta amazing? The fact that the current president so desperately wants "I protected America from another terrorist attack on our soil" to be his legacy, as evidenced by his address last week, makes me want to dispute it, or dismiss it, because he's been a cocky, disastrous, dismissive guy, but we ought to at least give him due credit there.

Still, it's much more satisfying to marvel at the things some of his predecessors did.