The American capital may be so blue that only nine percent of its registered voters cast their ballots for George W. Bush, but come tomorrow, Jan. 20, Washington will be the town where the pomp and ceremony of a presidential inauguration will take place, along with massive partying involving nine balls, countless candle-lit dinners, a rock concert and a concluding prayer service on Friday. All of which will cost in the neighborhood of $50 million, mostly forked out by big money contributors with huge stakes in administration policies.

Already critics are complaining that spending so much on these events is both ill-timed and in bad taste. Anthony D. Weiner, a Democratic congressman, sent a letter to President Bush in which he wrote: “Precedent suggests that inauguration festivities should be muted — if not canceled — in wartime.” Weiner also reminded the president that in 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt limited the celebration to a small function at the White House.

A more boisterous form of protest than a mere missive from a congressman will be expressed by the tens of thousands of demonstrators who will converge on the capital for their own so-called Counter-Inaugural.

To be sure, these folks are not your garden variety 60s lefties, whose slogan was the Revolution Will Not Wait. In fact, at a press conference at the National Press Club last week, their spokesmen promised that not only will the revolution wait, but it will be polite, orderly and mature, though not without the theatrics often associated with such events.

When George W. Bush takes the oath of office for a second time on Jan. 20, the event will mark the 55th time that a US president has been sworn in for a four-year term since 1789. As in previous inaugural ceremonies, after taking the oath, President Bush will give an inaugural address outlining his upcoming four years in office.

So on J-20, as counter inauguralists call the day, Republicans will dance till they drop and boogy the night away — while Iraq burns and Americans die in a war that is unwinnable and unnecessary, in a country that remains unresponsive to Jeffersonian “democratization,” a country that was about as much of a threat to the US, through its phantom weapons of mass destruction, as secondary smoke.

True, there will be a lot of earnest protesters in town, united in their opposition to the 43rd president and all that he represents, but there will also be a lot of yee-hah Texans, in their big boots and cowboy hats, and Midwestern cocky Republicans swaggering around town, coming on like the inauguration is not a celebration of democracy, but the coronation of a king.

First, the theatrics. We are assured by the C-I folks that these include no egging the presidential limo the way it was four years ago, but instead what they call the Turn Your Back on Bush, namely, you attend the parade quietly, but then at the right moment, the sighting of the presidential limousine, you turn away from Bush and give him your back — not your finger, please, this is not the 60s.

No doubt about it, as street theater, it appeals to those demonstrators who don’t usually take to the streets. It’s affirmative, but nonviolent; committed but not ideological.

The style of back-giving, presumably, is left to each individual Back Giver — whether you pivot your behind, say, in a pronounced, telling way or not is up to you, according to Sarah Kauffman, a student C-I field organizer, who just happens to be a theater arts major, and who demonstrated her back-turning technique to a Washington Post reporter.

Her turn, he wrote, was “swift, sure and graceful” and she did it so “elegantly that it’s as though her feet haven’t moved at all.”

So how are those, who don’t want to take to the streets, to protest — or bemoan — the fact that they have to put up with an inarticulate, incompetent and totally-out-of-it president for the next four years?

Simple: Just get outa town for the duration of the five-day festivities, as far away as possible (a cruise, the Bahamas, Cancun, anything, anywhere) so you won’t have to bump into exuberant Texans and hick midesterners stomping around your town and, God forbid, hanging out in your favorite watering holes in Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle.

And let the record show that’s what this columnist will do, because, seriously, how can you communicate with people who come from a state like Texas, where even hair-dressers are reputed to be straight, croissant and bagle shops are run by Pakistanis, and acupuncture clinics are operated by Hispanics.

Heck, I’m from Washington, a town where people have endowed their madness with method, the town that gave you a knife-wielding Lorrena Bobbit, a crack-smoking Mayor Marion Barry, and a brazenly phony Pulitzer Prize winning Janet Cook.

Or communicate with those Bible-belt midesterners who can hardly wait for the rapture and the day they gather in the New Jerusalem in order to be transplanted to heaven knows where, as they gleefully watch the rest of us perish in the all-consuming fires of the Apocalypse.

I’m in the column-writing business, otherwise known as the kvetching business, where columnists have little tolerance for such odious people and their pet ephemera.

So to get away from a campy event like the inauguration of a Republican president, and the hicksters attending it, I shall head on to California, California dreamin’, laid back, mellow New Age California where the Free Speech Movement started at Berkeley, hippies took over Haight, Rodney King wants us all to get along, Tania (nee Patty Hearst) robbed a bank with her putative revolutionaries from the Symbionese Liberation Army, and O.J. Simpson, well, the man just walked.

Hey, I love the great US of A (what other country, I ask, would call a relentless enemy like the Vietcong by an endearing first name, Charlie?), a land whose Republican leaders are undeterred by the reality principle, who can be counted on to mount a horse and gallop off to far away places in order to thwart off the threat of socialism, bring about regime change anywhere it pleased, and introduce wretched natives to democratization — while one of these leaders, Henry Kissinger, proclaimed in 1973, after the free elections were concluded in Chile, that “no country should be allowed to go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.” So, send down the boys from Langley.

Sometimes I wish we were like, say, Canada or Sweden where people’s benign view of the world is, “Hey, let’s be calm here.”

Okay, Okay, some Canadians get so riled at times that they want to secede from the rest of the country, and the Swedes have been known to assassinate a prime minster walking out of a theater after watching a morbid Ingmar Bergman movie, but come on now, that happens only once in a blue moon.

I’ll be back from California soon and, trust me on this one, it won’t be long before J-20, 2009, is upon us and with luck a Democrat will be sworn in, declare victory in Iraq, and get us the heck out of the quagmire that the Republicans have gotten us into.

Meanwhile, the Bush team will continue to run a rigged game for the next four years. So be sure to keep your eyes on the shell with the pea under it.