WASHINGTON, D.C. — They say the new president doesn’t like it here much and I can understand that; Washington doesn’t feel stylish or all that cosmopolitan; it is a city of $12 haircuts and puffy down jackets worn over Men’s Wearhouse suits, of sensible women in skirts and tennis shoes and homeless people camping in tents along E Street.
It feels odd to have avoided living here; a lot of my friends and colleagues took a tour in Washington as a rite of passage. Karen worked here for a while. Almost every trip back we take a stroll past her old apartment building—the Stay Free Mini Pad where USA Today used to house its “loaners,” staffers from other Gannett newspapers dragooned into service on the mothership.
I have been to this city many times, but only once or twice on business. Mostly I have been at liberty here; roaming the monuments, decompressing amid the over-serious and self-important who scurry along in this nexus of power. I treat Washington ironically and, to its credit, the city seems to get it.
Maybe that’s what Pierre L’ Enfant had in mind for his American Paris; that we’d use this place as a recreational center, a national park in which we’d feel genuine ownership. I always feel good here; the light feels clear and clean (it helps that the height of the buildings was famously limited to the width of the street they face plus 20 feet).
Maybe most tourists come out of a sense of duty, propelled by some vague, grim sense of civic conscience. They bring their children to see the engines of government, to hurry through the museums, to fulfill some American rite of pilgrimage. This is where they—mostly irritated-looking white men in blue suits with jackets that gap at the nape of the neck—make our laws. This is where they keep our president locked up for the duration of his term.
Everyone here seems to be from somewhere else. The DNC worker and his activist friend we take to dinner are Californians. Africans staff our hotel. Sikhs run the liquor store next door. My Washington is a sentimental territory, a not quite real place crammed with totems and relics, shot through with a kind of fragrant American wishfulness.
I always wonder about people who, rather than being stationed here on some temporary assignment, really live here. I don’t know if most of them grasp how pretty the place is, a city of spaces and shapes, green and grassy with marble and only a modest amount of glass. Washington has grown into the wide boulevards that seemed pretentious and ludicrous in the 19th century. Despite the stupid spoke streets—thanks a lot, L’Enfant—that have a tendency to deflect the trajectories of the aimless and besotted, shooting them off in directions they never intended, it is perhaps our best city for walking.
Like most things we think we know, Washington is never exactly as we remember. Sometime in the ’80s it was planted in my brain that the Willard and Old Ebbitt Grill were west of the White House. They are actually a couple of blocks east. And the White House faces north, not south; the National Mall, sometimes called “America’s front yard,” is beyond the White House’s back door. I know these things, yet every time I come here I find myself mildly disoriented. Such is the power of preconceptions.
New this trip is the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, a handsome bronze-clad inverted ziggurat (the shape was inspired by Yoruba art) that sits in the shadow of the Washington Monument in what is supposed to be the last parcel of real estate on the Mall where building will be permitted. It is a magnificent, solemn place that, like the story it tells, is more than 60 percent submerged. The above-ground levels celebrate the cultural contributions of black Americans, giving us a glimpse of Jackie Robinson and Moses Fleetwood Walker, of Chuck Berry’s cherry El Dorado and Diana Ross’ costume from The Wiz.
But ride the elevator downstairs and find yourself plunged into the dark and solemn story of how a nation was built on the coerced labor of people torn from their homes and separated from their humanity. Ride the elevator and confront America’s original sin.
Disillusionment is a useful process; we need the kind of history that admits the inconvenient evidence. We need to understand that people have always done wrong while proclaiming the justness of their cause. We needn’t believe the founding fathers were saints or always gentlemen to appreciate their sacrifices and foresight. We don’t need to excuse their moral failure. We need to understand that even the best of us are capable of rationalizing away the inalienable rights of others. We need to understand how vicious—how capable of atrocity—all of us remain.
We don’t need the sugar-coating, the whitewashing. We need to understand it all eventually comes down to flesh on flesh. To what you might do if someone put a whip in your hand.
This city of American Idols reminds us we haven’t been here very long. How long can countries expect to live? As long as they can, one supposes, but does anyone believe he might be immortal? That there will still be a tribe that calls itself American when the world creaks and stalls and falls frozen into the black maw or else fries up?
Some, I know, believe it mightn’t be all that long before history ends—in fire or ice or to the accompaniment of angels’ trumpets. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel; some who have privileged access to this White House believe it may be a matter of years before the final days begin. Maybe they’ve begun already.
You can feel that here, in this straw city where every monument seems set up to be knocked down—zapped by aliens, exploded by terrorists, burned by pitchfork-toting mobs. Empires die and Washington too will pass—it’s only that secret kernel of yourself that’s indestructible.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.