February 2003
It’s all one story and there is no other story. Al Qaeda, anthrax, smallpox, camel pox, West Nile, malaria, Iraq, Iran, the snakeheads, the sniper, the war, whatever comes next. Whether or how these things are factually related doesn’t matter. The president will not sort it out, Congress can never sort it out, the television makes money by making it worse. Pandora’s box is agape even where people are paid to deconstruct. A middle-aged poet freshly hired to teach the premeds at a local university how to pen verse needed an armed bodyguard halfway through the fall semester because someone threatened to shoot up his writing workshop if he didn’t ease up on his criticism. When a career in police work looks more secure than doctor-lawyer-engineer (or tenured poet), it’s time for a long stay somewhere unfashionable. Bad Nauheim’s warm saline springs, impregnated with carbonic acid for the heart, or anywhere “between Nice and Bordighera,” as Ford Madox Ford suggested.
The Good Soldier, his 1915 masterpiece, has been riding a swell of popularity among the book clubs of Cleveland Park and Chevy Chase. If more marriages than usual are on the rocks, or if what in England used to be called “quite good people” are increasingly fascinated by tales of how badly things can turn out, then they have found the right guide in Mr. Ford. That he also wrote propaganda for the British government to lure America into World War I might even inspire some of the Cabinet-level appointees just now getting the hang of what it takes to please their Connecticut Texan.
Washington is still a fashionable apartheid city, with a narrow swath of Northwest containing most of the white people and the three other quadrants, almost all the black and brown. People of color thus have more room in the District to spread their wings than during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when they were confined to the slave shacks of Georgetown, or during the first half of the twentieth, when many were too cut by poverty to leave the Southeast and Southwest ghetto that had arisen near the Capitol during Reconstruction. Despite two generations of integration and a burgeoning black professional class that is courted nowadays by the old prep schools and welcomed by the banks, there lingers a palpable unspoken notion in the neighborhoods between Wisconsin and Connecticut avenues debouching into Montgomery County that the Third World is held at bay here. This is why homes in Cleveland Park and Chevy Chase are valued at Palo Alto levels, not because of proximity to ginchy restaurants and enchanting sidewalk life.
The Third World, whether of the offshore or the homegrown variety, has always found ways of busting into this realm, of course. It is empirically obvious that flying machines can be crashed into national landmarks, tropical microbes can hitch aboard immigrant bloodstreams and insinuate themselves upon native-borns, yucky alien foodstuffs can be surreptitiously dumped into backyard pools to devour local fauna, and a Chevy can be converted into mobile artillery. What these events say about American foreign policy or the domestic viability of an advanced capitalist state awaits the clarification that comes gradually with memory loss. (“Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good,” Nietzsche warned in Human, All Too Human, albeit as syphilis was climbing up his brain stem.) Meanwhile, there is the most terrifying realization about American life since Henry Adams watched State Street devour Quincy: money cannot buy a safe address. This was the bummer at the Pentagon’s E-ring, the Hart Senate Office Building, Leisure World, and Home Depot. Nobody ever thought too hard about foreign policy in those places anyway.
Although the little white spy planes are gone for the time being from the skies over Columbia Country Club, and the video cams along the Beltway are back to catching road-ragers, Washingtonians now understand how long it takes to focus this technology on a specific foe. Unregulated “growth” in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs quickly provided houses and shops as the District depopulated itself of all but its very richest and poorest residents, but it created an anonymous labyrinth where strangers are neighbors, roads are tangles, and every intersection presents the same vista of identical franchises. Chingachgook himself, transmogrified to the twenty-first century and educated at Georgetown Day, would lose the trail here, let alone police chiefs hired from Oregon. The Department of Homeland Security will discover that in order to save America it will have to destroy it–the one military aphorism from the last hundred years that never went out of date.
And yet the money continues to pour in from somewhere. Along the once and now again malarial banks of the Potomac, from Chain Bridge north beyond Great Falls, the hilly Virginia woods are being sculpted into tracts of homes so large that they recall the tower-villas of Potsdam. The economy that makes possible the building and buying of these fabulosities is as inscrutable to les gens dans la rue as the livelihood of a solitary dairy farmer. Once they are purchased, what American career offers the financial longevity required to maintain and live in them for more than a few years? Are they being acquired simply as wagering chips, to park and wash the fake profits of the nineties? Will they ever be inhabited at all? One certainty is that they cannot be defended by anything less than a division of the Virginia National Guard. They have sprouted in the protective lee of the CIA (GEORGE BUSH CENTER FOR INTELLIGENCE, says the highway sign outside the gate, splitting the sides of many a European tourist), much as the black shantytowns did near Congress, but five-acre lots are harder to police than to manicure, and no owner would dare arm his Salvadoran landscape technicians.
On the Sunday before Election Day, a pristine autumn afternoon when the pin-oak and sassafras forest was hot yellow above Great Falls gorge’s class-5 rapids, young Asian and Latin American families crowded the park’s observation decks. The view across the Potomac is a quintessential New World inspiration, reflecting more American history than the park rangers can say. Georgetown Pike, which brings in the carloads from town, follows a prehistoric trail around the Falls formed by animals that grazed from the Chesapeake Bay to beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. Susquehannock traders used this path during the seventeenth century to bring furs to English shippers anchored at the head of the Potomac. Tobacco replaced furs, and George Washington’s Patowmack Company built canals around the gorge to give access to Ohio. President James Madison and Dolley fled over the road from British troops who burned their house in 1814. In 1863, J.E.B. Stuart’s doomed soldiers slogged through on their way up to Gettysburg.
This is all forgotten, except perhaps by a few members of an occasional preservation committee trying to forestall the paving-over that characterizes most of the rest of northern Virginia. No one would fault the Koreans and Nicaraguans for not being up on these factoids–it’s an awesome sight, that thundering white Appalachian water, and as new citizens they probably know more than the local children from Madeira School, whose headmistress bought the old bankrupt toll road during the Depression, for $500 ($6,600 today), and then gave it to the state so it would be fixed up for her tony clientele. But when everyone starts voting Republican in these environs, especially in this particular state, where you can buy a combat rifle or execute a teenager as easily as join a church, they should make no mistake about whether it is a sign of welcome. Below the Mason-Dixon it is still always, always, a vote against the wog, as above the Old Line it is forever a vote for lucre.
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. With Republicans now running everything worth running in and around Washington (the District mayor, a Democrat in perpetuity, is rather like a college dean who is permitted to apply his teacup of power to the tempest of faculty hirings but who dwells in the pocket of fat-cat donors), triumphalists have reasserted control over the zeitgeist: demonization of the Other, Social Darwinist attitudes toward unconventionality, trickle-down economics whereby a pinhole in a zeppelin is the only source of fresh air for a Malthusian ground crew, and abhorrence of scientific fact that contradicts religious faith. Washington has never been a city of ideas, only of power, as Henry Adams and Henry James saw clearly a century ago, when the capital city finally became more notable to the outside world than foggy bottomland. By extension, the nation has been interested in exercising power around the world whenever serious money is at stake. “Is there any man here or any woman, let me say is there any child here, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?” asked an exhausted Woodrow Wilson, who had lured the nation into World War I with calls to make the world safe for democracy, before restless crowds a year after it was over.
Most apropos in this anxiety-filled season is the grand show of George Catlin’s portraits of Native Americans at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. During the decade after Congress passed the infamous Removal Act of 1830, which forced the ethnic cleansing of Indians from all lands east of the Mississippi, Catlin journeyed west to paint hundreds of individuals as well as primordial landscapes and hunting scenes. His paintings constitute the sole surviving record of certain tribes. Perhaps not surprisingly, the U.S. government showed no interest in acquiring this stupendous historic resource until the Smithsonian accepted it from a private donor in 1879, by which time the cleansing was finished from coast to coast and Catlin was long dead. It has rarely been exhibited since then. The faces that he portrayed while they were still “uncontaminated” (his word) by European civilization now form a magnificent army of lost souls, especially when displayed “salon style” from floor to ceiling, as they are in the Renwick’s voluminous second-floor chamber. Imagine a gifted, clear-sighted photographer in the 1930s, instead of such a painter in the 1830s, tromping through the shtetls of Poland instead of the Mandan villages of the Dakota Territory, and you get some idea of what Catlin gave future American generations to contemplate.
The Renwick sits at the barricaded corner of Seventeenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, a half-block from the White House. Outside its main door, concrete pylons disguised as giant flowerpots, and a pop-up barrier against truck bombs, mark the pedestrians-only entrance to an eerily lifeless zone that is still called Lafayette Park, the closest thing D.C. ever had to New York’s Washington Square. Hardly anybody comes to play or relax here anymore, certainly not the often nutty protesters who used to stand across from a White House fence with signs about some part of the world they thought was getting screwed by the mansion’s occupant. The few tourists who nervously snap photos through the fence do not hang around long, as though the White House were too dangerous to linger near with youngsters. All in all, a perfect locale to show Catlin’s pictures, though it might be too much to suspect that the curators at the Smithsonian possess such an ironic sense of history (remember the Enola Gay).
Staying home with a nice book like The Good Soldier or North American Indians is clearly the safest thing to do around Washington at the moment, though readers need to venture into dirty-nuke downtown or sniper suburbia to find a Borders for such arcana. Out there along the semi-rural Potomac, there are no bookstores at all, or anything else, for that matter, besides what comes over the airwaves. To spend millions on a clapboard colonial the size of Brideshead, fill it with the flickering glow of the evening news, order Domino’s for supper delivered by a Pakistani doctoral candidate, and fall asleep inside the infrared perimeter beams–this is the top of the heap. Life gets raw and exposed below this summit, filled with jobs that are here one day and gone the next, friends who are happy one day and divorced the next, children who get A’s one day and flunk the next, bosses who are heroes one day and thieves the next, politicians who are Democrats one day and Republicans the next, doctors who save someone one day and kill him the next, athletes who are young one day and over-the-hill the next, and, ineluctably, a bitter numbness in which you’ll vote for anyone with an ounce of energy.
for Lewis Lapham, 1935-2024, generous editor and friend
Illustration: Pigeon’s Egg Head Going To and Returning From Washington, George Catlin, 1845