Paraders Out of the Past

NO ONE NOTICED

Paraders Out Of the Past

Wayne Biddle

The Nation, 4/6/92

 

     I had been in the Library of Congress all day, reading

about von Papen and the end of Weimar Germany. This

is not a subject I come to by birth, so to speak, but I

am starting a biography of Wernher von Braun, the

rocket scientist, and know that I must eat the can of worms

that is German history. I fret about the contemporary rele-

vance of von Braun and about my reluctance to spend the next

three years with him, but my wife (who is Jewish in the way

that I am Christian–that is, both of us now thousands of

light-years from an imprint of childhood) believes that he is

one of the century’s improbable archetypes. Since she has an

uncanny sense for these things, I am becoming an expert in

historical matters I have always been happy to regard from

a distance.

     Exhausted by the crises of 1932, I leave for home. Outside

on Independence Avenue, the afternoon sky is a styptic, Jan-

uary gray. I try to take my normal path to the Metro station,

but find it blocked by thousands of people. I remember from

the morning news that today is the annual antiabortion rally

on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Most of the demonstrators

seem to be teenagers, many wearing Catholic school jackets,

escorted by parents and grandparents whose faces show the

strain of lives that are not going well. But the kids look amaz-

ingly pure, hopeful, holding hands and clowning. It is a field

trip for them, I realize, a day off. A few carry big posters of

mutilated fetuses.

     Two handsome young priests walk by. “Thanks for coming,

priests!” the girls near me shout. On First Street, a darker,

more run-down group, somehow not as gloriously American

as these, walk close together under a huge, primitive portrait

of Jesus flayed alive to expose a shining heart. A lone nun,

thin and boyish, grips a hand-lettered sign about stopping the

killing, but I cannot read her cramped scrawl.

     As I push on through the crowd, which is encircling the

Capitol, I find that most of the demonstrators are familiar

to me from the Baltimore neighborhoods I grew up in thirty-

five years ago. They are all white, they look like they dwell on

the harder side of the middle-class midline, they are unstylish

and educated along common denominators. I have been read-

ing for years in the papers that they feel squeezed from all

sides, but it has been many more years since I felt that I under-

stood them at all, class traitor that I am.

     As I approach the thickest part of the crowd, in front of

the Supreme Court, whose Olympian white steps are guarded

by helmeted cops (“Go to church!” one of them, or perhaps

the father of one of them, shrieked at me near here long ago

as he clubbed my neck while attempting to clear the street of

antiwar demonstrators), I hear the roll of marching drums.

It is a high school band, I assume, though a parade seems not

exactly right under these circumstances. Walking to the curb,

I see a line of boys with Yankee Doodle drums and heavy

sticks, beating a dull rhythm only slightly faster than a dirge.

Behind them are perhaps several dozen more young men car-

rying banners on high poles. They all have astonishingly white

skin and rosy cheeks, but they look grim, like this is not ex-

actly a field trip. Unlike the kids in the crowd, who invariably

wear the gaudy nylon and denim of American television

teenagerdom, these boys are wearing drab wool overcoats. It

occurs to me that they are not American at all, but what do

I know at this point? From their high poles hang long scarlet

banners that match the sashes draped across each marcher’s

shoulder. “Life, Family, Tradition,” the banners say in old-

fashioned German script. A vast white sheet proclaims that

foreign-born workers are invading Europe to steal jobs, that

we must prevent this from happening here and that . . . but

I cannot read the rest of the semiliterate screed. Some of the

kids along the sidewalk join in behind the procession with

their antiabortion signs, but most of the demonstrators pay

little attention. There are other groups in the street, and no

one seems to find this one much different from the rest. In

my head flash photographs from the library books I have been

reading, and I suddenly feel a slight loss of armature.

     I should scream a warning to the other marchers, I think,

but I don’t know how. I instead walk quickly away, out of the

demonstration, away from the Capitol toward the empty side

streets. An old man, obviously psychotic, holding a sign that

makes no sense at all, sees me coming and intuits that I am

not one of the antiabortionists. Stop and talk! he tells me. He

is right, of course, but I brush past him and rush down the

Metro escalator. The evening news will not show what I have

seen. I feel as though I have sighted an alien spaceship, poised

to invade my puny world. Is it possible that I was the only one

to recognize them? The newspapers will never report this. I

go home to tell my wife, who will understand.