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.