Capital Circus
Washington, DC: Your Freakshow guide will occasionally show you the happier side of the circus instead of the freaks. This weekend, I have been in the nation’s capital for a reunion of all the correspondents and writers who ever worked at the DC bureau of Time Magazine and are still clinging to the mortal coil.
I covered the White House and Congress for a few years in the ‘90s. It was one of my first gigs outside of the Midwest and I had a lot to learn. One of the first things I realized when I got here, was that a lot of people spoke with voices of immense authority, on TV and in meetings, who didn’t really know what they were talking about. I was usually too insecure to correct them.
I was often too impressed by power and authority. The bureau chief sent me to a White House Press conference, and I was so cowed I didn’t raise my hand to ask a question of the President. The boss had been watching on TV in real time. When I returned to the office he was pretty pissed. “We speak truth to power,” he said. “That’s why we’re here.”
Eventually I got used to doing that. It didn’t come naturally, but it is our birthright.
It was lovely to reconnect with old colleagues, members of the scribe tribe, people who have scratched out a living asking often unwanted questions.
This afternoon, I took a long walk around the city with one of them, the terrific journalist Hannah Bloch, now at NPR. Hannah was based in Pakistan and covered Afghanistan when 9/11 happened. We wandered a long way, from way up in tony Kalorama, where the Obamas and Ivanka and Jared lived, all the way down to the White House.
I haven’t been to the White House since Trumpy days. During his presidency, security had erected a second, giant chainlink fence around the grounds, creating a kind of no-man’s land perimeter far into Pennsylvania Avenue. For years, you couldn’t get close enough to see the White House.
That fence is gone now.
And the street, in view of all the White House windows, was filled with people holding signs advocating a wide variety of causes and points of view: FREE ASSANGE, read one. A group of Koreans held up a sign demanding that China stop sending North Korean defectors back into North Korea. A somewhat confusing collection of signs around a rainbow PEACE flag on the Lafayette Park lawn advocated for jailed native leader Leonard Peltier, blamed Iran’s poverty on the ayatollahs, stated that “Kashmiris reject Indian occupation.” A friendly young man man stood behind free Qurans at a small table. Another man pushed a cart with a handwritten sign calling Jim Jordan a racist and Trump supporters “maggots.” Someone clad in black was parked in lawn chair blasting the national anthem from a boom box.
A few American things can make me tear up: The edge of the Everglades where Miami ends. The sight of the USDA beagle and its smiling handler after months abroad in more dour and hard parts of the world. And, the sight of every kind of people - unmolested by cops - stating their case to the public, with the possibility that Joe Biden is looking out the window of the big White House and taking note of their myriad pleas.
We speak truth to power here, it’s part of our DNA.
Tomorrow, I’m told there will be big protests outside the White House against the Gaza bombing. The organizers promise “civil disobedience.” That too is part of our national right, the right to make noise, vent against injustice or lies or greed, and get arrested.
Here are some pictures. I’ll be back on the Freak beat next week.
Thanks Nina.
Thank you.