Odyssey Americana (Part DC)

In which our hero rides a fucking scary escalator, and descends into the utterly absurd center of the American universe, and marvels at what he finds there. He also makes a couple of stupid jokes.

The train ride--

Entering and exiting trains is a wonderful experience. As travel goes, train entrances and exits are like the day spa of travel bureaucracy. They check your ticket every once in a while, but other than that, no big hassle. Unless you count travel time. In that case, it's the part of the day spa where some new employee locks you in the sauna for a day and a half, forgetting you were there, and when they finally remember you, you emerge looking like Emperor Palpatine. The trip just drones on and on. My travel companions, comparatively, were priceless.

First-- Incredibly White Fratboy with his iBook, blasting Lil' Wayne from Boston to Stamford, Connecticut with no regard for others. It was especially endearing when he started mouthing the words with that half-smirk I've come to expect from guys like him, which simultaneously intimates, "I Think Can Nail Any Bitch Who Walks By Me" but "I Don't Know How To Read."

Second-- Yakking Ivy League Girl, who spent from Stamford to New York City squawking on the phone with someone, discussing whether or not she wants to go to Yale or Harvard for Grad School... in English. It was almost frightening having to listen to her almost moan over Victorian poetry while name-dropping (apparently) famous literary critics and talking about her new shoes, or forgetting that "she was, like, not even 22 yet, [she's] still only 21. Oh my goooood."

Last-- NYC Hipster Asian who nested EVERYWHERE. She got on in New York City wearing leggings, and plugged into her iPhone. From New York to DC, she plowed through about eight In-Touch Magazines and steadily spread out all of her belongings into our little section. First the seat adjacent to her, then the seat adjacent to me. Not that I was using it, but that she was so presumptuous was rather annoying.

DC--

It's hard, at first, to write about Washington DC. In the last eight years, my own relationship to this place, as with many of countrymen, has become, to put it delicately, strained. To a certain extent, I still liken entering this city to entering the belly of a beast. I tire of the thought of writing something beautiful and moving about my frustration and fury with the United States since the 2000 election. So I won't say anything, more than that I'm apprehensive. Though we've seen a change in administration, I'm hesitant to put myself full force behind anyone who would actively pursue the leadership of the country. (As John Adams once remarked "No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it," and years later, Douglas Adams nodded in agreement when he wrote "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.") To a certain extent, I come to view Washington DC less in terms of Jimmy Stewart and more as a place of inimitable corruption and inhumanity. This paragraph has quickly lost its flare.

This Washington DC has the scariest escalators I have ever been on. Descending (or rising) from (or into) the bowels of the city. These escalators bearing people to (and from) the subway are about 200 feet long, they drop down about 100-150 feet and they are incredibly steep. Every time I've gotten on them, I've been completely mortified.

The subway they descend to is easily the nicest I've ever seen. Composed of tube-shaped concrete wall/ceilings, the place smells like a human factory, but is awfully well-kept. The trade-off for this nice subway is that the prices are astronomical. My week-long Public Transit pass in Boston was $15. In DC, a single day pass was $7.80. And they don't allow you to buy them in bulk at a cheaper price, or to buy week-long passes. It was infuriating. More infuriating, though, is that due to discrepancies in prices listed in each station, some places require you to pay an exit-fee, if you paid less money than you were supposed to, (not that you had any control over it, a machine did all the math) they gouged you a bit more. If I were more inclined to hate taxes, I assume this would get my ire up enough to protest, but I don't think that's necessary.

By and large, this expensive nature extends to the rest of the city. A friend and I met up and went to a hookah bar. In Oregon, a round of shisha costs about $5-$7. A nice price for an hour-long activity which can be shared by several people. At this place, we paid $22.99. Plus tax. To be fair, my companion said that even for DC this was pricey, her old hookah bar cost about $9 a round. On top of that, the lounge itself was blasting house music, draped in dark red curtains with plushy chairs, carrying an array of awful beers, with trashily dressed waitresses. In short, it felt like we shouldn't have been smoking hookah. We should have had our noses on the coffee table snorting lines of coke. At least then the $22.99 tab would have been a steal, not a shanking.

The next morning, laden with all of my bags, I hoofed it from Massachusetts Avenue over to the campus of American University, where I was staying with a family friend. The walk from Massachusetts Avenue to the Dupont Circle Subway station in the daylight gave me a nice glimpse of the city. It's lowlying, filled with ornate block-like buildings, most of which (at least on Massachusetts Avenue) are filled with fascinating enterprises. In a two block radius, I walked passed the Chilean Embassy (a flamboyant little building), the Congressional Black Caucus, which was almost directly next to the inauspiciously named Tobacco Lobby, which was near to the appropriately Spartan, (or appropriately oppressive) Uzbeki Embassy, followed by the massive SEIU building, and finally, the Australian Embassy, which dwarfed both of the previous embassies but lacked the free-range kangaroos of my dreams

The rampancy with which Embassies clog this city is almost scary. In my time, I passed by those embassies, as well the Russian, Japanese and Swedish Embassies. Later on in my trip, with my family-friend/tour guide, I would learn more about the idiosyncrasies and jokes surrounding these places. That on Halloween, the French Embassy supposedly passes out glasses of champagne to those of age in America. Conversely, that the Russian Ambassador had to squelch rumors of free vodka shots for the same evening. We joke that Serbia hands out homemade bombs and AK-47s. This lead to a discussion, more serious in nature, about the way these embassies act during moments of national crises-- Earlier this year, for example, when the war with Georgia ramped up and the United States wasn't terribly friendly toward the Russians and their place in the conflict, the Russian Embassy took on a bunker-like mentality and status. Passing the Swedish embassy, we worried that raising tariffs on whitefish or restrictions on viking ships would result in a horde of helmed vikings walking through Georgetown wielding battle-axes and growling at every passerby.

I managed to wander over to the AU campus, meeting up with my companions. From there we traveled back over to the city, to see the Mall. It's going to be slightly difficult for me to put everything I felt seeing the central hub of the nation into perspective, so bear with me.

We exited the subway into the middle of the mall, between the Washington Monument (again, the forefathers? Not fond of foreskin) and the Capitol Building. The mall is massive. I've always understood the mall in abstract, but to see it, the long sloping grass knolls, corridors created by drooping, leafless elms, the late winter grasping at strands of near-warmth hidden in the wind, is almost overpowering. It was conceived by Pierre Charles l'Enfant in his original plans for the city from the late 18th century, but wasn't fully conceived until the early 20th century, with the McMillan Commission, and inspired by the City Beautiful Movement.

We decided to go first to the National Museum of American History. It's another block-like building, about 3 stories tall. Outside, the sound of Billie Holliday drifts down from somewhere, almost ethereal. We passed by just as the words "he can be happy/with just a sip of gin" fell from her lips. Or it did, when she recorded "Can't help lovin' that Man" all those years ago. It made me smile so that I just paused and let her fill my ears for a few moments.

Inside, the Museum is filled with the miscellanea of more than 250 years, starting with Washington's uniform from the French and Indian War. I use the word 'miscellanea' intentionally. The scope of what we've amassed culturally versus the detritus we've jettisoned, the artifacts, art, music and ideas which have become, over the years, uniquely American (or in some cases, things we've co-opted).

Dorothy Gale's glass slippers, Oscar The Grouch, MC Lyte's Journal, Kermit The Frog, Fab Five Freddy's boombox, Carol Channing's Dresses, Grandmaster Flashes' turntable, C-3PO, Elvis' guitars, a board game based on the Kennedy's (inappropriately we joked: "Will you get shot, get brain cancer, drive your plane down into the sea?") A portrait of Stephen Colbert, a whole room filled with co-opted Stradivari instruments, Grover Cleveland's top-hat and overcoat from his inauguration, a silver toy ship gifted to Teddy Roosevelt, Ike's uniform, a failed attempt at creating empire-invoking uniforms by Tricky Dick, an unsettling death mask of Abraham Lincoln, articles of his clothes, the whole of what makes us who we are, not the wars, the destruction, hate, but the creative acts are the ones we keep, the bizarre, the inane, the tacky, the beautiful, anything and everything that has proven significant, all here, all part of what makes us American. Billie Holliday's voice singing somewhere for each of us. Outside, the homeless man with the saxophone, blowing for his existence, blowing "Pure Imagination" and in every line I can hear pain, sorrow, joy, humor, anger, hanging in every howling note and every empty space between them. Everything we've taken from people and everything they've given us. Jazz. If ever there is a quintessential artform which relays the chaotic, numbingly beautiful underpinning of the universe, it is the pulsating, confused melodies and the carefully random rhythms of Jazz, and the music most likely to exist long after this nation, deeper than any words on paper, it is the very soil of this country. It is surely the most pure form of music we as a nation have ever created, and its influence, like vines, crawls up and sparks even the most austere of constructions, and I am glad that here we acknowledge its roots in our cultural life. But I digress. It is in this rambling I attempt to reach a point: that in this place, though we know our country to be a quilt composed of bitterness and thievery, the whole that it creates is marvelous, possessed of the ability to be objective and welcoming of every artform to which the country owes something.

And after this we walk the mile, lie down beneath the Washington Monument, the breeze slowly picking up, surrounded by people of every color and creed I can imagine. The reflecting pool empty for some reason ravaged now by sons and daughters, lovers and friends digging in the dirt for pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters ("has the recession gotten than bad?") the sunset fading over the Lincoln Memorial, where silent I mouth the 246 words, especially the last, "and that government : of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

From there, the words still echoing on my tongue, we wander out along a path which takes us past a reservoir, an outcropping of the Potomac where, resting for a moment on a bench, the reflection of the Jefferson Monument and pinpricks of light dance like fireflies in the night water. We continued on to the Roosevelt Memorial (of which I have only two things to say: Not enough wheelchair. And it was like a concrete hedgemaze. So maybe they were trying to make it a visual metaphor for Social Security) and then on to the Jefferson Memorial itself, another neoclassic shitshow (As proof of the brazen and silly obsession the forefathers had with Grecian ideals, it is said that somewhere, in a Smithsonian basement, apparently rests a gigantic statue of George Washington in a toga. I both thank and rue the man with the wisdom to keep that under a tight lock and key.) The building had more of the clever quips and phrasings of both the Roosevelt and Lincoln memorials, which were lovely and heart-throbbing, yet I cannot deny that I secretly hoped to find, etched in a tiny crevasse in the wall, a quote from Jefferson canonizing Sally Hemings' booty. Or at least something along the lines of "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to tap that big black ass, aww yeahhhh!"

Which only makes the next joke about how Obama's memorial, if he ever gets one, may not be neoclassical, but it ought to be made of obsidian, all the more atrocious. Be thankful I got rid of that paragraph.

Thought I certainly mock, the truth is that I recognized, as the designers of this place recognized, the power it must hold, both internal and external. But at these moments, because of that place, I was learning to love my country again. Perhaps this was the real reason for this trip. After eight years of frustration, war, hatred, sadness, screaming furor, everything that began not on September 11, 2001, but on October 7th, the night we began bombing Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, the night my father, brother and I howled in righteous furor at fire and death, death of innocent people, the destruction of hopes for people I'd never even met, while my mother sat unspeaking and how it haunted me, and my own regret and anger at my actions ever since have made my life a struggle make up for the failure of our humanity and compassion that night.

It led up to this. I still have issues with my country. I still disagree with it, still wish it embraced peace more, welcomed death less. But in hearing, for example, that on election night, most of Georgetown, thousands of students, ran to the gates of the White House and impromtu sang "(Na Na Na Hey Hey Hey) Goodbye" to its occupants, I can do nothing but smile. Even as I edit this, some 3 months after, I read in the news that a man named James Hill is running for congress as an honest-to-god pirate. Bless him. I read that a few days ago, the legislature in Missouri, in a move to confound Neo-Nazis who adopted a road, approved the name-changing of the road to memorialize a rabbi who fled Nazi Germany. Each day I read more and more concerning reports of the travesty of the Iranian election. In all of this, I am re-learning the beauty of what freedom of speech means, the beautiful, Jazz-like nature of Democracy and existence, where we have the opportunity to embrace everything from the silly to the sacrosanct, the pretty to the putrid, the strange fits and starts of humanity's tiny cul-de-sacs of thought, we see that in embracing the beautiful, we must also embrace the bizarre and the completely ridiculous. Where we learn that the meaning of free speech is not only the right to one's opinion, but the imperative to educate one's self and defend it. It's about learning what makes this country beautiful, and utilizing it, not sitting in reverent fear. That this great experiment must be pushed, prodded, poked and even stabbed. And that it will only be stronger for it.

And I thank the universe, and Jazz, for it.