Monday saw our first real sight-seeing day; after spending the night in Northern Virginia, we decided to take the metro into Washington D.C. Justin helpfully pointed us in the direction of the nearest Metro station, but it took us about an hour of futile hunting for a bus-sized parking spot before we decided to just park across two parking spaces and pay for both meters. I guess the risk we took (it was probably but not definitely legal) paid off because the bus was still there when we got back sans parking ticket.
D.C. is a strange place. Most other nation capitals I’ve visited — London, Berlin, Paris, Prague — have been massive metropolitan cultural centers unto themselves, and the business of governance was only a portion of what made them significant. But Washington D.C. isn’t any of those places. It’s smaller but the business of national governance seems so much bigger. In fact, when we got off the Metro at Gallery Place/Chinatown to visit the Campus Progress headquarters, I was surprised to find myself in an actual city. My experience with D.C., like that of so many other non-residents, had been limited almost exclusively to white marble edifices and sights like the Watergate. I didn’t even know D.C. had a Chinatown, much less a vibrant urban area on par with something you might find in Philadelphia.
After a brief encounter with my benevolent overlords and all-too-brief introduction to young wünderboggers Matt Zeitlin and Emily Rutherford (both of whom I’ve communicated with online for years but never met in person), we departed for the Washington Mall and the Smithsonian to do the whole lame tourist thing.
Sightings worth mentioning: The Lincoln Memorial, of course, and the Star-Spangled Banner, that tattered American flag which flew over Baltimore in 1814 and inspired the national anthem. When you’ve been away from that area for long enough, it’s easy to forget how powerful some of the spectacles you’ll witness are; as a political commentator, I can be a fairly cynical person, but I’m also a huge sap for grand expressions of patriotism. As a result, seeing these monuments and memorials was practically a cleansing experience, a moment for me to take a step back from the disgust and horror I feel while listening to, say, people debate whether or not the United States should torture as if not torturing were completely unreasonable. Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, I was able to acknowledge that, and then, temporarily cast it aside, and feel in its place an incredible pride and gratitude for being able to live here.
(Apologies for the excessive earnestness of the above paragraph; this is not my typical output, as many of you well know. My next post will be covered under the usual eight or nine layers of irony, I promise.)
