A Pilgrim’s Digression

I missed my bus from Union Station today, and so I had to walk up Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, the weather has turned hot and icky after a couple days of cool breezes. I feel like I need another shower. The smell of deodorant probably ranks a little higher than body odor on the pleasantness scale, yet who wants to go through the day smelling of deodorant?

In the parking lot on the north side of the Russell SOB, I saw an enormous, ugly, converted Winnebago called the USDA Food Safety Mobile. It’s painted all over in a colorful scene in which smiling soap dispensers and laughing, purple cutting boards dance in front of rainbows and national monuments such as Mount Rushmore. Leering, green bacteria mock the Statue of Liberty and with remarkable effrontery slide down the St. Louis arch, while the cheery kitchen utensils, including a creepy thermometer, called Thermy, seem unaware of what is happening around them. I find myself fully identifying with the bacteria.

Sometimes I find it easy to believe the worst that ignorant people say about government waste. Yet at least the USDA Food Safety Mobile isn’t going to kill or maim anyone with taxpayer dollars. Unless it causes some poor Democrat Senator to experience an acid flashback that sends him into a suicidal frenzy.

Once past this monstrosity, I found myself quickly tiring. I am so utterly lazy. A couple weeks ago, I bought one of the McDonald’s adult happy meals so that I could have the little pedometer that comes with it. I’ve been wearing it, and it is remarkable the placebo effect it has. Even though I do not walk any more than usual, I feel like I am exercising and therefore must be losing weight and gaining in cardiovascular health.

All this was far back in my mind today, though, as I muddled through the haze to work. On Capitol Hill, construction is widespread. Every federal building has some kind of construction going on somewhere on its grounds. The SOBs and HOBs all have parts of the streets which they face blocked off. Maryland Avenue, beside the Supreme Court, is almost completely closed to traffic. North Capitol Street from the Russell SOB to the Hart SOB is down to one lane of traffic. Independence Ave. on the HOB side of the street is constricted.

And of course 1st street on the East side of the Capitol is constricted because of construction of the Capitol Visitor’s Center. Since the Library of Congress is directly across First street from this construction, and because the architects are connecting the library to the Capitol via an underground tunnel, there is construction on both sides of the street.

Sidewalks are mostly impassable; I couldn’t count the number of times I had to cross the street pointlessly because a sign informed me “Sidewalk Closed.”

No one knows exactly what all the construction is about, though one assumes that it has to do with perimeter security. I read in the Washington Post awhile back that the Visitors Center never would have received funding before 9/11, for fear of the unforeseen costs of the project; and that fear has indeed been realized, yet security trumps fiscal responsibility.

I know a good window from which I can look out on the work site; otherwise, one can’t really tell what is going on, for it is blocked off from view at street level with high walls. Sometimes at lunch or on a break, I go and look out that window, and I am awed by the scale of this project. I’ve watched it from nearly the beginning, and it still amazes me. One can’t even imagine the costs.

Not long ago, when the hole for the underground Visitors Center was first excavated, one could see the very foundations of the Capitol; one could see underneath the steps where Presidents have been inaugurated. Great dump trucks would drive down into the hole and look like Tonkas when they reached the bottom, it was so deep. It really strained one’s conception of what men can do.

In my life, I have never seen a project so massive before. Now that has all been hidden with the superstructure of the building that is going into the ground there, yet lots of activity continues. The Visitors Center will be open in another year [ed.note, it is still not open nor even nearly complete on 3/21/2007], and everyone hopes that finally, after all these years, the construction on Capitol Hill will end. It would be nice to walk down a sidewalk again.

In the meantime, I noticed something interesting today. I don’t normally walk to work, so I had never noticed this before. At the Library of Congress Jefferson Building, across from the Capitol, the workmen have torn up the road in preparation for the tunnel that will connect the library building directly to the Capitol. Long, steel beams extend through the air from one side to the other of the slit the workers have cut into the earth. These are the streetcar tracks paved over long ago, still there after all these years. I suppose the workers will remove them now. What once was hidden, now is revealed, relics of a former time. A better time than this.

Today’s coffee is Verona. Not bad, but nothing special about it. I still believe the Italian is the best flavored Starbucks coffee. I remember in Paris, my wife and I would breakfast at a brasserie near the Gaillon fountain, off the Avenue de l’Opera. I would always order a café au lait, which sounds innocent enough in either French or English. It presented such a bold taste I would usually have to cut it with a single sugar cube. French coffee is the only coffee I have ever had to sweeten. Even the foam on the top of the freshly poured coffee was a rich, deep golden brown. Now that is a fine cuppa joe, as Agent Cooper used to say.

France is also the only place I have ever seen sugar cubes, either in a restaurant or grocery store. I wonder why in America, sugar cubes seem like surprising relics of a former decade, like ice trucks and milk men? Yet in France, a sugar cube still retains its usefulness and can be found in small bowls on the tables of both the lowest and the finest dining establishment. So much of France struck me as anachronistic in that way. That was one of the things I liked most about that country.

So today I signed in to work and then walked out to buy my coffee. I passed the same supervisor I regarded last week, doing the same thing. On my way to Starbucks, I passed a bookshop window and remarked to myself that every one of any political note, and many persons of not much note at all, have a book on the shelves today. In the window was a large mock-up of the cover of Bill Press’s new book, Bush Must Go: The Top Ten Reasons Why George Bush Doesn’t Deserve a Second Term. Now there’s a book with a shelf life of about a week. It was destined for the bargain bin almost before it was published, though not because George Bush is necessarily going to win in November. If Bush loses, the book will be worth even less. I suppose Press did not write it for the ages, yet there seems a horrible waste in all the paper used and man-hours expended over a book of such limited scope and lifespan. One can hardly speak better of President Clinton’s tome due out tomorrow. 950-some-odd pages, the critics say. “Often eye-crossingly dull,” the New York Times has told us in advance, as if it could make for other than a very dull read. Presidential memoirs, like memoirs in general, are pretty worthless stuff, the post hoc efforts of a good, but not brilliant, mind attempting to give the impression that it had thorough control over events that happened “on its watch,” in the parlance of the political world. I often think that the great secret of the presidency is that for all the appearance of command and control, a President actually arrives in office to find events already transpiring pretty much on their own without regard for the high office of the Executive. Thus one’s term of office is spent making pronouncements, hopefully preemptive, the significance of which is to give the appearance that the President is himself a maker of history rather than just another bystander. I was especially impressed with that idea week before last, during all the Reagan commemoratives. Even when he was alive and in the strength of his power, I never thought of Reagan as much more than a smiling, idle old man, yet two weeks ago I discovered to my surprise that he single-handedly brought down the soviet empire and engineered the economic recovery of the nineteen-nineties. Oh, but his hagiographers were saying such things even when he was still alive, and the din of loud remembrance only increased after he doddered into the blackness of senility and incoherency.

And so another President tries to write history in his favor, tries to make sense of the insensible. I imagine Mr. Clinton must wonder where those eight years went he spent here in Washington. He lived his whole life for the chance to change the world, and yet very little of any great moment happened during his eight years. It must be disappointing. He was cursed to rule during peacetime, I suppose, though he could have had his war, too, if he had recognized the signs. That is George Bush’s peculiar triumph over history as well as over Clinton.

Every once in awhile, I think to myself, “There must be a faster route to work.” And so I decide to take a different bus to the Metro station. And so I end up at work fifteen minutes late. Of course I stopped at Starbucks along the way. Good coffee today. The Sumatra blend Starbucks served earlier in the week was oily tasting. I’ve read about a kind of coffee bean fed to monkeys, then collected from their shit and ground and brewed as a particular delicacy. I wonder …

I noticed one of the supervisors in my department signed in for work, then went out to Starbucks for coffee, this morning. I have a problem doing that myself, not because I am a moral exemplar, but because I am lazy. I’d rather buy the coffee on my way in to work, rather than sign in, then leave the building again to buy my coffee. Passing through security every time you enter or leave is a real bitch. We have coffee shops in our building, but only one serves good coffee, and it is just as far to walk there as it is to go out to Starbucks.

Ah, the life of a civil servant office worker. How utterly … boring.

On the train today I read an R. Crumb cartoon in the New Yorker concerning a trip to Cannes he and his wife took a few weeks ago. Crumb is a favorite of mine. There is an ordinariness, a lack of pretension about his work, that I appreciate. That may be at odds with received opinion of him. I know his work is often read from a psychoanalytic viewpoint; he particularly angers feminists with his interest in sex and big butt, big legged women. Comparing him to newspaper cartoonists is probably an insult, but so many newspaper cartoons, these days, are overtly political. Is Boondocks supposed to be funny? I read an article about its creator in the New Yorker as well. He seems like an angry young man, which is attractive when one is an angry young man one’s self. With age comes temperance. Trudeau makes me laugh occasionally, though not often. He’s pretty tiresome, I think. Crumb is a true artist. He has his political opinions, but they come through much more subtly. Or else he simply announces them in a bland, straightforward way that breaks all the rules of political comic strip wit. In his New Yorker article on Cannes, for example, he depicts himself and his wife as provincials in an alien environment of wealth. He critiques the greed that supersedes art in a media event such as Cannes. He critiques the deference paid to undeserving movie stars, choosing to praise the uncomfortable, quiet Daryl Hannah over Uma Thurman during a press conference with Tarantino and his two female stars. He remarks on the extraordinary amount of “security thugs” roaming about Cannes. Remarkably, he and his wife see Fahrenheit 9/11, but Crumb does not remark on it immediately. Finally, at the very end of the article, he inserts one pane in which he and his wife speak directly to the reader. They say that they believe the movie is true and deserves to be seen. This is the only overtly political statement in the whole article, and it is refreshingly straightforward and lacking in a pretense of superior knowledge. I respect that.

If It’s June 16, This Must Be Bloomsday

And Bloomsday it is. I can no longer recall exactly when I first read this book. It was sometime in the mid-nineties. I was a college student studying English literature. I’ve read it many times since; I took a whole course on this one novel in Graduate School. To this day it remains in my mind the most fascinating and amazing of books. Joyce beggars comparison with other writers because there has never been one who has insisted on putting on paper every stray thought, every scrap of knowledge ever to cross his path. Joyce does exactly that. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are unofficial encyclopedias of the early twentieth century, of Ireland and the other places Joyce inhabited, of Joyce’s mind which in itself was an expansive region comprising so much of human knowledge. Some have compared him to Shakespeare, and certainly this is the only apt comparison. Joyce drew heavily on Shakespeare. Stephen Dedalus’ long meditation on Hamlet in Ulysses demonstrates that much. And certainly Shakespeare in many ways harnassed for his use the knowledge of the time in which he lived. Just as critics can delve the esoteric depths of Shakespeare’s use of slang, or Shakespeare’s references to popular culture of the time, so scholars can do the same for Joyce. Joyce and Shakespeare are indeed brothers of a kind. Ulysses, the pretentious novel about “nothing,” is about everything. That is the tie that binds the two greatest literary geniuses together over four centuries.

Someone just strolled through our office to tell us there is a fire on the roof, but it should not concern us. Go about your business. She felt she ought to tell us because we might smell smoke. Every so often we have a full scale fire drill. Fire trucks even show up. One would think today would be a perfect day for an evacuation. Well, I’ve got my “escape hood” and my emergency kit around here somewhere.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Bitter at the Top

David Brooks writes an interesting column today. I’ve always respected him for his fairness. He also seems to reflect my own middle-of-the-road, tending toward conservative values. I don’t think there is anything astoundingly new in what he reports here, though. I suppose common sense would suggest that “knowledge” workers would vote Democrat while “managers” would tend to vote Republican, and the parties themselves nominate candidates based (unintentionally) on this stereotype. I can rememeber my AP Political Science teacher from High School, Mr. Woody Wilson (yes, that was indeed his real name), telling his students that the well-educated tend to vote Democrat. I think what Brooks points out here is that the well-educated as a class is itself divided. Myself, I am “bi-political,” meaning I swing both ways. The first vote I ever cast was for George H. W. Bush in ‘92; I voted for Dole in ‘96. I voted for McCain in the 2000 Republican primary, and I voted for Gore in the General Election. My vote for Gore was the most difficult vote I ever cast; to this day, I still admit it reluctantly. It was too much like voting for Bill Clinton to ever be completely palatable to me, but at the time I felt it was the right choice. This year, I don’t know which way I will swing. The trajectory of my voting history, following as it does the course of my college education and entrance into the workforce, suggests a steady pull towards the Democrat party. My vote in November will be heavily influenced by events over the next few months.

Internet sex diary has D.C. guessing who was involved

I could not find this article at the Post, so the Philadelphia Inquirer will have to do as a source. Unfortunately, you’ll have to register to read the story, but then again, every on-line newspaper site requires that you register. They can’t make money selling you their writing, so I guess they think they can make money by letting advertisers cater to you based on information in your profile.

Tuesdays are not so bad as Mondays. Yet I have come down with a cold overnight, perhaps because I slept with the air conditioner set to “Arctic.” By August I will be sleeping with it set to “Antarctic,” but last night it was just at “Arctic” temperatures. I woke with a sore throat that I thought might pass if I could get some fluids in me, but juice did not help. Now I am at work and my taste is gone and my handkerchief is soaked. Incidentally, pocket handkerchiefs are important accessories, as Bilbo Baggins knew, and they should never have gone out of fashion. Even when I am not sick, I always carry one. I find a handkerchief especially handy for those times in public restrooms when there are no paper towels on which to dry one’s hands after washing up.

Oh, but I was complaining about my sickness. The humidity here in Washington is terrible today. Stepping out of doors is like walking into a damp sheet and sucking it into your nose and mouth. The air is bad anyway, though there have been no Red Alert days yet; all this has no doubt contributed to my cold. I have noticed that I have contracted them much more frequently since moving to the city. When I lived in the mountains, I rarely had colds.

I am rambling today. I recently read a Washington Post story about a D.C. intern who kept a blog in which she recounted her sexual trysts with various congressmen and government officials. I apologize that I cannot supply anything so racy as that. I am quite ugly, for one thing; for another I am married, and so have sex infrequently at the best of times. However, I promise that if an opportunity presents itself to have “relations” with a member of congress, an official at the Department of Homeland Security, or the Attorney General’s Office, or the Office of the President or Vice-President, I will be sure to write about it here. I won’t go so far as to entertain the idea of sex with an employee of the Department of Agriculture or Voice of America, however. The Department of Ag. building is horrifically bland-looking, and both the interior and the exterior of the Voice of America building reminds me vaguely of a plain, gray office building perhaps modeled after the architecture of old Soviet-bloc countries. It is better named the Ministry of Propaganda. So no sex with the Dept. of Ag or VOA people. However, that is the only line I will not cross. I can think of no other reason anyone would want to read such a blog as this if I didn’t at least hold out the hope of erotica some time in the future.

Justice Dept. Memo Says Torture ‘May Be Justified’ (washingtonpost.com)

This just proves that if you want to torture someone, let your lawyers develop a convincing legal strategy beforehand. One can imagine a wife murderer hiring a team of lawyers prior to the act. “Now if I establish conditions under which she attacks me first, what then would be the legal consequence?” or “How does U.S. code distinguish between murder committed with a knife or murder committed with a gun? What if I use a garrot?”

This would be funny, except that the Administation lawyers are probably perfectly correct. I have no doubt they have checked and double-checked every law book, crossed every eye and drank all the tea. The worst is that I have difficulty even caring. Callousness is a common condition in society today. I don’t blame the war, because it hardly seems like we are at war. Nothing is real anymore; it all happens on TV, somewhere else.

Monday mornings I always feel as if someone has wrapped me in gauze and thrust me out into a gray, bleary world to stumble my way to work. My mouth is dry so that I only squeak hello to the few regulars I see on my daily commute. Everyone I see is morose and tired. As I exit the train at Union Station, the hoard waiting to enter the train nearly shove me back inside as they push to enter; I wonder if they even see me. I feel like a ghost. Outside the station, there is a sort of high squeal coming from somewhere; I look around for the source, as I walk across the roundabout towards what I think is my bus at the far end. The whining is from an electric-powered bus. Pigeons flap up from the sidewalk in a noisy whir. A man approaches … “Hey man, you got a transfer?” I shake my head no. Washington Metrobuses only have their destination on the front and on one side near the front door. Unless you are in front of the bus, or directly beside it, you cannot tell where it is heading. I walk all the way around the half-circular bus pick-up/drop-off only to discover that the bus is the X8, not the N22. I walk all the way back around to where the buses initially stop to drop off passengers, and I wait. Time passes. I feel asleep standing up, suffused in grayness; gray buildings, gray sky, gray pavement, gray faces passing, gray pigeons. My legs ache from standing, and I become conscious of being really, really hungry. I skipped dinner last night. I read somewhere that people who experience some measure of starvation live longer than fat, happy people. And so doctors now advise skipping a meal. “Maybe I just need some orange juice to get my blood sugar up,” I think. Or coffee. Yes, coffee. The N22 pulls in and unloads. The driver, a small woman little bigger than a child, gets out and lights a cigarette; she stands glumly by the door as passengers board. “Good morning,” I croak hoarsely, showing her my transfer. The corners of her mouth tighten a little. The bus stinks as if it had been inhabited by beggars all weekend. The smell is a combination of sweat and damp wool and cigarette. Additionally, the heater is on, so the bus is stuffy and the fetid odor of humanity circulates freely. I fall into a seat and take out my book to pass the time, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War by Paul Fussell. At some point the driver gets back aboard, and the bus begins to move, around Columbus Fountain and then up First Street. Constitution Avenue is almost completely blocked off with construction along the Dirkson and Hart SOB side of the street. Further up First street, at the Library of Congress, construction on the Capitol Visitor’s Center has also narrowed the street, so the whole area is potentially one great traffic jam. This morning, the bus sits through three changes of light at Constitution avenue before making it across the intersection. Some passengers get off here, though it is probably not their normal stop. A couple drivers in vehicles beside the bus decide to perform illegal u-turns in full view of the Capitol Police monitoring and directing traffic, and they head back down First street apparently frustrated with trying to squeeze through the bottleneck. Finally, the bus makes it across the intersection. Enormous flatbeds and great cranes stand blinking along the right hand side of First street, further constricting traffic flow, apparently waiting to enter the construction zone. Police by the dozen mill about, or guard the entrance, inspecting vehicles carefully before letting them pass through the gate in the high wall erected to restrict the construction area. “The green zone,” I think. “That’s what they call it in Baghdad.” Further up, at East Capitol Street, pickups unload workmen, all Hispanic. Each man carries a small, red Igloo cooler such as my grandfather used to carry to work each day.

Off at C st. SE and Independence. A strong, cool wind is blowing, belying the humidity that will seep up from the asphalt as the day wears on. I walk down Pennsylvania Ave. SE to Starbucks. A trap door opens in the sidewalk, leading into the cellar of one of the restaurants along Pennsylvania; someone below is tossing up bags of garbage to another man who tosses it into a garbage scow parked along the street. The stink is awful. I pass and am greeted by the smell of baking donuts. Two Capitol Hill police officers are just ahead of me; they turn into the donut shop. Why do they wear handcuffs on the back of their belt, in the small of their back? Seems like the cuffs would be more at hand in a pocket or on the side of their belts. Just another sign and symbol of their power. One of the men is paunchy, probably from all the donuts he has eaten every morning of his working life. A beggar sits on the ground beside the door of Starbucks. “Hey buddy, can you …” or maybe it was “Do you have ..” I don’t know. I go in and cannot even remember what he said to me five seconds afterwards. The music this morning is something light and jazzy, like the browns and yellows and beiges of the coffee shop itself. Starbucks is quiet this time of morning, not even seven A.M., except for the foamy whoosh of the cappucino machine. The clerks are all foreign, Pacific or Caribbean Islanders, I think, though I am probably dead wrong. I tend to think all oddly named, dark-skinned foreigners are Pacific Islanders. I have this secret desire to live in Fiji. Sometimes the clerks don’t understand me, though I speak plainly and loudly. One time I asked for a tall “Gold Coast” and they gave me a grande Mocha. I always order a “tall” not because I am cheap, but because I am embarrassed to say “grande” in America. “Venti” is even worse; I’d really feel like a fool. “Tall Sumatra,” I say. The girl gets my order right this time, though I always have my doubts. She always looks at me a moment too long, and so I usually end up repeating my order just to be sure. I take my coffee to the self-service bar and pour in the cream. I am reminded from what I just read in my book that all of these items, coffee, cream, and even the sugar I don’t use, but which is plentiful, were all rationed in 1942. I just bought a cup of powerful coffee and fortified it with real cream. Perhaps the coffee was even from Sumatra, as its name would suggest, though names of products probably are deceiving. Every item in this shop would have been a luxury, from the tuna sandwiches in the cooler to the coffee makers themselves (household appliances were also in severely short supply because the metals in them were so valuable to the war effort). In a real war, food, any food, is a luxury to be savored when had. In a fake war like this one, U.S. marshals eat a bounty of donuts for breakfast and civil servants enjoy Starbucks coffee. Out of Starbucks again. “Hey Mister, can you help me get some breakfast?” And down the street I go. Two blue vans with the words “United States Marshalls” on the sides, followed by a non-descript, gray official car, scream up Pennsylvania towards the Capitol, sirens blaring. Every morning, these same two vehicles drive madly up the street in this same blaring manner a little before seven A.M. The first time I heard them, I looked around, concerned I was in the middle of a terrorist attack. Now I sometimes don’t even remember that it happened. Where are they going? They make a u-turn at the intersection with Independence and C street and head back down Pennsylvania, stopping in front of the donut shop. I didn’t know they could use their sirens to go to the donut shop. Maybe the donut shop is under seige, hostages held and donuts barbarously eaten by terrorists. I cross the street to work.

This is my Monday morning.