washington
the more corinthian columns the more federal the building
It’s Thursday! I am deliciously alone in the lab for the next four days so I will tell you a little bit about my trip to Washington D.C. over the Easter weekend. It was officially my fifth trip to the city, but only the first two (in the warm blurred tenderness of my childhood!) felt truly like visits, the other times were trips I took for college debate and I spent the entire time sequestered inside strange academic buildings.
D.C. is a bit of a non-place, its importance too massive to be contained in a city but too small to be a state, and its entire deal is to be the most American place possible. Even the names of the universities there (George Washington, American) make the city feel like it was produced by children who had only a dollar bill to inspire them. Yet with the plethora of embassies and diplomats and international corporate headquarters, it almost seems to defy the notion of being within a country and is instead a place that has gone beyond countries, to contain the most elite institutions, the highest levels of capitalist productivity and governance on earth, and function exclusively to maintain and perpetuate these institutions. And unlike cities like New York, which also houses behemoths of finance and offices of the United Nations, there seems to be very little economic impetus outside of federal and corporate headquarters. Everyone I know in D.C. moved there to work for the government.
This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it; I had a very lovely time. I learned the D.C. is very much the South, at least in terms of the sweetness of strangers. I have been in the habit of picking up plastic 6-pack rings I see on sidewalks; according to my personal karmic arithmetic, if I find and cut up fifteen rings I am then allowed to eat one oyster. (I earned 13.3% of an oyster over the course of my stay.) But I am not in the habit of carrying scissors, so I asked one of the security guards at the National Gallery if he had any for me to snip one apart and he said he could just do it with his hands. “It’ll give me something to jiggle with while I look at my email,” he said with a thick Southern accent. Despite my general mistrust of men with vests and guns in museums I thought him pleasant. Another guard in the Gallery–not vested, not armed, not male–saw me sitting on the stairs by the end of a gallery and, jocular, asked “whatcha doing down there?”
I also discovered that D.C. is perhaps the gold standard for public transit. The buses came on time, even at 1:04am. The metro cars are a satisfying trapezoidal shape, and in the older models the cars are carpeted and the seats are padded. It felt like a living room filled with strangers. On Saturday afternoon I gasped because I saw someone by the door had a large grey lizard on their shoulder, and I gasped again because I saw they had a large brown lizard on their other shoulder. This was extraordinary to me, but other people in the metro car didn’t seem to notice or react. “I thought you saw someone get shot,” my friend Natalie told me.
Does liking D.C. mean that I like America? As long as I have been conscious enough to think about our nation’s government I have felt grave misgivings. But I was surprised to find myself unexpectedly affected at many of the museums. I felt moved almost to tears at the tiny bones of a pocket mouse in the Natural History Museum. Was there some speck of patriotism floating at the bottom of my emotional barrel? It’s not impossible. As Natalie put it, “We may not have healthcare, but at least we have the National Gallery.”