Dirty Jubilee: Warring Sects Assemble for the Bush Coronation

Washington, Jan. 20?So every four years there's this rustling in the provinces, and the rustics head east, toward the royal court. Horse carts jam on the high-roads into the capital city, and one witnesses the grand pageant of the yeomanry: barkers; crapulous reeves on piebald horses; whores selling mutton pies; pox-scarred franklins; carbuncled highwaymen wearing Saint Christopher medals; hurdy-gurdy men; manciples with bucklers; eunuchs working a sleazy itinerant trade in papal indulgences. The city's ruddy innkeepers collude, gouging pilgrims, charging extra ha'-crowns for lodgings. Jugglers, fools in motley, mummers circulate amidst the carnival crowds, and slumming knights with their squires, chivalrous veterans of Flanders. So the city inclines toward the great day, toward the coronation?

Sometimes fights break out, and factions do hurly-burly in the alleys. Maidens battle with rolling pins, and brawlers turn the carts over, littering the streets with cakes and flagons of ale.

And so on.

Now this portly, muscular young guy in workboots, a real bruiser, stalks the marble risers that line the west side of the Mall?this Muscovite plaza. Swaggers along the row of moist spectators, their necks craned in the direction of the Capital building, that Unreal City, consumed by mists, materializing on this Inauguration Day out of wintry fog-banks.

Not that you can see anything from here. It's noon, the Inauguration ceremony's in progress, but the podium's far beyond any of us punters' ability to see it. So there's just this angry, workbooted bruiser, carrying a little Pigpen-cloud of static along with him as he moves, baiting people, starting up with Grand Old Party matrons, in town for the great day. Sticking his middle finger right up into unsuspecting Bushie faces. And his comrades follow him, in their protest rags, a nervous current trickling through Republican masses.

And I heard America singing:

"Fuck you all then."

"Illegitimate motherfucker."

"Get the hell away, you son of a bitch."

"Go back to Idaho and Texas?where you came from, huh, you racist Republican motherfuck?"

"Yeah."

"Get a job, drifter."

And jeering. All over the Mall, in the rain-muted hum of the Sousa marches oompahing from the scaffolding (and the huge videoscreens, smudges of color against the colorless noon), little wars broke out?dustdevils on a plain, nodes of countervailing energy. Grunge-kid protesters with placards and bumperstickers affixed to their black sweatshirts?DICK CHENEY HATES GAYS?break out into open confrontation with Republican triumphalists, under the freezing precipitous slop.

Hippies in the distance unrolled a black sign: ILLEGITIMATE.

"Leave Jesse alone!" the triumphalists screamed, satirically. "He didn't mean to do it! Haaaaaaaah!"

Hippies taunt back, over the great distance, but their words are lost in the fog.

"What?" Kids bait from amidst the fratboy cluster, holding cupped hands up to their ears, laughing at hippies. "What? What was that?"

"Leave Jesse alone, you racists! He said he was sorry!"

"Haaah haaah..."

"He said he was sorry!"

"Ah-hah, dick!"

Loudspeaker voices, refracted through moisture: mwaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmmm.

Presumably someone's getting sworn in way up there, on the podium.

Fuck-you fingers in the faces of:

Plump little cowgirl Texas wives with thousand-dollar rodeo rigs and painstaking makeup jobs. Suburban dads with brush-mustaches, their kids on their shoulders, sticking up into the mesosphere like human weather probes. Jimmy Stewart-style oldsters who recoil in confusion in their raincoats?this glowering silent son of a bitch is in their faces, flipping them off, what??guys who a thousand years ago stormed beaches, fragged krauts in Cherbourg, disemboweled Japanese on atolls?and who this morning collected their gentle wives and motored in at 45 per, hugging the shoulder in ancient well-preserved sedans, optimistic despite the rain, the Restoration so close they could taste it?

"Bush! Bush! Bush! Bush!" people chanted at passing protesters.

"...illegitimate president."

"Fuck you, buddy."

 

Guy outside the Metro Center train station wore a baseball cap, stood near a sign reading SUPREME HYPOCRISY TOPPLES DEMOCRACY, under the eave, out of the late-afternoon weather. He loped about in a tight circle around his sign, handing out stickers, hollering with an amused inflection to his voice.

"Hail to the tobacco interests!"

"Shut the fuck up," passing Bushies yelled back, but he took it in stride, couldn't be dissuaded by their abuse.

"Hail to the oligarchy!" he yelled. "Hail to the tobacco president! Let's get those kids addicted early!"

"Shut the fuck up, you bastard."

People straggled out of the downpour, headed for the train. A father and son strode in, grim and loose-jointed, metal-detector guys, the both of them wearing sopping "Sore Loserman" t-shirts. The inaugural parade was over, everyone was headed home. There was that tired, straggling, all-business-and-our-business-is-getting-home feeling you get in the air after you've watched a big football game that consumes all your passion, and then suddenly it's over and real life reasserts itself, the little constituent threads of the real reassert themselves, the matrix of mundanity becomes reconstituted. Carnival time runs out, people head back to their wives, hungover and remorseful, wondering where the money went. Rubbish strewn all over the street. Guys would rip off their disposable ponchos, throw them on the ground as if they represented everything that had to be left behind about this contested, freezing, ceremonial day?this break in the continuum, this Event of the sort that has to be lived through once in a while, endured but not enjoyed. And they'd glide down the escalator, dripping toward the dry train tunnels.

"Hail to the thief!" the guy in the baseball hat was yelling. "Hail to King George the Second! Hail to the tobacco president!"

"Isn't that Gore? That's Gore."

"That's Gore, too. But Gore didn't win, did he? Let's get the kids addicted!"

"Shut up, you bastard."

The heckler glided down into the Metro.

Up on dark Pennsylvania Ave. in front of the White House, tv crews broke themselves down on the media stand across the street from the reviewing stand. The white and blue pavilion was still bathed in the white-hot lights, it was too real. The whites were too white, the royal blues too blue. You could climb to the top level of the now-empty bleachers on the White House side of Pennsylvania Ave. and look straight over the top bar, down onto the White House lawn and into the White House windows, homefully lit and alive with bodies, the optimistic hubbub of a move-in day.

A couple longhaired country boys occupied the top bleacher step with a pair of binoculars.

"You see anything, Mike?"

"Just a bunch of police and shit. And a nice set of china."

A third guy, a middle-aged guy in a trench coat, obviously not part of their crew, hung behind them on one step lower, looking tired. "You guys voyeuring?" he asked, stressing the first syllable.

"Huh. He's the one with the binoculars."

"Aw, he ain't in there," the fellow in the trench coat said. "He's at the Texas ball."

"Someone's in there. That's Dick Cheney."

"Nawwwww."

"Someone surrounded by people."

"Who's that? Laura Bush?"

"Naw. She's wearing blue tonight."

"Yuh. This one's got one strap, and the other side's down, you can see her?" He broke off, and gestured with his hand in the direction of his left breast. Then his attention broke and he lowered the binoculars to his chest and looked at his feet. Started hopping up and down on the bleacher plank, testing it. It sagged and flexed queasily under his old boots.

"This is flimsy shit."

"Ain't it?"

Rain froze on the grand trees that line Pennsylvania Ave. The media and review pavilions faced each other, both ablaze with arc lights. A blazing, silent, million-watt drama on a night lacquered with rain. Beams howled down from cranes. Soldiers walked in formal uniforms. Red, white and blue bunting lined the cast-iron fencing. Golf carts sped, crew-guys coiled up feed-cables. Somehow this seemed an appropriate ambiance for the consolidation of great power. Tourists wandered the stretch?dazed, damp, stumbling in the direction of the crane-mounted tractor beam, like sci-fi-flick provincials attracted by an alien radiance.

Tour buses were loading.

"This is a great day," a woman was berating an elderly protester. She bustled in her red coat and with her camera, gathering groups for photographs, waving family members into a phalanx, hooking wandering children into the shutter-frame. She turned to address the man. "We waited eight years for this day."

"Shut up."

"You shut up."

"Jesus."

Citizens posed for photographs in front of the blank whitewashed wall of the review pavilion. Bugs pinned by light against a white wax tray?when they moved away from the wall, you'd see their guts smeared against it, or else the pure tv radiance would have seared onto the wall the outline of their skeletons. A barrelshaped woolly hippie, standing nearby, removed his knapsack from his back, squatted over it. Produced from it a flyer. Soaked the flyer in a rain-puddle. Strolled up to the pavilion's white wall and affixed it at eye-level. Red letters declared: NO BUSH GENOCIDE IN COLOMBIA. Crimson paint dripped down the wall.

"Take it down," a passerby yelled.

A teenager in an overcoat did so?walked up calmly, pulled the flyer off the wall, threw it on the ground.

The hippie watched, strolled over, picked it up off the pavement and stuck it up again. Another red stain.

"No no no, take that down," barked a man's voice. A middle-aged guy in khakis held a camera ready.

The hippie removed the sign and, holding it, retreated respectfully until the guy'd flashed his kinfolk, who grinned under the presidential seal. Gold carts buzzed around, functionaries with two-way radios.

Hippie stepped forward and affixed the sign again. A third bloody dripping stain.

Guy with the camera, cursing, stepped up without even looking in the hippie's direction. Ripped it down. Ripped it to pieces. Stuffed the pieces in a trash barrel.

It angered me. Today they had given George W. Bush, of all people, the keys to the world, and this poor hippie couldn't even have his one bloody sign. I wanted him to have it up there on the wall. It was his own little fragment, shored against what he perceived as ruins.

But the hippie maintained his patient composure, dripping, an eternal part of the landscape, like a tree.

 

Everything was screwy. Even in the morning, in clogged Union Station, where some protest kids were streaming off the trains and others had staked out floor-space to paint signs, you could sense a strange caffeinated energy. Like, let's get this done. Washington had attracted only the extremists, the purest, most committed members of the two dominant political American sects. The Red and the Blue, to use the contemporary categories. The rustics had arrived to crown their strange new king. The college kids with their protest signs and their black-sweatshirt anarchist rigs had materialized in order to mess shit up. So on the one hand you had the day's Bushie majority, which?for reasons that have always eluded me?finds something redeemable, something worthwhile, something admirable, something even perhaps human, in that decadent, ignorant and destructive complex of ideas known, misleadingly, as American "conservatism."

On the other hand, you had the usual youngsters practicing the privileged whitekid parlor game that's called "oppositional" or "radical" politics in this deeply, even dangerously?because the self-absolving pretensions of privileged whitekids have great social implications and costs, in a way that the self-absolving pretensions of, say, poor Cambodian immigrants or poor-white Appalachians don't?dishonest political culture of ours.

You could walk through the city and watch factions clash. I'd lately read War and Peace, and I felt like Pierre, gallivanting around behind armies, watching campaigns from ridges, out of harm's way, becoming progressively more amazed by the extent of the waste, disorder and carnage. Gangs would verbally skirmish, retreat, regroup?Rwandan units in the rain, some dressed as suburbanites and cowboys, others as grunge-kids and old hippies. They'd stopping just short of actual physical violence, although for all I know that might have happened, too, somewhere in that weird city, somewhere in that giant rainy arena of a place.

Walked up to the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro stop and found the MCI Center, the sports arena, presiding over an emptied-out neighborhood, one of those wasted, empty, depopulated regions?victimized by postwar concrete-bunker architecture?that typify American cities. National Guard trucks rumbled in a line down F St. Soldiers in visored helmets, flak jackets and shin guards loitered at their posts along the street, passing ax-handles between their hands. Left to right, right to left, the gloved hands caressing bonebreaking hickory, skullcrushing ash.

A bunch of policemen stood out of the rain in the station arcade, pistols strapped to their thighs. These were big guys, obviously conscious of their power, talking through the bored moments.

"...Eighteen rounds, I said you retarded? Carry 18 rounds in your carbine..."

"She's administrative duty, she's not carrying."

The eight army trucks rumbled in the rain, you could feel the deep low-grade diesel-churning in your intestines. Guys in fatigues stepped out into the street to direct the Army vehicles with languid gestures.

A crusty black kid handed out religious literature?"Last Generation: To Prepare You for the Final Conflict Between Good and Evil: Special Issue."

"It was a little tense up here a while ago," he said. "They were lined up across the street. They're expecting the protest to come by here."

"What protest?"

"Just all of them. I'm not up on the political situation, but things are weird. This is the first time they got to check your bags. This is the first time they've ever checked bags for the Inauguration. They just up and search you now."

Across the street an abandoned prewar office tower dominated its stretch of block. I looked at it for a while. It was a beautiful old thing, white-tiled. It evoked a thriving old-time commerce, from back before the days when Americans hadn't, for the most part, given up on the idea of the city.

Entered the MCI Center, looking for a way out of the rain, and read the glossy historical placards lined up across from the box office. They presented kookily cheerful indications of a lost civilization:

"Historically, the site of the MCI Center was at the center of downtown... [O]n the ground beneath our feet, J.P. O'Donoghue ran a shoe store and W. Uttermehle a tailor shop. Printing houses at 631-633 F Street are now the site of Sections 430, 431, and 432 in the arena. In the 1840s, Carroll Brooks sold groceries from what is now Section 408. Belva Lockwood, the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, lived in what is now Section 201. Matthew Emery, the city's first mayor, lived on F Street. Children played here and family pets were buried here. The following is a glimpse of what was once beneath our feet."

And so on. Kloeppinger's bakery, two stories, corner of 6th and G. Bergmann's laundry, opened on G St. in 1918, and "soon expanded into next-door stable." The gorgeous home of the National Benefit Association, designed by W. Sidney Pittman (1875-1958), one of the U.S.' first black architects. The Barrister Building, 625 F St.

"Salmon P. Chase lived in this grand house on E Street while serving as Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury."

The Palace Theatre, and the Gayety Theatre. A confectioner's.

The house on H St. where John Wilkes Booth was said to have conspired.

"Seventh Street north from Center Market was a major business and retail street. Dry goods merchants clustered nearby, including Mr. Saks, who began his business here before moving to New York."

"Center Market...was one of the great democratizing experiences of daily life in Washington. Society's upper crust mingled with servants and the working class while browsing the many goods on sale."

In other words, a civilization exterminated, wiped from the face of the Earth. I stood in the empty arena lobby for a while and dried out. Protester kids crossed the intersection outside and down the street, past the trucks. A civilization trashed in the name of our suburban dispensation, in the name of our culture's weird geographical logic, in the name of the way our civilization spreads itself profligately across space. The very ground we were standing on?this lifeless block, dominated by a sports arena for wealthy suburbanites?represented some of the most damning evidence you can find against the culture these kids claim to be so against. The bipartisan physical reality that surrounds these kids is a dehumanizing joke?they live amidst waste and ugliness, a continental shoddiness?but they don't even notice. They ignore the evidence. It doesn't even occur to them to complain, to demand that it change.

Rather, they concern themselves with the big things. They write "ASHCROFT" on oak tag pieces, replacing the "S" with a swastika. They carry on about how much Dick Cheney hates his own gay daughter.

 

Georgetown pub, evening. Lacquered middle-aged Republican matron sits at bar smoking. She speaks with that pungent Southern-accented sarcasm, that mordant twang, which Southern women tend to acquire after they turn 40. Her companion is a rumpled, tweedy elderly gentleman of the common Washington genus Tipus O'Neillus.

"Did anything happen today?" she drawled.

"That thing at 14th St.," the man answered her. "Tried to climb over the banister."

"Classy. The signs. 'Bush Get Off My Bush.' Beautiful."

"Just white kids whose fathers give them money and tell them never to come back."

"Or maybe I'm just getting old. I mean, it's like it's 1968. Well, I gotta go. We're gonna be late. I been late all day. I don't wanna be late for the ball and miss the W. Because it's at the Armory, he's gonna hit that first. Go now, stay until 11, 11:30. See what else."

The college-age bartendress broke in here.

"George Washington U.'s having one. I got invited, but I'm not going. Guy who invited me got mad because I wouldn't date him. So he canceled the tickets."

The matron appraised her as only a Southern woman can appraise other women.

"That's rude," she said, raking her up and down with her eyes, and you could tell she didn't think it was rude at all, she thought it was probably justice.

The inaugural balls were commencing. Walking up Pennsylvania Ave. from the White House up to Georgetown, you could see people in black tie congregating in the lobbies of every hotel and restaurant you passed. The Park Hyatt, Galileo, The Prime Rib. Sometimes you'd walk by a hotel dining room and look through the window and downward onto a vista: a huge table rimmed by Several Generations of Republicans, all in severe black tie, the Older Republicans helping tuck the Immature Republicans in behind their starched napkinage. Regular middle-class people dressing up for the night in their rented rigs, religious people, decent folk, I guess, and it was affecting. Sometimes the rooms were empty?elegant and empty?which rendered the ambiance mauve and melancholic, like these people'd had their party stolen out from under them. But maybe it was just early.

College-age ballgoers congregated in the Georgetown pub now, clean-cut young men leading dewdrop girls in dresses.

"You fellas have ID?"

Stagey horror. "ID! Embarrassed on the night of my prom!"

All night you'd see tuxedoed kids all over the city, in transit?in cabs, clogging the sidewalks, dominating the Metro. Only in Washington. Guys in evening dress on the subway, headed toward bureaucratic balls. A whole rapid transit system that I think exists only to ferry tuxedoed preppies on this one night every four years?a system that blazes into its full reality only on Inauguration Days. Every other night, the Metro system exists in a sort of half-real twilight, drained of vitality, its heart isn't in the work. Carrying porters, cleaningwomen, spinsters?such are the mundane ferryings of the days. And through the long fallow periods between coronations, the train engines pine in their electric hearts for the redemptive ceremonies, and in the train sheds at night the engineers swear they can hear the engines' lonely sighings.

On the Metro, a passenger leaned over a tuxedoed preppy's head to check the route map.

"Yo, Matt, move your head. Guy's trying to look."

"Oh, is that what you're doing? I thought he was trying to pick me up."

Matt, you pure product of America, you're unschooled in the negotiations that govern urban lives on subway trains, and so you confronted my subway-rider's harmless and reasonable and quite helpless gesture with macho Republican excess.

For the 50th time that day, it occurred to me how much Americans hate each other's guts.

 

Visited a DC journalist friend of mine at his house in Columbia Heights, sat with his friends for a while eating Ritz crackers and watching the inauguration's aftermath unfold on the grainy black-and-white television feed.

"I'm still confused by what's happening, I haven't figured it out," my friend said. "I spent eight years despising the Clintons and now the situation's shifted. The Clintons, as much as I hated them, I understood them, I knew people like that, I lived in their world. Everything that was disgusting about the culture they epitomized?that yuppie meritocratic culture with its worship of money and power, its smugness, its disregard for the violence it inflicted on others, its hatred of everyone who was different, who wasn't a yuppie or a meritocrat?I understood that, as much as I disliked it, I understood it. I went to school with those people. I've worked with those people. With Bush, I'm totally against all his policies, everything he stands for, but it's something new, it's this royal WASP thing, it's something I just don't understand. I have no experience with it."

I bid everyone good-bye. Walked through dripping poor neighborhoods?the buildings were ramshackle, the front-yard gates swung open, and no lines in these neighborhoods are ever flush?and over to 16th St., where I flagged down a bus going, as it turned out, in the wrong direction. Rumbled blithely for 25 minutes through streets that grew progressively more tree-lined and suburban until I sensed something fishy and came to my senses, and asked questions of my fellow passengers?tired working people, all Hispanic?and ascertained that I was actually in Silver Spring, MD, where I had neither need nor intention to be.

The bus let me off and I walked in the twilight along the shabby commercial strip toward the elevated Metro terminus. American ugliness, American waste?these edge-city landscapes we compulsively build. From the elevated train back into the city you could look down into the suburban ratlands. The interchanges, the traffic pulsing along the malled suburban arteries, the lighted office-blocks rising from their low-slung voids in the sooty distances, and the abandoned industrial manufacturing infrastructure rotting in the interstices, twisted amber-rusted metal, forgotten. Unreal city. Again, it bothered me. No one protests this. No one protests reality, the way America unfolds itself around you, the way your body is forced to fit into the contours of its landscape. No one protests the way the country physically is.

By 9:30 it was snowing. I stood around in Union Station waiting for the last train back to New York. There was a slack, wasted, post-climatic anti-energy all over the station, all over Washington, all over the world. Union Station's lobby had been subsumed by a ball?the New York/New Jersey/Pennsylvania ball. I stood outside the entrance to the thing and checked it out, the Uninvited Guest, out in the cold, trailing behind me the stench of my political cynicism. And here were these people, celebrating their victory. Women floated about the entrance in their gowns, headed over to the next-door stationary kiosk for cigarettes. Wafted back into the ballroom, flashing their perfect slender postures and their golden arms.

Man, I'll tell you one thing. This GOP broad thing?it occurs to me that it's extremely compelling. A little slice of some kind of heaven: a whole goddamn ballroom filled with lithe GOP broads, thousands of smooth-and-powdered whitegirls, veterans of cotillions and field-hockey exertions, gliding in evening clothes, pearls and blonde bangs. They're married by 24. Wearing headbands, Hermes scarves and J.P. Tod's, they steer Volvo station wagons through the melancholy Chevy Chase cul-de-sacs of their too-precocious matrimonies. They betroth themselves unto wonks, guys who commute in to posts at State. And so the race perpetuates itself. In bedrooms in Bethesda, in Chevy Chase, in Virginia, bureaucrats and media hondlers and senior policy analysts screw their beauteous wives?a miscegenation, a compounding of wonk and swan?who stare wistful at the shifting bedroom ceiling, disinterested, clutching wonk-backs with halfhearted fingers and dreaming, almost certainly, of ethnic editors of weekly newspapers in New York City?

Two Hispanic guys, friends apparently, stood at the entrance with me?loose, chortling, slouching in baggy trousers, backslapping, falling out?baiting the women as they emerged.

"Heyyyyy, baby. Hee hee hee hee."

"Hey mami you lookin' goooooooood. Hee hee hee hee hee..."

Welcome to the New America. Can you imagine? Glide out from your ballroom, all hopped up from having met?that very day?the President of the United States of America, the consummation of what you've worked a full eight years for, your veins coursing with the day's triumph, the triumph of the Restoration, and you're conversant with Senators, you're indulged by newsmen, no stranger are you to Georgetown dinners, a habitue of fragrant White House drawing rooms you shall be, and tonight you're slender in your ball gown, queenly and golden-armed and achingly blonde in your purity, when?boom!?all at once you're walking out to the magazine stand for a pack of smokes and there's a couple Puerto Ricans with their eyes popping out of their faces, throwing sleaze in your direction, saying stuff about your ass?

And some awful ethnic journalist in black boots, there with those Ricans?are they together? He snuffles through his ethnic nose, his ethnic eyes appraise you. His rain-matted hair sticks up omnidirectionally. Your underclothed body?you shiver from the clammy violative energy that's conquered this ruined moment. The smirking ethnic scribbles in a notebook. The Ricans fall out. You grip your handbag, you adjust your shawl.

"Hey, mami..."

 

Slept in the almost-empty late train as it screamed northward from DC though the snow.

Two elderly men had struck up a conversation. Next to one of the gentlemen sat a teenage girl, traveling alone.

"One guy. He had a nose like a Cuban parrot. And the flag came down and he started going 'burn it, burn it!' I wanted to say something to him but there's about 250 of them, and? There was a big cop there, and I could tell he wanted to sock him."

"Good."

"Did y'all get close to the inauguration?"

"I didn't go, actually," the nice girl said. Nice kids kill me, especially nice girls. You're 16, you have to put up with all that shit?and still you find it within yourself, somehow, to be decent, to speak respectfully to old men on trains. "I'm going back to school. I go to boarding school."

"Oh! Do you like it?"

"It's okay. It's a good...international experience."

"Oh, there's international students! There were some international students marching in the parade today."

"Yes."

"...I ate at Chi-Chi's. It was excellent."

"Yes."

There's nothing like moving in a mostly empty train through a snowstorm. Baltimore looked beautiful. Trenton looked beautiful. Newark looked beautiful. You could look down from the trestle into the humble Newark neighborhoods, cleansed by snow. I saw a pensioner walk out from a corner pub?an old neon sign threw silent gassy blue light?and rock homeward at 2:30 a.m. through new-fallen snow.

"I could tell he wanted to sock him."

"Good."