To be from Washington, DC is in some sense to be from nowhere. There is no DC accent, no identity. Too much of the city's population is impermanent and transient for such markers to take hold. Nevertheless, none of us can escape a primal attachment to the place from which we came. Some usually inactive nerve of DC-ness, of DC pride, was touched by the grotesque and appalling images that came out of the US Capitol yesterday. I am not in the habit of shouting expletives at the television, but so it turned out. It didn't seem possible that I could loathe this pestilential president even more than I had loathed him the day before, but so it turned out.
My father grew up in the city and worked for the government his entire career, at the US Geological Survey. My late mother worked part time for the Smithsonian Institution, at the National Museum of Natural History, on the Mall. She also volunteered at the White House during the Bush and Obama administrations. These somnolent, seemingly impregnable monuments were always in the background of my youth, though I very seldom ventured inside them. My only visit to the Capitol, as far as I can recall, was for a second-grade field trip in which we were given a tour by Senator Edward Kennedy, one of whose sons was in my class. We sat at desks in the Senate chamber, but I remember being most impressed by the underground train that carried people from one part of the complex to another.
My rage at Wednesday's events gave way to tears when I tried to imagine my mother's reaction to them. She was deeply devoted to Washington's ceremonial trappings and architecture. We had dozens of books about the White House, the Capitol, and other buildings on the Mall. She was also politically very conservative. I don't know if she would have accepted any of the right-wing justifications or distortions that are circulating around the terrorist incident at the Capitol, but I am certain that the sight of democratic symbols being violated and destroyed would have caused her very intense distress. I can't help feeling the same, even if the physical damage is incidental to the lives that were lost, and even if the entire circus-like spectacle drove home the concept of white privilege in incontrovertible fashion.
