In Search of a Sense of Place. October 15, 2006.

In Search of a Sense of Place
Washington
October 15, 2006

PBS started re-showing Eyes on the Prize a few weeks ago. I missed it when the program was first shown in the mid-eighties and then again in the ninties. Must have been when I did not have a television. Looking now in 2006 at this documentary of events from forty and fifty years ago, it is obvious that many things have changed. Security officers for the great 1963 march on Washington carried cutting edge technology to communicate with each other: walkie-talkies. The things looked like enormous toys that probably didn’t even work. People smoked cigarettes everywhere, indoors, outdoors, at lunch counters, in jail. Automobiles were fenderous behemoths.

In addition to archival footage, there are interviews with former activists, quite young during the sixties, middle-aged then and perhaps dead now, for all I know: Andrew Young and several very articulate and occasionally very funny young guys. Also some touching clips from two Black women who were little girls at the time. But the people who made the greatest impression on me were the white racists speaking from old black and white footage: George Wallace, Bull Connor and a couple of others. Their defiance, their seething resentment, their characterization of civil rights activists as “outside agitators, inspired by foreign ideologies, un-American, haters of America, ungrateful, etc.” all seemed so dated, yet weirdly contemporary.

It seemed that I had heard this rhetoric before, more recently. How could this be? How could this hateful rhetoric from forty or fifty tears ago seem so contemporary?

Then I had it: George Wallace and Ross Barnet have simply died and been reincarnated as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and, even more weirdly, Ann Coulter. They have their own television network and book deals.

The quotations of the week come from the Sunday New York Times. A first section story featured a race between incumbent Republican Curt Weldon and Democrat Joe Sestak in suburban Philadelphia. Ann St. Clair, who is heading up Republicans for Sestak, is quoted as saying “that she and her husband grew disenchanted with their party when they lived abroad in the last several years and watched the nation’s reputation deteriorate.” “I came home and felt like I didn’t recognize my party,” she said.

In the book review section, Henry Kissinger reviewed a biography of Dean Acheson, concluding with a quotation that could well be an open memo to this Republican Party:

“Americans must limit themselves to ‘limited objectives’ and work in congress with others, for an essential part of American power is the ‘ability to evoke support from others – an ability quite as important as the capacity to compel.’”

Meanwhile, fall comes late in Washington. I remember peak color in Vermont and New Hampshire coming in the first or second week of October. Here the leaves have just started to turn. After several muggy, rainy days, a front finally moved through this morning. It will get down to around forty tonight and the lights of the city beneath my windows will twinkle in the cool, clear air. I live on the top floor of my building, which sits just off of Saint Alban’s Hill, the highest point of land in the city at 400 feet or so. The only building higher than mine is the National Cathedral. I look across at its spires as I write. Right now, at 6 o’clock Friday afternoon, the clouds move along quite quickly and I feel as if I am their companion in the darkening blue sky.

Planes taking off from National Airport emerge from behind the front towers of the cathedral and head west towards the setting sun. Downhill and east of the cathedral, the marble and limestone government buildings glow white, then pink, then gray as the speeding clouds block and then reveal the light from the sun. The trees that form a canopy above Cleveland Park are still green with just a suggestion of the color to come.