Unqualified Offerings

A couple weeks ago, Sybil Vane wrote about coming to visit what the connected locals tend to call Thistown, the place where Tim Russert lived and worked. My town, sort of. I mean, I live here – really, just north of it, and I work somewhere west. But I’ve been down on the Mall and amid the marble and the gilded monuments many a time, night and day. Doctor Vane:

A mama-blogger that I very much like had a post a weekish ago about going with her young kid to Washington DC and touring about. She noted the sort of squeamish conflict between the kind of idealism and awe a city full of landmarks and history can inspire, especially when you are narrating the city to your kid, and the cynicism she feels when she considers what goes on in DC and what it has come to mean for her.

And maybe this is what my libertarianism consists in these days, but those feelings, the idealism and awe a city full of landmarks and history can inspire; that doesn’t happen to me. Hasn’t in many years. Nor do I well up with TAXATION EQUALZ THEFT!!!1!eleven!1!one! rage or weep bitter tears for the children of Waco with every view of the Capitol Building or the White House. (I used to work across the street from the Old Executive Office Building. Many lunch times I would feed the squirrels in Lafayette Park or lose games of speed chess to junkies.) If I feel anything, it’s the kind of wariness you’d feel on a hike seeing a thunderstorm on the horizon, or just . . . nothing. A distantly annoyed nothing, like when you see the same poster-ad for a TV show you don’t like on the bus stop day after day. Nor am I talking about mere habituation, the kind of blase familiarity one occasionally breaks through by recalling that, Wow! The most powerful people on the planet are inside that granite meeting center right now! It’s when I’m most aware of the import of these places that I’m most aware of being unstirred.

What’s more, I have zero interest in narrating awe about the landmarks into my children. All things considered, I’d rather not teach them to thrill the the sight of the House of the People’s Representatives or the place where they print the money or, heaven forfend, the FBI Building.

At the same time, I don’t rant to them about the evils of Teh Sistam or any of that: it would be tiresome. To the extent I annoyed them they’d just reject the rant and the ranter. To the extent they internalized it, I’d just be making their childhoods marginally more difficult. "The weird kid gets all his strange ideas from his crazy old man." I’m gratified that, with absolutely no doing on my part, my twelve-year-old became a flaming peacenik before he was out of elementary school. I’m not going to shove the Child’s Illustrated Edition of Our Enemy the State on him. I can’t even get the kid to read Snow Treasure, and that was an awesome book.

So the visible monuments of the seat of our government causes my heart to swell with . . . very little either way. And from what I can tell, that’s very odd on my part. Alienation I guess you’d call it. But there it is.