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DC Diary:
The Late 1980s

From
Multitudes:
The Unauthorized Memoirs of Sam Smith

 

LETTER TO DONALD GRAHAM

[I was invited to a community meeting called by Donald Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. I was unable to attend, but I wrote Graham a letter, part of which follows]:

Dear Don: I imagine that you could write down today a list of the major concerns that will be brought up at the meeting. These concerns haven't changed much over the years; they need not so much discovery as response. I am of two minds on this matter. On the one hand I have come to accept the wisdom that one should never try to teach a pig to sing -- it doesn't work and it annoys the pig. On the other hand, I have sensed enough wistful desire on your part and enough frustration on the part of members of your staff to cling to the hope that there remains potential of change.

Let me suggest a slightly different way of looking at the problem that might help to free that potential:

The Post controls the opening minutes of each day in the lives of over a million Washingtonians. Barely removed from our sleep, we pick up our cup of coffee to read the Post. Spousal conversation at that point in the diurnal cycle is in no small part determined by the Post. Our children soon catch the spirit. My younger son, for example, has come to believe that asking for the sports pages is an adequate substitute for saying good morning to his parents. And what are we doing as we sit there glazing our fingers with your ink? At one level we believe we are educating ourselves. But at another, and very important level, we are developing an impression of the day and of our city that will affect our mood, our conversation and our actions for the hours to come.

And how does the Post serve us at this critical juncture? What sort of day and city does it prepare us for? Basically it says to the reader: you are about to go out in a city which has a wealth of problems that you can't solve, pleasures which you're not important enough to partake of, and people who, when they are not just being dull, are deceitful, avaricious or mean.

Some years ago I subscribed to the Philadelphia Daily News in order to select a column by Chuck Stone for reprinting. I discovered a curious thing happening to me. I began reading the paper for pleasure. It dawned on me that here was what I was missing in Washington as filtered by the Post: a real city with terrible, wonderful, funny and contentious things happening to real people. The obituarist ran long obituaries of ordinary but interesting people. The columnists fought with each other. The editorials displayed human emotion rather than the bureaucratic consensus of an editorial committee. Most of all, people in Philadelphia, one gathered from the Daily News, were meant to have fun. Further, they had rights that were not to be intruded upon by crime, bureaucratic idiocy or other forms of venality. In short, the paper, written from the reader's perspective, projected a city that was worth facing, enjoying and fighting for.

In contrast, the Post seems at times almost maniacally determined to drain the life out of the city. The ghost of Harry Gabbitt has been thoroughly exorcised and what remains is a bureaucratic memo on the last 24 hours from the perspective of that small minority of people who wield power in this town.

So if I had been able to come to your meeting I would have accused you of being a wet blanket on my mornings and, by consequence, of the rest of the day. To my mind, this is as serious a charge as one can make against a daily newspaper.

I think this is so not because Post writers and editors are inherently dull, indifferent, or lack humor or emotion. Many, I have found, consider themselves more prisoners than collaborators. I think the problem stems from the fashion in which the Post attempts to rule, benignly and with noblesse oblige, from its monopoly position. Its methods, as I understand them, are not strikingly different from those of McDonald's, that is to say they depend in no small part on quality control. This control, aimed at preventing bad things from happening, has the inevitable result of preventing a lot of good things from happening as well. You end up with a product not unlike Muzak, in which both the low and high pitches are removed leaving the listener with the bland middle range.

This may strike you as inevitable, but I would suggest a way out of the dilemma. Give up some control. If you insist on acting like gods, your task will inevitably be futile, contentious and ultimately unrewarding. The community will come periodically and dump magazines on your doorstep or plead earnestly and vainly at your dinners. And nothing will happen. You will remain read and disliked.

Imagine, however, a Post which did not take upon itself the god-like task of blending and compromising all the different views, currents and spirits of the city. A Post that decided instead to be a stage upon which the city acted out its own play. A Post in which columnists did not have to go running to Benjamin Bradlee to defend their right to say something controversial. A Post that found Style in people who earned less than six figures, or in people we could emulate rather than scorn. A Post in which politics was theatre as well as process. A Post in which what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the little felicities of every day were reported as well as the great strokes of the mighty. A Post that did not wait for the downfall of a mayor to report the other voices and other ideas in the city. A Post in which one could expect to find both the joy and danger that awaited when one left the house in the morning.

You could not describe such a Post in a memo because its direction would not come from management or editorial decisions but from the vitality of the city itself. The same million stories that were out there in Front Page days are still out there waiting for the Post to cover them.

It would not be orderly. But there is no objectivity in creating journalistic order out of the anarchy of a city. No fun or wisdom either.

In short, my advice would be to abdicate as priest, broker, mediator and civic Cuisinart. Just be in the news business. It's a fine trade and all too few people practice it these days.

-- Progressive Review, September 1989

LOU

One of the saddest parts of your editor's departure from Cleveland Park was that I wouldn't be living next to Lou and Di Stovall anymore, which had gotten to be a 28 year habit for me. Lou and Di are both artists but they also serve as the magnetic north of the neighborhood. Follow a compass and that's where you'll end up. Our friendship has endured even though Lou no longer asks my advice on art. That ended after I wandered into his studio while he was working on a print of a seascape and he recklessly asked me what I thought of it. I pointed to an empty piece of sky and suggested that a plane towing a banner would look nice there.

I did get into one of his prints, though. Outside his house one day, he explained that he was working on some prints for the Equal Opportunities Commission and needed some quotes to use on them. "Got any quotes, Sam?" he asked. "Look Lou," I said, "writers write things and then they get quoted; they don't just write quotes." But for him, I thought of one anyway and he used it: "God is an equal opportunity employer."

Lou and Di provided the neighborhood young with counsel, refuge, their own box of art supplies in the studio, laughs, food, and a badminton court. Back when the street wasn't as busy as it now, Lou painted home plate in the middle of it for whiffle ball, the required afternoon activity for anyone between the ages of 6 and 16. Since there weren't enough kids to staff two full teams, every game involved innumerable "ghost men," imaginary creatures whose precise accomplishments and locations at any given moment were a matter of endless, loud debate after every play. Among other services, Lou and Di provided advice on anger management. One year, though, four of Sidwell Friend's starting nine were graduates of the Newark Street field of screams.

Some years later, Lou and Di's own son went to Sidwell and, faced with having both Chelsea Clinton and Al Gore Jr as schoolmates, rebelled in one of the few ways available to a 7th grader under such circumstances: he became a Republican. This revolt, mercifully brief, included playing golf and arranging to have me sent a membership in the GOP Gold Club complete with a welcoming letter from Haley Barber, as well posting a Dole-Kemp sign in his bedroom that looked directly down into our living room.

Lou and I conspired on a number of matters, including one of the city's first neighborhood crime watches. Lou designed the signs and hosted meetings, while I served as crime statistician. Some of the watch's efforts didn't work out all that well. At one meeting, the late Bishop John Walker complained that a wanted poster drawn by a neighbor seemed racist to him. I told John that he just didn't understand the difference between racism and bad art. John, bishop of the Washington National Cathedral, had a sense of humor good enough that Lou once loudly told him one of my recently transmitted jokes, from one crowded Giant food checkout line across to another, and John had the grace to laugh. The joke was that Moses had come down from the Mount and told the people, "I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is I've talked him down from 100 to ten. The bad news is that adultery is still one of them."

On another occasion, someone called the police around ten pm to complain about someone shining flashlights into their house. It was the neighborhood watch on patrol, albeit a bit counterproductively. Then, on a pleasant Saturday afternoon, the alarm went off at the house on the other side of ours. The police responded, with Lou and I there to assist. Noting that the kitchen window was unlocked, the officer pulled his revolver and announced, with what struck me as excessive import and hubris, "Stand back, I'm going in." He opened the window and crawled through, waving his revolver. A few minutes later, he reappeared, announcing with even great import, "Stand back, this could be dangerous." In his right hand he still held his revolver, but in his left was a saucepan out of which all the water had boiled, leaving only one perilously overheated egg.

On another occasion, I returned to find Lou in his front yard. "Doesn't that car look like the one they're looking for in that rape case?" he asked, pointing to a decrepit vehicle up the street. We went to take a look, nodded thoughtfully at the decrepit contents, and then returned to call the police. Afterwards, we stayed on the sidewalk talking for about twenty minutes, until Lou said, "Let's go take another look." After our inspection, we returned to Lou's fence and our conversations. Some while later, Lou said, "Where are those cops? I think I'll call again." When he returned outside, he reported that the officer on duty had told him, "We have the car under surveillance, sir, but it doesn't help much if citizens keep looking in the window. Which one are you, the big white guy or the little short bald black guy?"

"I resent that," said Lou. Replied the officer, "We're paid to be observant."

It's going to be rough not having Lou close at hand to help in such matters. But then, maybe now he'll be able to get more art done.

ONE OF LOU STOVALL'S WORKS.

IT'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

City Paper, June 5, 1987

Life in Washington's slow lane is under siege. The culture of the more than half-million residents who don't subscribe to the Washingtonian, who think of game plans only on fall weekends, and who eat at the 537th best restaurant in town and honestly believe they have had a good meal is threatened by in intrusive, presumptuous, and pompous elite so insecure it must remind us every day in every way that it is in town.

This elite is not content with the mere possession of money, power, and success; it feels compelled to plaster its icons and totems all over town, giving the place the oxymoronic aura of franchised trendiness, coincidentally destroying the places and symbols of indigenous Washington.

This latter Washington -- the natural city, the generic culture, the slow lane -- remains but is unnurtured, unnoted, and uncelebrated. This is the Washington of Burleith and Michigan Park, the city of clerks and secretaries, the city of volleyball on the Mall and fishing at East Potomac Park, the city of shopkeepers and their assistants, of sales representatives and moonlighting cab drivers, of women taking the last bus back to Anacostia after a long day at low pay. It is the city of people choosing not between better and best, but between having and doing without. It is the city of those who know that a dreamy afternoon watching baseball at Turkey Thicket does more to reveal God's ways than reading George Will does. It is the city of those who believe that if you can't find it at Sears, Hechingers, or G.C. Murphy's, you probably don't need it.

It is a place of churches and PTAs, of people whose social life revolves around relatives and friends, of a lonely drink in a crowded bar, and of shifting around to find a warmer spot on the grate. Those in the slow lane are seldom in the press except when they die or tragedy comes to their neighborhood. They worry about their reputation rather than notoriety, and seek pleasure rather than power.

It is a city, in many respects like dozens of others, but with a big exception: Its virtues and its problems are hidden in the shadows of the unrelenting spotlight on the pageant of the grand . It is a city not even given the honor of derision; it is simply ignored.

In Third World countries they call it cultural imperialism, politicians become revolutionaries to fight against it, and the signs read: "Yankee, go home!" Here they call it the 'New Washington, the mayor brags about it, and the signs read: "Ready for Occupancy, Fall 1987."

The members of this elite think of themselves as in the fast lane, but like the Beltway that has become, sadly, one of the last symbols to unite us, their motion is ultimately circular and peripheral to the heart and soul of the city.

They think of themselves as having added style to Washington life, but it often is the style of those described by Carlyle, "whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of clothes." Instead of style being an outward sign of inner grace, it has become just another item to purchase.

They profess to have enlivened the arts, but rather then being critical enthusiasts or participants, they tend to be culture-shoppers looking for hits and investments. To them a painting is a BMW for the wall, a gallery is a place to be seen rather than to see, and if their theatrical tastes extend much beyond Neil Simon, the National hasn't discovered it yet.

They claim to have improved the food at the city's restaurants. For many residents not on expense accounts, the issue is moot. They can't afford to go to them anymore. But certainly the quality of more than one of the city's best restaurants has dramatically deteriorated with the temptation of easy money and easy cooking for alcohol-dazed big-spenders. Enjoyable atmosphere has been replaced with ersatz ambience, and even the chicken salad has been doused with peculiar herbs that leave one with mild but costly dyspepsia.

They have come to be close to power, but because they have little purpose beyond power, they are loose cannons on the deck of the city. If they are real estate developers, they ruin our neighborhoods with their ugly workday mausoleums If they am hip capitalists, they replace the useful shops of the city with endless boutiques purveying the unnecessary and the ostentatious. If they are lawyers, they spend their days serving the avaricious and spend their evenings boring us about it. If they are journalists, they fill our papers and our ears with the latest disinformation from government officials so carefully cultivated over lunch or drinks. If they are city planning officials, they proceed about the city enforcing their sterile neatness. If they are politicians, they deaden our evening news, and our morning reading with such disingenuousness, such tediousness, such gracelessness that me loop for the next tampon commercial. Collectively, they clog our roads and then honk at us for daring to turn left; they brutalize our language, they talk too loudly in the subway about excruciatingly uninteresting subjects and create excessive lines for increasingly marginal services and goods. Their bike-riding couriers, carrying their turgid memos and latest schemes for destroying the cityscape, run us down in the street. They don't answer our phone calls. They so fill available aircraft on their puerile missions that we end up missing our grandmother's funeral. They even put forth the absurd proposition that the 1980s version of the man (or woman) in the gray flannel suit is not only a role model but a sex symbol. And there's hardly a smile or a laugh in the lot. They have overwhelmed the pleasant crazy-quilt pattern of a once vital city with the dull ritual of self-important bores.

They also consider themselves to have brought sophistication to Washington, and in this, at least, they may be right, since one of the meanings of the word in English, a language formerly spoken here, is "adulteration." And another is "the use of sophistry."

I know they have done their mischief not only on Washington. Part of the character of the fast-laners and the power addicts is their rootlessness. Since their values revolve around themselves and not a place, their ethic has been able to spread like social hydrilla throughout urban America. But Washington's power and prominence has a special appeal, aid unfortunately the City is neither large enough in size nor strong enough in its own traditions to ignore them and go about its business. Further, Washington has become the capital of the insecure, and as New York marketing expert Peter Glen recently told Regardie's, "You can't market to the secure rich; you can only market to the insecure rich. If you're marketing to the secure, there's not much you can do because they don't need your garbage. . . . Washington is the most insecure place in America, and therefore a perfect place for marketing to the rich."

I, for one, would be happy to ignore the fast lane. But how can I when even the Hispanic carryout down the street offers its specialties on croissants? When the mayor cavorts with the cultural intruders like some official of Vichy France? When cab drivers can find the Four Seasons Hotel but not the District Building? When the superintendent of our public school system is asked whether she's leaving for another job and says, "I'm seriously considering my career pattern?" And a ward candidate for the school board speaks of "isolating structures" and "modalities?" When waiters and clerks treat ordinary citizens as though they had a socially transmitted disease? When you get the feeling that any day now you may be bounced from your local supermarket for violating their dress code?

Other cities infected with the fast-lane mentality at least defend themselves with their sense of history, of ethnicity, and of place. But Washington, so long denied self-identity, its culture so long ignored by the local media and put down by the national one, is easy pickings for this domestic version of Euro-trash.

Lost among the glitz and the grotesque a sad but important fact.

Today, the cheap space is gone and with it those whose only sin was that they couldn't afford the rent. The public-interest lawyers wear suits now, the group homes am in Takoma Park, and the little shops are in Wheaton. The Van Ness Safeway has become the Safeway Food Emporium and Goodwill Industries has become the headquarters of a huge law firm.

We have had growth, but it has been malignant, and it threatens to devour all that is healthy and natural in the city. Right on the heels of gaining a modicum of political self- we have thrown away our cultural identity for the privilege of serving and entertaining the powerful, profligate, and decadent of late 20th-century America. Our cultural symbol has become that of the $300-i-night hotel doorman dressed in the servant's garb of another imperial culture that once wanted it all but now has to mike do with the Falkland Islands.

In better times we might expect some help from local leaders in politics or die media. Our politicians, however, increasingly respond to a constituency of dollars, not votes, and the once-declass declasse members of the press have brilliantly used their own media to move themselves en masse into the capital's elite, coincidentally leaving behind their former empathy with the city's slow lane. Some days, the Washington Post seems almost to forget that the city exists. Not even murder will guarantee you access to its skimpy local coverage. In crime, as in other matter, if you don't kill big or important, the story may end up on the paste-up floor.

We do have a few friends left at court. A declining proportion of the City Council still have the whiff of the city about them. The school board is so far out of the fast lane that it doesn't even make the news much anymore. A few in the media, like Jim Vance, George Michaels, and Arch Campbell, have a relaxed exuberance that is a tonic after normal stentorian Washington journalism. WHUR and WOL still make Washington sound like a real place rather than a stage set. The WMAL team of Trumbel and Core even have given us the Gross National Parade -- one of few occasions an which it large number of Washingtonians get together not to win, not to demagogue, not to watch an impressive spectacle but just to have ordinary, human fun.

But the seriousness with which the city's elite takes itself seems to have worn off on the whole city, and to an outsider we must come across as a city of worriers, complainers, and the hopelessly insecure We complain to Dr. Gridlock about the traffic, we write to Bob Levey about the seemingly endless rudeness of our fellow citizens, we annoy Miss Manners with our boorish questions. Our local columnists rarely tell us funny, engaging, or encouraging stories about Washington life. Style Plus keeps dreaming up new problems for us to worry about. And local call-in shows are unrelievedly informative or politically evangelical.

It doesn't have to be that way. Larry Glick, host of a popular call-in show in Boston, taps the well of ordinary conversation with ordinary people with highly entertaining results, But then Boston is a place where citizens realize that they know more than politicians, journalists, and other experts and, besides, what Washington program director would allow that? The Philadelphia Daily News has an obituarist who asks, "Who would you miss more -- your trashman or Henry Kissinger?" So he writes about the trashman. But in Washington, as they say, it wouldn't be appropriate.

Well, if this city is going to amount to anything, it has got to stop being so damn appropriate. Otherwise it's going to just get duller and duller and all we'll be doing is sitting around waiting for age to give our tedious culture some reason for existence.

It's up to us in the broom closets of power to do something about it. We can if, in our minds and our actions, we draw a clear distinction between their Washington and ours. 'We have to understand, as any New England shopkeeper could tell you, that you can take their money without becoming like them, and that there is a part of town for tourists and hustlers, and a part of town for people. We have to stop watching the people that Washingtonian tells us to watch and look at what we please. We need to appreciate what is indigenous more than what is imposed. We need to expunge fast-track jargon from our conversations and stop "net-working" when we should be having a good me. We need to create more places where people can do Washington-type things away from the effete rituals of power, We need to eat more Chesapeake Bay crabmeat and fewer oversized and undercooked chocolate chip cookie. We need to create a unity of feeling and understanding that goes beyond shared miseries of the Beltway or shared victories of the Redskins. We need, in short, a local cultural revolution that places the generic culture of Washington at the center of our lives go we can stop living vicariously through a world that most Washingtonians serve but do not own.

The statehood movement seemed dead. And then serendipity raised its happy head. Many in the movement had become frustrated and tired. The goal was still there but the spirit wasn't. The movement badly needed an enthusiasm and freshness that hadn't spent ten years being beaten down. It arrived in the person of Ed Guinan, who quietly but effectively organized a statehood initiative committee. Even some of the old statehooders weren't confident it would work.

RESTAURANT REVIEW

ONE OF THE HAZARDS of being a writer is that sometimes people take you literally when you're just being metaphorical. Thus it was when I led off an article in Washington's City Paper in 1987 with the following:

"Life in Washington's slow lane is under siege. The culture of the more than half-million residents who don't subscribe to the Washingtonian, who think of game plans only on fall weekends, and who eat at the 537th best restaurant in town and honestly believe they have had a good meal is threatened by in intrusive, presumptuous, and pompous elite so insecure it must remind us every day in every way that it is in town."

Soon after the article appeared, the phone rang. It was Phyllis Richman, the food editor of the Washington Post. "Which," she demanded, "is the 537th best restaurant in town?" She apparently saw my comment as a swipe at her and her profession, especially since her own ratings stopped at 100.

I had learned not to trifle with food columnists. We had one in the DC Gazette, although she apparently never went to a restaurants, wrote interminably of the virtues of soy and bean sprouts, and once interrupted a phone conversation to say, accusingly, "Sam, you're breathing through your mouth."

I ran quickly through most recent meals and finally, with as much casual certainty as I could muster, informed Phyllis that it was Hodge's, a small carryout on New York Avenue.

She immediately went out and reviewed it. For a rush sound-bite I hadn't done poorly on the ambiance side of the rating. Richman wrote, "Huddled between Lee's Brake Service and Kim's Auto Body Shop, Hodge's is a self-service sandwich shop with a few shiny tables outside under the green plastic awning." But the meal I had clearly underrated:

"If you're sharp you'll notice that nobody orders anything but the roast beef sandwich. And what a roast beef sandwich! A whole steamship round is being carved to order, in slices thick enough to leave some juices in them. And seeded Kaiser rolls are sliced - also to order - and quickly dipped in the pan juices ~ before they're stuffed with the beef . . .

"537th? Hmmph. Even the City Paper voted this roast beef sandwich the best in Washington, says the framed certificate on the wall. And the coffee was better than at the lunch counter in my office, even when Hodge's manager declined to charge for it because it wasn't fresh enough . . ."

Which is why, these days, when I pick a metaphorical number out of the hat, I'm a bit more cautious that I once was.

THE SWAMPOODLE PAPERS 1987 Keep your powder dry, remember to call your ambulance early, and tell them you're going to the airport. Then they'll be sure to come.

PERMIT

Washington artist Lou Stovall called the Office of Emergency Preparedness the week before a scheduled block party to get a permit. A Mrs. Jones told him that it was absolutely out of the question as it took a month to get a permit. Lou argued with Mrs. Jones, pointing out that the community placed no burden on the city and handled all logistics itself. She was not moved. It was, she said, impossible.

"Well, I guess I'll have to come down there, then," he said.

"Why would you do that?"

"To throw myself on the mercy of the court."

"I am the court. It wouldn't do you any good."

"Well I'm coming anyway."

Upon arriving at the mayor's office, Lou stepped into an elevator in which stood Sam Jordan, director of the Office of Emergency Preparedness. They exchanged pleasantries and then Sam asked him why he was downtown. Lou explained his problem. "What's the use of this office," replied Jordan, "if it can't assist communities?" and he proceeded to smooth the way for the permit, including personally visiting Mrs. Jones and making it clear that Stovall was to have the approval before the scheduled event.

When Stovall returned to pick up the permit, he brought along a print for Jordan's office. Jordan was in a conference, though, and couldn't be disturbed.

When Lou showed the print to an aide, however, he was told to wait a moment and rushed into the conference with the print. The aide returned shortly with Jordan who expressed his delight.

Stovall returned home. An hour late, the phone rang. It was Mrs. Jones. "Mr. Stovall, this is Gladys Jones at the Office of Emergency Preparedness and I just want to make sure your got your permit all right."

"Yes, I did, thank you."

"That was a beautiful print you gave to Mr. Jordan."

"Thank you"

A pause and then: "You know, I was the one who did most of the work."

Lou replied, "I am eternally grateful to Mr. Jordan and will be glad to assist your office in any way possible. Thank you, Mrs. Jones" and hung up.

THE AUTHOR'S BAND IN THE 1980s

THE CITY COUNCIL
& SANEMAGOGNAS

April 1987

I recently testified before the city council. The subject was statehood and the bizarre manner in which our elected officials were approaching the matter. At the end of my statement I told a 19th century whaling story which concludes with a sailor saying to a tyrannical captain, "All I ask is a little decency and that of the most god damn common variety."

David Clarke, the chair of the council was reading my prepared statement as I spoke. As I approached this harmless little tale, he raised his gavel and at the precise moment that I uttered the words "god damn," he banged his gavel down and, with a ferocity unusual even for him, declared that such language would not be tolerated in the council chambers.

Startled by the sudden appearance of the ghost of Jonathan Edwards, I attempted to explain that the usage was not one of gratuitous profanity, that I had learned the story from a book printed by a highly respectable publisher and, besides, as a writer it seemed the words fit the context better than, say, "gosh darn." It was, after all, a sailor and not George Bush who was speaking. All of this fell on deaf ears and it was some minutes before I could turn Clarke's attention to statehood.

Clarke's curious outburst could be considered in part, I suppose, an act of loyalty to that not insignificant portion of his constituency which is occupied in the ministry. But I think it more likely that the rule I had violated was not that of the Baptist Church as that of the Fifth Floor Chapel of the Holy Amendment over which Clarke himself presides. Even before I had testified, it had occurred to me how much council meetings had become like going to church.

This is unfortunate, because one of the important purposes of theological ritual is to provide continuity in an otherwise ephemeral world, whereas one of the important purposes of council meetings is to produce change in an otherwise stultified society. Yet there the thirteen politician-priests sit (when they bother to come), in front of a wall covered with deep blue velvet (or is it velour?) upon which is hung in the place of a cross, a huge seal of the city. The councilmembers are seated behind a long U-shaped altar-like desk raised high enough to allow them to be taller in their chairs than anyone standing below them. Sitting in the audience, the angle is so great that what one mostly sees are heads and shoulders propped behind name plaques, giving the impression of a row of bowling trophies.

The result is that one comes to testify in an atmosphere designed to make one feel a supplicant rather than a democratic peer. As I walked up to speak, I found myself saying to myself, "We do not presume to come this thy table trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold mercies ...

Then I cleared my head, which is how I got into trouble. But others are more careful. As a friend notes, "Why do they always begin, 'We deeply appreciate this opportunity to appear before you," as if the council were doing them a favor by letting them testify?

The metaphor breaks down because there is no collection plate, but that is a mere doctrinal quibble. And besides, the plate is passed rather aggressively every April 15.

The injection of religious totems and atmosphere into the council proceedings is not accidental. It is designed to intimidate citizens, prevent issues from being discussed frankly, create a false impression of due process and elevate the councilmembers' social status. None of this serves democracy, but it well serves the council, allowing it under the guise of pseudo-decorum to commit all sorts of political mayhem. The council, as it has increasingly withdrawn from the people, has increasingly hidden under the cover of ritual. So bad has it become that one councilmember recently even called in the police during a controversial hearing and told them to arrest anyone who laughed or was disrespectful.

Startled by Clarke, who is usually on the side of civil liberties, engaging in such petty bowdlerization, I quickly searched out one of the best resources available: H.L. Mencken's remarkable The American Language, which discusses expletives like god damn at length. Here is some of what I found:

God damn is first recorded in English in 1633. It soon became a sobriquet that the French used for the English and later was applied, presumably with literal intent, by the Puritans Cavaliers. Nonetheless, two years after the death of the foul-mouthed Elizabeth I Parliament passed a ten pound fine against anyone in a "stage play, interlude, show, etc." using blasphemy. Among the victims of this rule was Shakespeare, who was convinced by friends to censor his own plays that, as Mencken put it, "had been full of oaths and objurgations . . . The editors of the bard in later years had the exhilarating job of restoring the denaturized expletives."

Mencken attributes a more tolerant attitude in the United States to the decay of the legal concept of blasphemy, a point with which attorney Clarke has not yet caught up. While the Puritans in New England did attempt to suppress the practice, it is clear from the number of offenses recorded in town records that they failed. Mencken continues:

"The Revolution, like any other general war, greatly prospered both obscenity and profanity. The admonitions of George Washington and John Adams against profanity and blasphemy in the Army and Navy had no effect, and at the end of the century an English visitor named Richard Parkinson was recording that the word damned was "a very familiar phrase" in the new Republic, and that even the clergy used language that was "extremely vulgar and profane." Washington himself, despite his order to his men, used both damn and hell with considerable freedom, as have several other American officers since."

By 1931, the use of hell was so common, despite efforts by the likes of the Holy Name Society, that L. W. Merryweather in American Speech prematurely worried that it might be soon worn out. He suggested that "clerical circles should take it upon themselves, as a public duty, to invest some other theological term with a shuddering fearsomeness that will qualify it as the successor to hell when the lamentable decease of the latter actually takes place."

Incidentally, Mencken gives credit to publisher Joseph Pultizer, "a great master of profanity in three languages," for inventing the insertion of profanity in the midst of a word as in his attack on an editor; "The trouble with you, Coates, is that you are too indegoddamnpendent."

Thus, it would appear that Dave Clarke is on the losing end of history. Others, mostly of prudish and repressive ilk, have tried to eradicate god damn from the language and have failed, perhaps, in part, because they, like George Washington, have been known to use it too. If Dave wants to align himself with the Puritans and the Holy Name Society that is his business, but he should understand that he is flogging the dephlogisticated. And he may also be lending credence to a notion in other parts of the world that Americans are rather unimaginative and wimpish on this score. Writing about son of a bitch, Mencken notes that the phrase seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or Latin as fudge does to us: "The dumbest policeman in Palermo thinks up a dozen better [oaths] between breakfast and the noon whistle. Worse, it is frequently transmogrified into the childish son of a gun. The latter is so lacking in punch that the Italians among us have borrowed it as a satirical name for an American: a sanemagogna . . . In Standard Italian there are no less than forty congeners of son of a bitch and each and every one of them is more opprobrious, more brilliant, more effective." --DC Gazette

SEND IN THE CLOWNS

April 1986

When Philadelphia was in the midst of 69 years of Republican rule, they used to describe it as corrupt and contented. It's a term that's beginning to fit DC as the city finds itself with the most corrupt city administration since the days of Boss Shepherd and seems hardly bothered by it at all. The mayor's ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, ex-buddy and deputy mayor all go to jail, a current deputy mayor is under investigation and resigns, death certificates are fiddled with, contracts are routinely handed out to political cronies, the federal government finds a $1.6 million discrepancy in a low income housing account, a key witness in one scandal ends up in hiding in the federal protective custody program and everyone acts as though it's just business as usual.

To be sure, DC still isn't up to the past or present sophisticated corruption of such cities as Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New York but for a town that didn't even have an elected government slightly more than a decade ago, it is learning awfully fast.

One of the things the rest of us can discover from the experiences of these other cities is that corruption doesn't flourish just because of the venality of a few public officials. It flourishes in no small part because of its acceptance by a large number of honest and upright people who may not approve of what is going on but who come to treat it as a normal part of doing business. As long as they are not the ones giving bribes, embezzling public funds, or cheating the public trust in other ways, they can carry out their relationships with the city government as though nothing were amiss.

Besides they need the job, they need the appointment, they need the contract, they need the mayor's support, they need to repay the mayor for past favors.

Thus it was recently that five thousand righteous and decent citizens of the city gathered to pay homage to the mayor on his birthday. You asked some of them; they told you that was why they were there. They were the good burghers of Washington: doctors, lawyers community activists, real estate developers, ministers, gay leaders, progressive councilmembers, statehood people, concerned, honest and fine citizens.

There was a jazz band, a Brazilian samba group, clowns, jugglers and stilt walkers. It was estimated to cost $100,000 which will not be reported as a campaign expenditure since the Office of Campaign Finance says it was not a political event.

As federal investigators combed through city records and interviewed witnesses, as years of political sleaze slowly unraveled in the public prints, Marion Barry brought in the clowns and 5000 good citizens paid money to say thank you.

Some of these citizens were there because they thought their presence might help a good cause. Some of them were there as victims of a sort of political graymail, the heavy-handed enforcement of quid pro quo at which Barry is so adept. Some of them were there because the one part of government in which they were mainly interested had done something right.

All good or practical reasons and yet in aggregate they unintentionally contribute to the impression that his town sanctions the behavior of the Barry administration, that it buys the Barry line of personal non-accountability for what goes on in his administration, that deep corruption, extending even to stealing money budgeted for the poor, is acceptable as part of our newly won home-rule.

And it is this impression, as much as the individual sins of government officials, that encourages further corruption and, worse, a corruption of the city’s spirit. That Barry administration has soiled the reputation of the city and has hurt our drive for further self-government. There may be little we can do about this at the present, but at the very least, those who would wish otherwise must try not to cheer when the mayor sends in the clowns. -- Progressive Review

FIVE YEARS OF FAILURE

February 1986

I was asked to give a toast at the fifth anniversary celebration of the DC Community Humanities Council. Here is what I said:

Five years ago the DC Community Humanities Council was formed, charged with the diffusion of ideas, the encouragement of thought and the inspiration of rational discourse within this our nation's capital. This was a little like trying to sell Bibles in a brothel, and I think that any fair assessment of what has occurred around us since we began would indicate that we have failed miserably. The best efforts of the council and its sainted staff have failed to halt a national and local stampede towards what is perhaps the most anti-humanistic era of our lifetimes.

It is an era, to be sure, not without ideas and a sense of history but what ideas and what history. It's as if the worst of the past had been resyndicated and put on Channel 20, with none of the other stations working. We draw from the economics of Morgan, Mellon and the British East India Company, the morality of Comstock, the civil liberties of Palmer and McCarthy, the civil rights of Tara, the lifestyle of Babbitt and Gatsby, the religion of Gantry, the political ethics of Teapot Dome, the business ethics of Ponzi, the gentleness of Nietzsche, the altruism of Ayn Rand, the ecological sensitivity of General Sherman, the spiritualism of Warren Gameliel Harding, the imagination of Rutherford Hayes the brilliance of Franklin Pierce, the expressiveness of Calvin Coolidge and the evolutionary theories of William Jennings Bryan.

It is an era when we propose to devise the most complex weapons system ever created, but when we go to explain it to people, our government feels compelled to use comic book stick figures on television. We have become the first society to know more about the external world than we do about ourselves. And now we even seem to be losing the ability to talk or write about the problem.

It is an era in which, like the fifties, the man in the gray flannel suit is in the ascendancy, but unlike the fifties, when he was viewed with the ambivalence that economics forces upon us, he or she is now a cultural role model, and, unbelievably, even considered hip, charismatic and sexy.

And it is an era in which we know how to promote, facilitate merge, network, manage, integrate, finalize and bottom line, but are losing the ability to make or to create. I have a nightmare that one day the country will awake and discover that there is nothing to manage, finalize and facilitate. There will be no one left to build anything.

So we have failed -- here in the jaws of the lion -- but I would argue that given the powers arrayed against the humanistic ideal, failure has been the only sane and honorable course. And the failure, one hopes, is only temporary. Long ago, John Locke warned of the constant decay of ideas, and how they must be "renewed by repeated exercises of the senses." If not, "the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen."

The print is fading, but, thanks in part to this band of happy humanistic warriors, it could have been a lot worse. It has engaged in repeated exercise of the senses with an integrity, decency, fairness, sensitivity and good humor rarely seen in this town anymore. In a city that is obsessed with style, it is one of the few real class acts. So a toast to the Council for all it has done and will do and to the humanistic spirit. May we live to see it once more

Copyright 1997 The Progressive Review

The Early 1980s

M U L T I T U D E S An Unauthorized Memoir by Sam Smith GEORGETOWN: A child of contradictions GHOSTS: The ubiquitous past HEADING OUT: Playing with and putting away childish things SUMMER FRIENDS A Quaker education MAGNA CUM PROBATION Why Harvard and the author didn't quite hit it off THE CANARIES IN STUDIO A  A young radio reporter learns a lot about Washington SUSPECT: How the author became a 23-year-old suspected spy HOOLIGAN DAYS: A memoir of the Coast Guard SEEDS The 60s before they became the 60s HOW THE TROUBLE BEGAN:   A long adventure in alternative journalism began in the mid-sixties FIRE: The Washington riots and other suspensions of hope PLACE: The battle for local power DC DIARY: THE SEVENTIES DC DIARY: THE EIGHTIES DCDIARY: THE NINETIES & ON THE LONELIEST MILE IN TOWN:  An adventure in apostasy -- drinking upstream from the Clinton herd GOING GREEN: The birth of a movement DC DIARY: THE NEW CENTURY REBEL