Suskind's book and the shocking quiet in Washington
Washington in the summertime is a hot, sweltering place, inundated by tourists. It’s perhaps a sign of how new I am to the city that I have withdrawn to my favorite Washington monument, Jefferson’s marble temple overlooking the tidal basin. I like this monument not for its grandeur but for a particular line etched on its side: “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” I have thought often what Jefferson meant when he wrote that line, and about what it means today.
One of the odd things about living in Washington is that the city loses its symbolic meaning. Even for those power brokers who actually run this amorphous mass of a government, I daresay the District loses some of its luster. It becomes the terrain of a grand battle for power and money but stops being perceived in a visceral sense as the seat of the Republic.
One sees this attitude, I think, in the anemic response of the Washington press corp to the revelations that came out of Ron Suskind’s new book. To review: a Pulitzer Prize-winning author publishes information, confirmed by several sources on the record, that claims that people in the Bush Administration ordered the CIA to forge a document that linked Saddam Hussein’s regime to Al Qaeda, misleading the nation into a bloody war and clearly violating the law banning the use of CIA to promulgate domestic propaganda. And yet there is not particularly a sense of urgency today; there are not hordes of television journalists being filmed in front of the White House, intoning about the crisis of the presidency. The TV media has covered it in a “he-said, he-said” sort of way. The major newspapers have remained awfully restrained, perhaps waiting for their own reporters to confirm Suskind’s findings (an important step).
I suppose I wonder, on days like this, whether any action by the government could shatter the symbolism of the National Mall and make them see the city as its power brokers appear to: as a battlefield. Or perhaps not: even in the times of Nero the Roman Senate still went through the motions of meeting, and I’m sure visitors to Rome still went to tour their chamber.
One of the odd things about living in Washington is that the city loses its symbolic meaning. Even for those power brokers who actually run this amorphous mass of a government, I daresay the District loses some of its luster. It becomes the terrain of a grand battle for power and money but stops being perceived in a visceral sense as the seat of the Republic.
One sees this attitude, I think, in the anemic response of the Washington press corp to the revelations that came out of Ron Suskind’s new book. To review: a Pulitzer Prize-winning author publishes information, confirmed by several sources on the record, that claims that people in the Bush Administration ordered the CIA to forge a document that linked Saddam Hussein’s regime to Al Qaeda, misleading the nation into a bloody war and clearly violating the law banning the use of CIA to promulgate domestic propaganda. And yet there is not particularly a sense of urgency today; there are not hordes of television journalists being filmed in front of the White House, intoning about the crisis of the presidency. The TV media has covered it in a “he-said, he-said” sort of way. The major newspapers have remained awfully restrained, perhaps waiting for their own reporters to confirm Suskind’s findings (an important step).
I suppose I wonder, on days like this, whether any action by the government could shatter the symbolism of the National Mall and make them see the city as its power brokers appear to: as a battlefield. Or perhaps not: even in the times of Nero the Roman Senate still went through the motions of meeting, and I’m sure visitors to Rome still went to tour their chamber.
