study to be wise

Monday, March 22, 2010

Better Weather


It was gorgeous in Washington this weekend. It may not have been an especially long winter, but it was intense. Yesterday, I took a look at my boots for the first time since the snow stopped falling. They were brand new in January, and yet they already know what it is to be weathered, creases already in the leather, watermarked for life by the blizzard of 2010. It's raining again today, but the weekend, at least, was gorgeous.



So I took a walk on Saturday because it was perfect out. Perfect to soak up the sun, enjoy the greenery, see the monuments. And perfect to party. Tea party.


It was just funny at first. I'm not sure I'd ever met a real life teabagger before, and it was ticklish to see that they all seemed to live up to the caricature. Outlandish homemade signs. A woman lying on the ground yelling, "Pelosi, go home back to your Soviet Union." Harmless, really, and not too different from the people in Dupont Circle who were throwing their shoes at a giant blow-up doll of George Bush the day before the Inauguration.




But then I walked around to the other side of the Capitol, where several hundred, maybe even a thousand, teabaggers were lining up around the steps of the House. They were trying to form a human wall, they said, around the congresspeople inside, either to confront them when they tried to enter the House or to be close enough that their loud yelling--and there was a lot of yelling and it was very loud--would disrupt proceedings inside the building.


My immediate reaction was one of betrayal. That I was somehow helping their cause by simply being there, adding to the headcount, sitting on the other team's bench. I smiled to hide a smirk. I tried hard not to laugh at the misspelled signs. But then I realized it wasn't so funny.


The louder the yelling got, and the more sing-songy the chants, the more I felt the conspicuous absence of other people of color, and the conspicuous presence of me, not exactly looking like I fit in. I tried to weave in and out looking for good photos, but wherever I went, I was surrounded by a very large group of angry white people yelling whatever they were being told to yell. I think sometimes people call this a mob.


I know I wasn't remotely close to being in any kind of real danger. There were Capitol Police everywhere. And even if it plays to the stereotype, I can always whip out my "I'm not American" card and duck and cover. But it wasn't the idea of being the only minority in the crowd that got to me. It was the idea that, in another age, not really all that long ago, these were the kind of people that gathered in large groups and yelled something awfully similar to "Kill the bill!" And when you overhear them talking about the "illegals" that were also protesting this past weekend for immigration reform, and you see the less than subtle voodoo effigy, it's hard not to think that even today, if there were enough of them in a crowd, if they were angry enough and yelling loud enough, someone could get hurt much more than enough.


Maybe that's taking it too far because I'm not exactly predisposed to giving teabaggers the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that's because they don't deserve it. Or maybe they're just envious, because they saw the kind of crowds and the enthusiasm of the Obama campaign--however cheesy and bandwagony--and want something like that for themselves. So there they were, yelling. "Kill the bill!" "Vote no!"


I went back to the Capitol last night because after all that, I basically wanted to see them shut the hell up. A lot of people seemed to have the same idea--because, you know, liberals respect the process--so I had to wait in line for almost two hours to get into the House galleries. They were shuffling groups in for 15 minutes at a time, and someone must have been looking out for me, because I got shuffled in for the exact 15 minutes of the vote on the Senate bill.

The House chamber is a whole lot smaller and more intimate than it looks during the State of the Union, and when all the Representatives are on the floor yelling their yeas and nays in unison it has the feel of those old basketball gyms that literally rock when the crowd gets going. Much cooler than C-SPAN. When the yeas hit 216, and as they counted down to the end of the vote, the Democrats did their best impersonation of all of us naive young multiethnic immigrant pothead hippies on the campaign trail that the teabaggers hate so much.

"Yes we can," they chanted. Beats "Vote no" every time.


It was gorgeous in Washington this weekend.