The MetaNarrative

Back on the AMTRAK and headed home. After five days of running around the cold, chasing history wherever we could, history of the past, history being made and a historical prelude to the future. First the travelogue piece of the narrative, we ate at the Georgetown Grill last night, nice enough place in a fancy hotel. There are few cheap meals in DC that don’t come out of a cart or fast food joint. I had a jones for a cheeseburger before it’s back to reality and a normal, middle aged guy diet, also had some lobster bisque, which is nothing like the lobster bisque in New England, they also had Manhattan clam chowder on the menu, call it clam tomato soup or whatever but don’t call it chowder you heathens. Becky had a nicer meal, but I just wanted that damn burger and beer. Not sitting well with the lingering stomach flu. I can’t believe I went my entire vacation without once touching whiskey, damn digestive system.

We went to take the early train out of DC, lugging around all of our stuff and our child. Union Station was crowded, for those of you who are traveling with toddlers, always take the first, front seat in the train. There are no trays, but definitely more room to “run” around. This train was packed, a post-Inauguration train out of town. People are overloaded with their Obama gear. So we slowly and methodically leave DC, the land of the self-important, the pinnacle of power, where the local news in the news making capital of the world ironically is 90% traffic and weather.

I’m trying to get some collective thoughts together, most of this again if for my two year old, so we can somehow remember this week. And for my wife who engineered this whole extravaganza. What I really want to write about is the speech. I love rhetoric and often feel like I’m playing chess with the speaker and speech writers and overanalyze. I’d like to see the first and former drafts and find out what the initial direction was. The time to note where the Scripture was used and why, to understand all the hidden messages. Unfortunately we heard the speech through speakers walking away from the ceremony to the bus due to a sick child, I need some time to read the text and sit down with a glass of scotch and watch it on c-span.

Going Home
Like everyone else, I’m often asked “where you from?” and like most people who have lived in different places there are different answers. If I’m out of state, I usually tell people I’m from Boston; it’s a common reference even though I’m about 8 miles from the city itself. For work friends, colleagues and folks like that I usually say I’m from Melrose, but I grew up on the Cape, lived in Framingham, Somerville and Malden as well. For people who are looking for a familial context, my mother’s family is from Massachusetts and the Bronx and my father’s family is from Puerto Rico. But really my young childhood was spent in Northern Virginia, Alexandria, Arlington and Fairfax County to be precise and most of my school vacations, etc were spent at my grandparents’ house down there.

When we were at dinner Inauguration night, the waiter asked us where we were from, when Latino people ask you that (he was Honduran), it usually means what country did your family come from, but in this case we said the usual, Boston (since there were folks in town from all over the country), but then I remarked but I was born right over here on Pennsylvania Avenue in the District. “Wow”, he remarked, “you’re only the second person I’ve met that was actually born here, the other one was my daughter.”

DC is quite remarkable in its mobile population, certain there are Washingtonians who have lived here for generations, but mostly and particularly in the Northwest part of the city, there is a constant churning of the population. You are as likely to be born in Tegucigalpa, Denmark or Nairobi as in Columbia Hospital. Being born in DC, meant that I really only spent the first three days of my life here before being taking home to Virginia. I do have some roots in the DC area, still a Redskins fan, but as time has gone by in my life I have become more disconnected. I tried living down here for a while after college, thinking it would be a good start to a professional career but it lasted about 10 months, I ended up going back to cooking over the summer and then into graduate school and living in Somerville to never look back. Since my grandfather moved to Florida and later passed away, my connections weakened even more, to the point that now I’m just a tourist.

So, home is now Boston, or Melrose technically, it’s where my heart lives, it’s where I’ve buried the stakes of my life. Washington is now like it is to most people, a center of power, and a center of history. A nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Color, Caste and Class
On every news broadcast from Fox News to American Pravda Weekly, the inauguration of the 44th President was announced as “historic”. And that is that nobody ever thought that a dark complected individual would ever be President. Certainly this is a man that can negotiate many cultures, a White culture in which he was raised by his mother and grandparents, an immigrant and specifically African culture by blood, an African American culture by context and surely the culture of the corridors of power, greased by Harvard and access to the best education. What lies underneath this talk of a “historic” inauguration is a lack of conversation on color, caste and class and whether truly this “historic” event has knocked down the vestiges of racism and classism.

It is hard to talk about race. It is often easier to talk about class or even “caste” which to me is the institutionalization of class. . You are maligned as either a “racist” or on the other end of the spectrum being “too PC”. The argument is that we should really talk about class, meaning we have de-racialized the entire discussion. To me this is a coward’s way out; you can’t talk about one without talking about the other. Today, for example, schools are more segregated then ever, but ironically one of the biggest destructive mechanisms to the black middle class in the south was desegregation, which cost thousands of jobs for middle class African American adults who were employed as teachers and administrators in segregated “black only” schools. While “Jimmy Crow” ended for the youth, “James Crow” locked out a lot of adults from decent paying jobs in “desegregated” schools, but I digress…

In nowhere but DC is the range of color, caste and class so apparent. As I noted above there always seems to be few people who were born in the wealthier part of the city. However in southeast and other parts of the city there are people who have lived there for generations, perhaps descendants of freemen or even folks who were auctioned off as little as 200 years ago in the district itself.

Most of the African American population in the District is the “underclass”. This very term is hard to define, I’m not an economist and can’t tell you what the actual income levels would be but suffice to say for my purposes it’s the poor, both working and non-working, on public assistance or not that are struggling day-to-day to make ends meet. For some of these families, people may have been on public assistance for generations, many of the folks are ill-educated, underserved by DC public schools in the past, large numbers of males (and growing numbers of females) have been institutionalized in prisons, so prison culture begins to match that of the streets and vice-versa. It’s a depressing scene, for the very poor; the homeless it is even more extreme, particularly in the cold and particularly for those homeless people that are severe substance abusers and/or mentally ill, it is extremely difficult for these poor folks to access the most rudimentary social services such as food and clothing. I am sad to say I saw a man with flip flops on, no socks, walking by and in a moment that I could have given him my own socks, embarrassingly just passed him by, not my best moment but my fear of possible mental illness and the threat to my family caused this lack of charity.

Meanwhile, less than a quarter mile away, one could spend over five dollars for a single cup of fancy coffee. A mile or so away, a celebration for a new President cost tens of millions of dollars. I believe in capitalism and the right of all to rise to the best of their abilities but certainly this fella should have a pair of socks when it’s ten degrees out.

Many of the poor have had a terrible shot at the American experience. The best and brightest have always risen to the top, particularly those that were blessed by strong families and teachers who led them down a path of success. But many continue to be cursed by multi-generational poverty and general lack of access to the good parts of capitalism, be chewed up and spit out by life. In many ways, Obama never had this experience, the experience of the urban cycle of poverty as a child, the legacy of slavery, not to say that there wasn’t racism at every turn but not the type of virulent institutional racism that faces many urban African Americans. As a community organizer in Chicago he worked in these communities, but his scars are not as deep. Nonetheless he is a hero and an icon to those that live in these communities and I think more so in those communities that have risen above it.

The amazing part about this trip to DC was the turnout of these folks. The amazing numbers of African American families that came out for celebration. And when I say families I mean multiple generations of families, grandparents (maybe even great-grandparents) parents, children, aunts, uncles, close family members that came from all over the country. All with a certain level of affluence to take time off there jobs, get everyone together and travel. I felt for the southerners and Californians who had no idea of the concept of layering clothing and discovered on the fly that many layers of Obama gear would help to keep them warm.

I could see Dr. King smiling amongst these hordes of people, but I was wondering, was he truly smiling on seeing the President himself standing there, feeling the same pride I felt as he snapped salute after salute to passing military honor guards? I was wondering, was he truly looking at John Lewis and other veterans of the civil rights movement that had gone beyond the fire hoses, birdshot and police dogs to the very highest levels, the corridors of power? Actually, I think Dr. King was looking down on the Mall far beyond the Capitol from the same spot where he gave one of his greatest speeches at a horde of successful people both African American and not, sometimes literally hand in hand to mark an enormous change in America. At a place where a shantyville was build by the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968 where King had merged his racial justice movement with that of an economic justice movement, Americans of different colors, classes and creeds had come together to celebrate the unshackling of part of their former selves.

To adapt Winston Churchill’s quote about the battle of El Alamein, “certainly this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning.”

Is the US Government the only people who buy US cars?
While watching the parade I started to think, are federal, state and local governments the only people who buy American cars? Outside of rental agencies, most American cars I see have government plates of some kind. A lot of these security vehicles are SUV’s, limos or high horsepower police vehicles and for more pedestrian state employees, Malibu’s, Taurus’s and the particularly brutal Chevy Aveo. With the cap values of these American car companies being greatly exceeded by the current and future government bailouts (I think Avon at this point is worth more than General Motors, which was once the most valuable company in the world) would it make sense for the government to take the ultimate step of simply adopting these company, nationalizing them into some wing of the Pentagon.

Wes Clark, who I usually side with on most issues but disagree on this, argues that to let these companies fail, to diminish American industrial capacity is a national security issue in the same way that pre-WWII (read Depression) capacity hurt the initial buildup of US force infrastructure. If had not been for some recovery governmental spending and the roughly two years before the US became involved in the war officially, the argument is that the Arsenal of Democracy would have flunked the test, and that the industrial support particularly of the Red Army who turned the Nazis back would have been diminished greatly. I’m not one to argue with a Rhodes Scholar and a national security expert but this seems not to be fighting the last war, but probably 4 wars ago. I’m trying to envision a scenario in which the US would have to produce that level of tanks, armored personnel carriers, etc., would it be WWIII, a land war in Asia, a return to fighting the Russians across the Fulda gap?

I’m no national security expert but this seems to be a very weak argument for not letting these companies fail. Certainly this industrial capacity if necessary could be developed in current auto plants in the south that are building smaller, more efficient cars. If not then there is a case for nationalizing these plants and drafting car makers into a reserve component of the armed forces, OK sounds crazy and it is.

Message to Elena
On Christmas, your mama engineered this whole trip to DC. I had half joked about going, but knowing my grand opposition to crowds and spending money, I didn’t think it would actually happen. How crazy one may think, bring a toddler in the middle of the winter to stand outside in the freezing cold, never getting a chance to actually “see” the event. Well, baby, I guess 90% of life is just showing up and you were a part of history this week.

You won’t remember anything about this, which is why I tried to write a bunch of stuff down and take some pictures, we’ll tell funny stories about how horrible we were as parents to take our girl with stomach flu all over the city in the cold and how you threw up on my back. How I taught you Lincoln’s house and Obama’s house. We even made sure to include some embarrassing photos of you eating crackers in bed with just a diaper on, that I’m sure to show every first date that you have and maybe if I’m so lucky use it as an 8 by 10 as your wedding photo.

So there you were in Lincoln’s house looking down on the crowds watching the end of the Bush administration. It was the end of an era as well as the beginning of another, it had been a run of Reagan/Bush and Clinton for 28 years, not far removed from Nixon and a 4 year outlier by a peanut farmer from Georgia, at a time when people would have voted for an outsider, any outsider unblemished by Watergate. At this point we have rolled the dice with a young man (relatively by political standards) from Hawaii via Illinois. It’s hard to say what kind of President he’ll be, “historical” yes, but so was Andrew Johnson.

He’s got a rough trail ahead of him. An uncharted trail filled with hazards, both foreign and domestic. Not only a “War on Terror” and an economy that seems to be broken but also the image of America in the world as a bully and not a “City on the Hill”. Not only crumbling infrastructure, meaning physical infrastructure such as bridges, roads, and buildings but human infrastructure such as education, health care, and retirement. I’m not sure there’s a roadmap for this. The traditional Democratic roadmap of “relax, government will take care of everything for you” seems as flawed as the Republican roadmap of “every man for himself”.

How to regulate but not over regulate? How do you get the right people in government, not only elected officials but those that execute the orders of the legislative and executive branch? How do you run a government that is not so small and ineffectual that “you could drown it in a bathtub” but also not so big and arduous that it runs every aspect of everyone’s life and stifles opportunity for wealth and production?

OK, a two year old likely isn’t going to understand this or answer these questions. In fact the hundreds of think tanks and politicians have yet to figure this out. But my challenge is for you to answer these questions and to grade President Obama not on his transformative nature but on his execution. He does not have the benefit of being a caretaker president, the train for the most part has jumped the tracks, and this is not to say that the tracks and the train don’t exist, but the engineer has got to get things in gear.