A Few Days in the Capital

 “He keeps touching my elbow and I asked him to stop three times!”

“That’s because she put her arm up so I can’t see out the window!”

Civil war in an Uber. 

We were shepherding two of our grandkids, mixed-race dual citizens of Belize and the U.S., well-behaved and delightful 99 percent of the time, around some of the many remarkable museums and monuments in Washington. 

But the background noise of capital politics (the President’s flabbergastingly inappropriate speech to the Boy Scout Jamboree, his passive-aggressive public bullying of his own chief law-enforcement officer, the mercifully brief appearance on the scene of the foul-mouthed Director of Communications for the White House) hovered like static over our attempts to explain to a nine and ten year old a few basics of American history.

We had begun at one end of the Mall, with the Lincoln Memorial. As one child enterprisingly began to recreate the building on his Ipad with a program called Minecraft, we took a moment to peruse Lincoln’s Second Inaugural speech, engraved in its entirety upon the right wall of the Memorial opposite the Gettysburg Address.

The noble and concise Second Inaugural, orated as a blood-drenched civil war was finally winding down, goes to the heart of why our democratic experiment continues to be worth the effort. Lincoln, a true servant-leader, tried to explain honestly why he felt the war, however much the country might have wished to avoid it, had to go forward—to maintain the essential American ideal of equal opportunity. Either slavery or the Union had to go. While no Gandhi—and how much might have been different if there had been an American Gandhi to protest the tragic carnage (our own Gandhi, Martin Luther King, came later)—Lincoln seems far from a warmonger. Especially telling was his refusal of the easy chauvinistic trope that God was entirely on the side of the North.

A century and a half later, the difficult ongoing work of resolving the divergences in our origin stories—the histories of the North and the South, of the slaves and their descendants and the economic masters and theirs, of native Americans and raw immigrants, remains incomplete. But take it forward we must, all of us finding our place in a yet unachieved but more perfect union.

Only few hundred yards away from Lincoln’s magisterial presence in sculpture and in his words engraved on high walls of stone, a fresh educational challenge arose: to interpret for the children the abstract brilliance of Maya Lin’s low-lying Vietnam War Memorial, where, also engraved on stone, the names of thousands of dead soldiers commemorated a dreadful, purposeless war, a war we lost and deserved to lose, for we had fought, like the South in our own civil war, on the wrong side. The leader of North Vietnam had been a follower of Thomas Jefferson and an implacable foe of the Chinese communists. So much for the domino theory.

Martin Luther King Jr. in his trenchant 1967 speech at Riverside Church labeled our core sins: racism, materialism, militarism. Exactly one year later, this speaker of unvarnished truth to power, the equal of Lincoln in eloquence and moral depth, was silenced at the young age of 39, like Lincoln at 56, by an assassin’s cowardly bullet. With the death of King, America seemed to further lose its moral compass. The nation’s halting efforts to repent of King’s three sins have continued, one step forward, two steps back, as the blowback of ill-advised foreign wars continues, as prosperity is unfairly concentrated at the upper end of the economy, as too many black youths continue to languish in prison.

The proximity of the two memorials, the Lincoln and the Vietnam, reminded us that in our polarization we are in the midst of something resembling another civil war. The sides continue to shout past each other. Our legislative representatives are paralyzed by uncivil strife. Both our major parties are hopelessly beholden to big money interests.

On another day we took the children on a private tour of the Capitol Building, guided by a friendly aide to a congressman. At one point we were introduced to a White House functionary, and I asked if I might pose an impertinent question: was there a plan in place to restrain the president should he try to start a nuclear war in a moment of emotional impulsivity? The young man, unsurprisingly a Trump partisan, replied tersely, “He is the president.”

Indeed he is—and thus he is unavoidably our mirror—a reflection of our own shadow. Our response as citizens, and the response of our representatives in congress and the courts to the monkeyshines of a shallow, petty, unhinged chief executive represent a new test for the Union and for all of us.

Lincoln’s calm rhetoric at the end of a terrible war and the low-lying gash of the Vietnam memorial suggest how our nation might mature into a new humility, somewhere beyond racism, militarism, and materialism. We need leaders who can navigate the new/old reality that on this small planet all war is civil war. That, as President Reagan correctly said, a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. That we all must participate together in meeting international crises like global climate change and in strengthening the delicate system of international law. “America First” is a foolish fantasy, but remaking America into a more cooperative player alongside the 200 nations (one hundred and twenty of which just signed a U.N. resolution outlawing nuclear weapons) with whom we share this planet always remains a possibility. We will survive together or we will die together—grandchildren and all.