I was standing in the basement of the Senate Russell building with fellow communications advocates yesterday, waiting for the Commerce Committee to bring the pain to Julius Genachowski (of which they brought very little), and my friends were complaining about how everything in our whole field is plugged up and not happening since the administration is dragging its feet about the nomination process.
And I pointed up the marble spiral staircase with a three-story queue of line-sitters paid by lobbyists to hold their spot extending to Room 253 and I said, “Well, this is it, you know. This is like pushing a stalled car and getting it going.” And thought but didn’t say, that I think a lot of really extraordinary things are going to happen soon in very rapid succession. Like a dam breaking.
Intuition is a bizarre thing, it’s so vague that I don’t even know if it’s about work, or my actual life. But I want to write it down so I can go back so I can see if I’m right. Even intuition needs verification sometimes.
I think I’m going to actually like it here. DC is just a bunch of silly rituals and everyone looks so comical and kind of touching going through them, even though they often aren’t aware of it, their little bellies hanging out over their belts, the young women in the flip flops with the many-times-reused crumply Ann Taylor bag containing their heels, the Red Line in the morning full of cut-rate Masters-of-the-Universe-in-training. All there, all waiting for one future or another to start. In just two years, you could be just as lame as Timothy Geithner is today!
I think I was wrong. We are not really running the planet – we are simply showing up for work in the most elaborately over-constructed edifice of language and money that has ever existed on Earth, and it actually prevents us from hearing the saxophonists and keyboardists and mandolin players who stand outside the Farragut North exit and play beautiful rush-hour morning music for the thousands of commuters who flow out silently to their jobs, their eyes averted, pretending to not hear so there will be no obligation to tip - a sea of cheap handbags, idealism, credit card debt, professional jealousy, anti-depressants, sunglasses, diet tips, Netflix to return, thoughts of home, and whatever solitary music they prefer to listen to on their IPods. Usually not involving saxophones.
They say, those ships, they sail into the Golden Triangle and just … vanish. They’re never heard from again. They lose all radio contact with shore.
I guess its time to reestablish.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
The Flowers in the Square
Sometimes you have something that follows you around for a while, waiting for you to take notice or pay attention to it. Sometimes it’s a word, sometimes it’s an idea, sometimes it’s just a picture. For me, lately, I have been followed around by rivers. Pictures of rivers, maps of rivers, watershed maps on my wall at work. There’s a picture of the Delaware on my desktop now, but this Friday, I dreamed about the Mississippi, that of it I know.
It was a beautiful dream, like a prism made of water. It was light, light on water, during the day, summer, the part of the river with the three steel bridges up by the border with Arkansas. The riverboat casinos even, down on the Mississippi side, in the north Delta. The green. Too powerful to get in the water, always, a mighty, a massive, like a city itself in motion but instead all water. All water. More water. Move down. Move down, water. Move down, city. Move down.
Move down,
Miss
I
Sip
I.
After that dream, I figured that the River that is all rivers was trying to tell me something, and has been for a while, and it was about time I listened. On Saturday I put on cutoffs and flipflops and got on the Orange line and went straight into to the marshes around the Anacostia River here in D.C., a small patch, 77 acres of what used to be 2,000, which they had to reconstruct from the ravages of progress.
There was a grating of cheap apartment buildings all around the park, and I wandered for a good long time, but eventually I got in. I managed to stay a long time there, walking around, looking at turtles and herons, mostly left to myself; I fell asleep on the banks and was awakened by some teenage boys in canoes who I think were slightly disappointed that they hadn’t found a dead body. “Sorry to wake you up,” they said, and paddled away. I yawned and brushed off a bunch of ants, and immediately went back to sleep.
The Anacostia is a brown river swollen with all sorts of nameless sludge, but there are fish in it, some of them quite large. It’s too bad its so polluted, because it has a beautiful name, but it is not powerful enough to be feared, and it’s obvious that people regard it as a dump. Apparently it’s against the law to swim in the river in the District of Columbia! I was very troubled by this but now I have seen the water I understand. At least there is still a forest there. Best of all, I got to ride home on the Metro promiscuously covered in mud.
This year, the two floats that I saw at the Cherry Blossom Festival were the Anacostia Roller Stars, a roller skating troupe that I think survives off of childrens’ birthday parties, and a flotilla of young Maryland women in Scarlett O’Hara dresses, parasols, and bonnets.
The Anacostia Roller Stars were dressed in superhero costumes, including “ObamaMan”, an African American superhero dressed in blazing white and sporting an “O” on his chest. He was a hit. Little kids wanted to be him. Women wanted to photograph him. After ObamaMan left, the Belles of the South were the next in line, and quite the letdown.
The South is on my mind because my grandmother Angelina Josephina Cuicchi Miller is sick now, in Leland, MS, and her spirit is still very strong, more so that her body. Some people are too strong even for their own bodies to hold, and that is a hard thing. She is 78, and my dad bought her an IPod for Christmas this year on which she still listens to the Three Tenors. When I was born, in 1976, she made me a Bicentennial quilt with emblems of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall on it, and I didn’t even know what they were until I moved to Philly in 1999, and then walked by them every day.
Angie Miller ran the Leland Flower Shop for 20 years, and running a flower shop means caring in a small and beautiful way for everyone in town at the most crucial moments of their lives: births, weddings, illness, funerals. There are always divorce flowers too, of course. And Valentine’s Day, the busiest day of the year, which in my family meant the day that everyone had to help Mama at the shop, and work all day, driving all over town and delivering hundreds and hundreds of roses.
It is the place where I learned that some flowers come in humidors flown overnight from Venezuela, and how to strip a rose of its thorns in 2-4 seconds, and other things, as countless as the stars in the Milky Way, the great river of light in the sky.
I still don’t know all that I have been given by this astonishing woman. I am a conduit for it but I don’t even know what it is – I don’t even understand it. It is mostly wordless, and comes and goes without name.
I would be an alchemist with it, all that I have been given; but I hardly know how. All I can do is listen, just listen to the water move.
It was a beautiful dream, like a prism made of water. It was light, light on water, during the day, summer, the part of the river with the three steel bridges up by the border with Arkansas. The riverboat casinos even, down on the Mississippi side, in the north Delta. The green. Too powerful to get in the water, always, a mighty, a massive, like a city itself in motion but instead all water. All water. More water. Move down. Move down, water. Move down, city. Move down.
Move down,
Miss
I
Sip
I.
After that dream, I figured that the River that is all rivers was trying to tell me something, and has been for a while, and it was about time I listened. On Saturday I put on cutoffs and flipflops and got on the Orange line and went straight into to the marshes around the Anacostia River here in D.C., a small patch, 77 acres of what used to be 2,000, which they had to reconstruct from the ravages of progress.
There was a grating of cheap apartment buildings all around the park, and I wandered for a good long time, but eventually I got in. I managed to stay a long time there, walking around, looking at turtles and herons, mostly left to myself; I fell asleep on the banks and was awakened by some teenage boys in canoes who I think were slightly disappointed that they hadn’t found a dead body. “Sorry to wake you up,” they said, and paddled away. I yawned and brushed off a bunch of ants, and immediately went back to sleep.
The Anacostia is a brown river swollen with all sorts of nameless sludge, but there are fish in it, some of them quite large. It’s too bad its so polluted, because it has a beautiful name, but it is not powerful enough to be feared, and it’s obvious that people regard it as a dump. Apparently it’s against the law to swim in the river in the District of Columbia! I was very troubled by this but now I have seen the water I understand. At least there is still a forest there. Best of all, I got to ride home on the Metro promiscuously covered in mud.
This year, the two floats that I saw at the Cherry Blossom Festival were the Anacostia Roller Stars, a roller skating troupe that I think survives off of childrens’ birthday parties, and a flotilla of young Maryland women in Scarlett O’Hara dresses, parasols, and bonnets.
The Anacostia Roller Stars were dressed in superhero costumes, including “ObamaMan”, an African American superhero dressed in blazing white and sporting an “O” on his chest. He was a hit. Little kids wanted to be him. Women wanted to photograph him. After ObamaMan left, the Belles of the South were the next in line, and quite the letdown.
The South is on my mind because my grandmother Angelina Josephina Cuicchi Miller is sick now, in Leland, MS, and her spirit is still very strong, more so that her body. Some people are too strong even for their own bodies to hold, and that is a hard thing. She is 78, and my dad bought her an IPod for Christmas this year on which she still listens to the Three Tenors. When I was born, in 1976, she made me a Bicentennial quilt with emblems of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall on it, and I didn’t even know what they were until I moved to Philly in 1999, and then walked by them every day.
Angie Miller ran the Leland Flower Shop for 20 years, and running a flower shop means caring in a small and beautiful way for everyone in town at the most crucial moments of their lives: births, weddings, illness, funerals. There are always divorce flowers too, of course. And Valentine’s Day, the busiest day of the year, which in my family meant the day that everyone had to help Mama at the shop, and work all day, driving all over town and delivering hundreds and hundreds of roses.
It is the place where I learned that some flowers come in humidors flown overnight from Venezuela, and how to strip a rose of its thorns in 2-4 seconds, and other things, as countless as the stars in the Milky Way, the great river of light in the sky.
I still don’t know all that I have been given by this astonishing woman. I am a conduit for it but I don’t even know what it is – I don’t even understand it. It is mostly wordless, and comes and goes without name.
I would be an alchemist with it, all that I have been given; but I hardly know how. All I can do is listen, just listen to the water move.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
On Unmanufacturing Consent
So my old friend from Philly Adam Fieled has asked me to "come out of literary retirement" and read at a poetry reading he is organizing of DC poets on August 8. Despite the fact that this would require me to write poetry again, which I haven't for years, I said yes, and now I have to think about what to write.
There is something a bit angelic about Adam himself - his Facebook picture has been the same for years: pallid and underfed, wearing too many layers of sweaters, as if he found the world to be something one had to bundle up against at all times.
In general, I’ve been thinking for a while that I have to find my language again. That campaign business just strangles it out of you. Control and endless testoterone and wretched egomania and bad food and a masochistic learned fear of creativity and the weird ‘fucking up your neighbors’ primary game in Philly – it’s like being a rock doomed to a life of endlessly banging into other rocks.
I think sometimes I should sit down and write down what I learned from it all, except then the thought of reliving it is distasteful. (Anne Dicker is somewhere barbequing right now, doubtlessly thinking the same thing). Sometimes in DC I talk to people who have also just arrived here, and they say things like, “oh, yeah, I got the campaign bug too!” and give me a grin, and I kind of grimace and make them go away.
I know we are all organizers, but there is a big difference between asking a Democrat to vote for Barack Obama, and asking a worker to stand for unionization when it might cost them their job. If just a few of these little puddings could get sidetracked by OFA into something else memorable (like the Dean campaign did quite admirably), then I would feel better about the future of the American left.
But then again, I’m in Washington, so I have absolutely no connection to the American left other than my brother’s feel-good earthy Palo Alto employer restarting Republic Doors and Windows, the factory where the workers had taken over after a shut down– a weird blend of 1930s communism and 2000s California ethical-business principles-cum-marketing-ploy. (For their trouble, they were mentioned in a speech by the president.) I suppose ethical business is the natural response to the historical singularity of consumer capitalism, and so it’s just another iteration.
There was hail in June today, coming down on 18th and L streets; I worried. I had had this terrible dream the night that Air France plane went down, that I was standing on the middle row of a plane in a horrible electric storm, full of terrified passengers, with lighting all around, and telling everyone to be calm, that it was going to be alright. At the time it was so real, so I feared it was foreboding of something, but then I came into work and heard on WAMU about the crash.
Resulting thoughts included a) Is it possible to hear echoes from others, in your dreams? and b) if I am clairvoyant then what the fuck am I doing in political advocacy?
Answers:
a) Yes, with the right drugs, and
b) Since I am doing communications work, it’s probably appropriate. Someday we will be able to get information directly through our skin by touching a metal pad or something. It’s gonna happen. Might as well get spooky and get ready for the future.
“Breakfast of Champions”, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about a science fiction writer, has 50 (at least) topics for science fiction books that Vonnegut himself thinks of but doesn’t bother to write.
THINKTANK RANT #1 (of many to come): One of the most amazing things I’ve seen since coming to Washington is the existence of an entire “future-projection industry”, which runs endless numbers and makes endless prognostications in order to determine what is going to happen over the next 100 years so those in power can make “informed decisions.” Water. Climate change. Oil. Agriculture. The military strength of Mongolia.
The trend became apparent to me precisely because it is in the filed of technology alone that chaos is assumed, and valued. The hilarity really ensues when you get to things like foreign policy, which covers the ‘behavior’ of ‘nation-states,’ which if I remember correctly are large clumps of really chaotic people mostly completely uncontrolled. The journals go on and on: which nation-state is eating too much or too little? Which nation-state is sick, or too religious? Which nation-state is in trouble and needs an ‘intervention’?
As a former sociology student, I don’t dispute the innate demographic needs of human beings to count and tabulate, but what’s so weird watching this vast machinery of think tanks and publications and press conferences, is that it seems so bizarrely solipsistic – so, we have written a paper on how you are running the world, and this is what’s going to happen later on after you continue to run the world a little more, and here how you can continue to get your grubby little hands on the resources you need, because if you have this projection you can point to it in a hearing and then be absolved of responsibility for your decisions. As bizarre as it is, I suppose it is an improvement on a court priesthood or consigliere.
And then again sometimes it’s worse when people ignore it.
I started reading Leaves of Grass this weekend. I decided that if I were going to write and read a poem in DC I was going to do a little riff off Whitman, since he wrote the great song of democracy, and that’s my bag.
I started reading it and I realized how much love he had for America, for every scrap of it. The whole book is just an unbelievable work of love. Our country has changed so much since then, just the fiber of it, and I don’t know what song we would sing now – or if we even have a song in us. We play video games, everything is mushy, we have soft butts in soft car seats, we don’t look out for our neighbors. Sometimes I love everybody on the whole damn miserable train platform so much I can barely look at them, which is the essential starting point of Leaves of Grass, except that how do you start writing about all of that at once?
Do you just start writing about your friends?
Maybe your friends.
Fuck.
That's Spoon River Anthology.
I hate Spoon River Anthology!
There is something a bit angelic about Adam himself - his Facebook picture has been the same for years: pallid and underfed, wearing too many layers of sweaters, as if he found the world to be something one had to bundle up against at all times.
In general, I’ve been thinking for a while that I have to find my language again. That campaign business just strangles it out of you. Control and endless testoterone and wretched egomania and bad food and a masochistic learned fear of creativity and the weird ‘fucking up your neighbors’ primary game in Philly – it’s like being a rock doomed to a life of endlessly banging into other rocks.
I think sometimes I should sit down and write down what I learned from it all, except then the thought of reliving it is distasteful. (Anne Dicker is somewhere barbequing right now, doubtlessly thinking the same thing). Sometimes in DC I talk to people who have also just arrived here, and they say things like, “oh, yeah, I got the campaign bug too!” and give me a grin, and I kind of grimace and make them go away.
I know we are all organizers, but there is a big difference between asking a Democrat to vote for Barack Obama, and asking a worker to stand for unionization when it might cost them their job. If just a few of these little puddings could get sidetracked by OFA into something else memorable (like the Dean campaign did quite admirably), then I would feel better about the future of the American left.
But then again, I’m in Washington, so I have absolutely no connection to the American left other than my brother’s feel-good earthy Palo Alto employer restarting Republic Doors and Windows, the factory where the workers had taken over after a shut down– a weird blend of 1930s communism and 2000s California ethical-business principles-cum-marketing-ploy. (For their trouble, they were mentioned in a speech by the president.) I suppose ethical business is the natural response to the historical singularity of consumer capitalism, and so it’s just another iteration.
There was hail in June today, coming down on 18th and L streets; I worried. I had had this terrible dream the night that Air France plane went down, that I was standing on the middle row of a plane in a horrible electric storm, full of terrified passengers, with lighting all around, and telling everyone to be calm, that it was going to be alright. At the time it was so real, so I feared it was foreboding of something, but then I came into work and heard on WAMU about the crash.
Resulting thoughts included a) Is it possible to hear echoes from others, in your dreams? and b) if I am clairvoyant then what the fuck am I doing in political advocacy?
Answers:
a) Yes, with the right drugs, and
b) Since I am doing communications work, it’s probably appropriate. Someday we will be able to get information directly through our skin by touching a metal pad or something. It’s gonna happen. Might as well get spooky and get ready for the future.
“Breakfast of Champions”, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about a science fiction writer, has 50 (at least) topics for science fiction books that Vonnegut himself thinks of but doesn’t bother to write.
THINKTANK RANT #1 (of many to come): One of the most amazing things I’ve seen since coming to Washington is the existence of an entire “future-projection industry”, which runs endless numbers and makes endless prognostications in order to determine what is going to happen over the next 100 years so those in power can make “informed decisions.” Water. Climate change. Oil. Agriculture. The military strength of Mongolia.
The trend became apparent to me precisely because it is in the filed of technology alone that chaos is assumed, and valued. The hilarity really ensues when you get to things like foreign policy, which covers the ‘behavior’ of ‘nation-states,’ which if I remember correctly are large clumps of really chaotic people mostly completely uncontrolled. The journals go on and on: which nation-state is eating too much or too little? Which nation-state is sick, or too religious? Which nation-state is in trouble and needs an ‘intervention’?
As a former sociology student, I don’t dispute the innate demographic needs of human beings to count and tabulate, but what’s so weird watching this vast machinery of think tanks and publications and press conferences, is that it seems so bizarrely solipsistic – so, we have written a paper on how you are running the world, and this is what’s going to happen later on after you continue to run the world a little more, and here how you can continue to get your grubby little hands on the resources you need, because if you have this projection you can point to it in a hearing and then be absolved of responsibility for your decisions. As bizarre as it is, I suppose it is an improvement on a court priesthood or consigliere.
And then again sometimes it’s worse when people ignore it.
I started reading Leaves of Grass this weekend. I decided that if I were going to write and read a poem in DC I was going to do a little riff off Whitman, since he wrote the great song of democracy, and that’s my bag.
I started reading it and I realized how much love he had for America, for every scrap of it. The whole book is just an unbelievable work of love. Our country has changed so much since then, just the fiber of it, and I don’t know what song we would sing now – or if we even have a song in us. We play video games, everything is mushy, we have soft butts in soft car seats, we don’t look out for our neighbors. Sometimes I love everybody on the whole damn miserable train platform so much I can barely look at them, which is the essential starting point of Leaves of Grass, except that how do you start writing about all of that at once?
Do you just start writing about your friends?
Maybe your friends.
Fuck.
That's Spoon River Anthology.
I hate Spoon River Anthology!
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
My Article on Racialicious on Hate Speech
On Media Reform and Hate Speech
June 2, 309
Racialicious.com
by Guest Contributor Hannah Miller
The media reform movement is an offshoot and part of the civil rights movement. It was born in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King and Rev. Everett Parker of the United Church of Christ initiated a lawsuit against white-owned TV stations in the South for consistently portraying African Americans in a racist manner, while refusing to show any coverage of the civil rights movement.
Because of their pressure, the FCC shut down a Mississippi TV station, stating that the power and influence that media companies have gives them the responsibility to operate with the broader public interest at heart – with special consideration given to oppressed minorities.
Since then, political pressure has been brought to bear against the FCC and Congress on a wide variety of issues: female and minority ownership of stations and publications, the dangers of consolidation of the media, the need to build public communications infrastructure like cable access stations or city-owned Internet networks, and the need for everyone to have broadband access.
The percentage of our time that the American public spends with media has been steadily climbing for 40 years, and with that, its influence over our lives. The media is our environment, and the battle I am engaged in is over the nature of this environment: whether it is an environment in which ordinary people have a voice – or whether we are to passively absorb content controlled by a small number of people and corporations. Whether the media is democratic, and reflects a variety of voices.
Why is this important? I will take an extreme example of the media’s power, when it is used by one group over another. In 1994, radio stations played a significant role in the Rwandan genocide, broadcasting hate-filled rants and giving directions to how to kill Tutsis, resulting in a genocide that killed approximately 500,000 Tutsis in 100 days.
Continued here.
June 2, 309
Racialicious.com
by Guest Contributor Hannah Miller
The media reform movement is an offshoot and part of the civil rights movement. It was born in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King and Rev. Everett Parker of the United Church of Christ initiated a lawsuit against white-owned TV stations in the South for consistently portraying African Americans in a racist manner, while refusing to show any coverage of the civil rights movement.
Because of their pressure, the FCC shut down a Mississippi TV station, stating that the power and influence that media companies have gives them the responsibility to operate with the broader public interest at heart – with special consideration given to oppressed minorities.
Since then, political pressure has been brought to bear against the FCC and Congress on a wide variety of issues: female and minority ownership of stations and publications, the dangers of consolidation of the media, the need to build public communications infrastructure like cable access stations or city-owned Internet networks, and the need for everyone to have broadband access.
The percentage of our time that the American public spends with media has been steadily climbing for 40 years, and with that, its influence over our lives. The media is our environment, and the battle I am engaged in is over the nature of this environment: whether it is an environment in which ordinary people have a voice – or whether we are to passively absorb content controlled by a small number of people and corporations. Whether the media is democratic, and reflects a variety of voices.
Why is this important? I will take an extreme example of the media’s power, when it is used by one group over another. In 1994, radio stations played a significant role in the Rwandan genocide, broadcasting hate-filled rants and giving directions to how to kill Tutsis, resulting in a genocide that killed approximately 500,000 Tutsis in 100 days.
Continued here.
Monday, June 1, 2009
When the Devil Shows Up on Your Doorstep...
Two weeks ago, on a Saturday night at 1 a.m., my entire neighborhood was torn from sleep by the sound of a massive explosion, followed by the deafening sound of grinding metal. Hearing this, I jumped out of bed, fumbled for the light, slammed a door open, and with most of the inhabitants of my house and the rest of the neighborhood, ran downstairs.
It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life – being jerked out of from exhausted sleep by what sounded like a bomb going off, then the sounds of an entire neighborhood flipping on light switches, opening windows and doors, afraid of what they would see, while all the while, the huge grinding sound continues, as if huge robots are waging war above the nighttime rowhomes of Petworth.
A 17-year-old boy had stolen a car from Kennedy and raced it south down 7th Street NW, losing control about half a block above Farragut and then careening into a parked Acura, a parked Jaguar, a parked Toyota and two other parked cars, before flipping over and exploding in a fireball about 30 feet from the home of Peggy Watson’s house, where I have been living.
The 17-year-old boy had been thrown from the car and was smeared across the road; his 15-year-old friend who had been in the car with him but who had gotten out alive sat on the curb and watched his friend dying. The flames of the still-burning car flickered in the eyes of the neighbors, some of whom held each other, some of whom cried, waiting for the police and firetrucks to arrive. At the end of the street, three men watched the car burn from the wheelchairs to which gunfights had consigned them from the rest of their lives. The guys in the wheelchairs were all under 30. “It’s like Vietnam,” Peggy said.
“This is the summer, here,” Peggy said. “This is just the beginning.”
Peggy Watson’s house is a little like a stone fortress on the corner of 7th and Farragut NW. She is a little bit of the block captain and unofficial mom of the neighborhood. She has two cats, one of which is named Hannah. I don’t know how she holds it together. This horrible scene is only the most spectacular of the things I witnessed there.
I have lived in a lot of places, and not all of them have been what is called ‘nice’, but I was completely unprepared for the stewpot of dehumanization, racial animosity, sexual harassment, mental illness, and just sheer hopelessness in the part of DC that I happened to wash up on. I was consumed by it, because I am always attuned to my environment, and I soak it up.
One of the survival instincts I lack is the ability to disregard other people’s pain; the 70/71 bus (which runs down Georgia Avenue, which I would take to work for the first two months of my existence here) is a moving holding tank of pathos and despair. My second week in town, while waiting for the bus in the morning, I started talking to a man who was waiting at my stop, at Farragut and Georgia. He was about 45, and had been waiting there all night looking for his teenage daughter, who had gotten into drugs and run away from home. He showed me a picture of her and asked if I’d seen her, and I said no, and he said, “Of course, she probably looks different now, she’s probably lost weight.” He had moved to DC with his family from Detroit for a job, and he regretted ever coming here, because the toxins had gotten to his daughter, and he was powerless to do anything about it. The bus pulled up and I had to get on, so I cried a little bit and gave him a hug and wished him good luck and watched him alone on the bench, from the window of the bus.
I have to write this down because I don’t know what else to do. The things I have seen are so awful: the girl’s wrist, for example. There was a tiny, 13-year-old pregnant girl in my neighborhood, and her wrist was as thin as a pencil, she was so underfed. Or - one time going at home at night on the bus, we had to pull over, and everyone had to get off and walk because someone on the back of the bus had literally shit on the floor of the bus.
A community service for the boy who’d died in the car wreck was held a week after the accident, right in front of my house. There were people who walked away from the service and made drug deals two blocks down the street in the early evening sunset. Peggy Watson got up in front of the crowd – she’s lived there for 20 years - and gave a speech that was an act of love. I was very proud of her. “Don’t let anyone tell you aren’t beautiful because you are black,” she said. “We are all beautiful. Don’t let anyone put you down.”
Five days after the accident, I went with Lynda to a happy hour and panel about the DC local blogger community put on by the Next American City magazine. I had never seen this magazine before, even though it is published out of Philadelphia; it was a gorgeously designed urban planning mag about sustainability and carbon footprints and phrases like ‘the built environment’, funded by some foundations, with no ads at all.
The cover of the magazine said “Cities in Crisis,” with a picture of a little old African American lady walking past a crumbling building (assumably Detroit, since they are now the poster child for romanticized urban ‘decay’.) Despite this being a 65 percent African American city, not only were none of the DC bloggers black – there wasn’t a single black person in the whole room! I was astounded. If I needed more of a reminder for why solving the digital divide is important, I don’t think I could have gotten one.
The event mystified me – the reality mystified me. I do not say this to cast aspersions on DC local bloggers, who are a group of extremely idealistic people that are probably the first generation of the DC transient class to ever care about the health of the city. This is a huge and important development.
The thing that is really and truly disturbing about the social breakdown and sorrow of DC is that is happens right under the nose of the most powerful people on the planet. People who could solve these problems with the stroke of a pen. The political class here has completely abdicated its responsibility to its neighbors, and that says everything you need to know about the way they go about running the rest of the country. One cannot govern humanely if you are choosing to ignore the real people around you who need help. That is a strange way to live, and that is why Washington is so dehumanizing. It has echoes of the slave city it once was. Not too long ago, this was not free land. And the two-class city that has replaced it doesn’t really look much different.
The only sure-fire way I know of breaking apathy and hopelessness is by teaching people that they have power over their own lives. That is the only thing that works. Having something to build towards brings out the best in people. The Obama campaign energy is still there, but it has to be channeled in DC, or else it will turn into more cynicism.
Right before I left Philly, I met this magical woman who had lived in DC in the 70s, and she told me about her life here then. It was a different world entirely. It was so much happier of a place, she told me, before crack was invented and all the guns came. She told me about a strip of discos – I don’t know where - where they would literally close down the street so people could rollerskate between clubs. And it would be a Saturday night and all these folks would be out rollerskating. In mean old DC.
Democracy does not cure all problems, and it does not turn thugs into rollerskaters. But what it does do is give people the opportunity to address the problems they see in their own community. What I don’t quite understand yet here is how the disenfranchisement of DC residents exactly works – but I have a feeling that this is connected somehow to all these other problems. Peggy tried to teach me this, but I am still confused, especially since we apparently have a functioning city government.
At the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights dinner, I met the outreach coordinator of DC Vote, and the poor woman got treated to a 30-minute harangue about what field consultant they should hire and how they should go after the unions and all that. “Oh yeah, there's about a six month window with political professionals after they get to town,” Nathan says, watching my enthusiasm. “After that people get resigned to not voting.”
I suspect I will probably be an exception to this, but I don’t have the foggiest idea how I will have time to work on this. However, it’s definitely the next thing that needs to happen in the democracy movement. Suffrage. Suffrage is … come on, it’s Democracy 101. And how beautiful a thing it would be to have an actual democracy movement right in the face of the American federal government.
P.S. I want to give a promo to the blog Lynda writes for (this is Lynda Laughlin, formerly of Temple, for those of you who know her): www.greatergreaterwashington.org. It is very good and smart and community minded and they are on a crusade to clean up the Anacostia River. It also has a blogroll of other local DC blogs. Someday I will write about the DC bloggers. They all know each other and complain about each other, it’s a community. I suppose I am one of them now since I am a blogger and live here. Hooray that I found the other writers!
It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life – being jerked out of from exhausted sleep by what sounded like a bomb going off, then the sounds of an entire neighborhood flipping on light switches, opening windows and doors, afraid of what they would see, while all the while, the huge grinding sound continues, as if huge robots are waging war above the nighttime rowhomes of Petworth.
A 17-year-old boy had stolen a car from Kennedy and raced it south down 7th Street NW, losing control about half a block above Farragut and then careening into a parked Acura, a parked Jaguar, a parked Toyota and two other parked cars, before flipping over and exploding in a fireball about 30 feet from the home of Peggy Watson’s house, where I have been living.
The 17-year-old boy had been thrown from the car and was smeared across the road; his 15-year-old friend who had been in the car with him but who had gotten out alive sat on the curb and watched his friend dying. The flames of the still-burning car flickered in the eyes of the neighbors, some of whom held each other, some of whom cried, waiting for the police and firetrucks to arrive. At the end of the street, three men watched the car burn from the wheelchairs to which gunfights had consigned them from the rest of their lives. The guys in the wheelchairs were all under 30. “It’s like Vietnam,” Peggy said.
“This is the summer, here,” Peggy said. “This is just the beginning.”
Peggy Watson’s house is a little like a stone fortress on the corner of 7th and Farragut NW. She is a little bit of the block captain and unofficial mom of the neighborhood. She has two cats, one of which is named Hannah. I don’t know how she holds it together. This horrible scene is only the most spectacular of the things I witnessed there.
I have lived in a lot of places, and not all of them have been what is called ‘nice’, but I was completely unprepared for the stewpot of dehumanization, racial animosity, sexual harassment, mental illness, and just sheer hopelessness in the part of DC that I happened to wash up on. I was consumed by it, because I am always attuned to my environment, and I soak it up.
One of the survival instincts I lack is the ability to disregard other people’s pain; the 70/71 bus (which runs down Georgia Avenue, which I would take to work for the first two months of my existence here) is a moving holding tank of pathos and despair. My second week in town, while waiting for the bus in the morning, I started talking to a man who was waiting at my stop, at Farragut and Georgia. He was about 45, and had been waiting there all night looking for his teenage daughter, who had gotten into drugs and run away from home. He showed me a picture of her and asked if I’d seen her, and I said no, and he said, “Of course, she probably looks different now, she’s probably lost weight.” He had moved to DC with his family from Detroit for a job, and he regretted ever coming here, because the toxins had gotten to his daughter, and he was powerless to do anything about it. The bus pulled up and I had to get on, so I cried a little bit and gave him a hug and wished him good luck and watched him alone on the bench, from the window of the bus.
I have to write this down because I don’t know what else to do. The things I have seen are so awful: the girl’s wrist, for example. There was a tiny, 13-year-old pregnant girl in my neighborhood, and her wrist was as thin as a pencil, she was so underfed. Or - one time going at home at night on the bus, we had to pull over, and everyone had to get off and walk because someone on the back of the bus had literally shit on the floor of the bus.
A community service for the boy who’d died in the car wreck was held a week after the accident, right in front of my house. There were people who walked away from the service and made drug deals two blocks down the street in the early evening sunset. Peggy Watson got up in front of the crowd – she’s lived there for 20 years - and gave a speech that was an act of love. I was very proud of her. “Don’t let anyone tell you aren’t beautiful because you are black,” she said. “We are all beautiful. Don’t let anyone put you down.”
Five days after the accident, I went with Lynda to a happy hour and panel about the DC local blogger community put on by the Next American City magazine. I had never seen this magazine before, even though it is published out of Philadelphia; it was a gorgeously designed urban planning mag about sustainability and carbon footprints and phrases like ‘the built environment’, funded by some foundations, with no ads at all.
The cover of the magazine said “Cities in Crisis,” with a picture of a little old African American lady walking past a crumbling building (assumably Detroit, since they are now the poster child for romanticized urban ‘decay’.) Despite this being a 65 percent African American city, not only were none of the DC bloggers black – there wasn’t a single black person in the whole room! I was astounded. If I needed more of a reminder for why solving the digital divide is important, I don’t think I could have gotten one.
The event mystified me – the reality mystified me. I do not say this to cast aspersions on DC local bloggers, who are a group of extremely idealistic people that are probably the first generation of the DC transient class to ever care about the health of the city. This is a huge and important development.
The thing that is really and truly disturbing about the social breakdown and sorrow of DC is that is happens right under the nose of the most powerful people on the planet. People who could solve these problems with the stroke of a pen. The political class here has completely abdicated its responsibility to its neighbors, and that says everything you need to know about the way they go about running the rest of the country. One cannot govern humanely if you are choosing to ignore the real people around you who need help. That is a strange way to live, and that is why Washington is so dehumanizing. It has echoes of the slave city it once was. Not too long ago, this was not free land. And the two-class city that has replaced it doesn’t really look much different.
The only sure-fire way I know of breaking apathy and hopelessness is by teaching people that they have power over their own lives. That is the only thing that works. Having something to build towards brings out the best in people. The Obama campaign energy is still there, but it has to be channeled in DC, or else it will turn into more cynicism.
Right before I left Philly, I met this magical woman who had lived in DC in the 70s, and she told me about her life here then. It was a different world entirely. It was so much happier of a place, she told me, before crack was invented and all the guns came. She told me about a strip of discos – I don’t know where - where they would literally close down the street so people could rollerskate between clubs. And it would be a Saturday night and all these folks would be out rollerskating. In mean old DC.
Democracy does not cure all problems, and it does not turn thugs into rollerskaters. But what it does do is give people the opportunity to address the problems they see in their own community. What I don’t quite understand yet here is how the disenfranchisement of DC residents exactly works – but I have a feeling that this is connected somehow to all these other problems. Peggy tried to teach me this, but I am still confused, especially since we apparently have a functioning city government.
At the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights dinner, I met the outreach coordinator of DC Vote, and the poor woman got treated to a 30-minute harangue about what field consultant they should hire and how they should go after the unions and all that. “Oh yeah, there's about a six month window with political professionals after they get to town,” Nathan says, watching my enthusiasm. “After that people get resigned to not voting.”
I suspect I will probably be an exception to this, but I don’t have the foggiest idea how I will have time to work on this. However, it’s definitely the next thing that needs to happen in the democracy movement. Suffrage. Suffrage is … come on, it’s Democracy 101. And how beautiful a thing it would be to have an actual democracy movement right in the face of the American federal government.
P.S. I want to give a promo to the blog Lynda writes for (this is Lynda Laughlin, formerly of Temple, for those of you who know her): www.greatergreaterwashington.org. It is very good and smart and community minded and they are on a crusade to clean up the Anacostia River. It also has a blogroll of other local DC blogs. Someday I will write about the DC bloggers. They all know each other and complain about each other, it’s a community. I suppose I am one of them now since I am a blogger and live here. Hooray that I found the other writers!
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