Seat of Power

In honor of April Fools Day, let's talk about Washington, D.C.

Pretty funny, right? Everyone likes jokes that make fun of our nation's capital, especially the people who live and work there. And there's nothing wrong with making fun of the powerful, who step through our seat of governance with comical self-importance, stepping right past some of the most crushing poverty in the country. Washington is a place where people talk so much that even important things seem unimportant after a while. It's an easy target. But we should always remember that we are laughing at ourselves; if our jokes are too cruel, we will cause ourselves pain.

By definition, Washington, D.C., is a place where people from every state in the Union live. There is no state in the Union that fails to send a busload of bright-eyed college sophomores to answer mail in a Senator's office, and there is no community that fails to take advantage of the Constitutional Right to Lobby. We're all there.

And we all visit there, too. Tourists are everywhere in Washington. There are plenty of foreigners, but you're most likely to see parents and grandparents leading eight-year-olds down the National Mall on the way to one of the city's 1,655,982 museums. It seems like, for the most part, people like to visit Washington, even though they may like to complain about what goes on here. And they want their kids to see it, too.

Yet you rarely see them smiling. People walk around Washington with serious expressions on their faces. What are they thinking? You can't really tell for sure. Do they love what they see, or do they hate it?

My opinion is that they feel neither. I think that visitors to Washington are in awe. They are in awe, not of America's goodness, but its bigness. They're thinking, as they walk past the Capitol and the White House and all those huge monuments, each made out of great slabs of stone, and they're thinking, This place is enormous. This thing is enormous.

Our thing, they might hasten to add. But they won't be sure. Because you can never really be sure that America belongs to you, these days. People are always going on TV and talking about how their opinions represent what the majority of Americans think. But the thing is, America has become so big, in every way, that even a tiny minority of Americans is still a lot of people. You get together with one hundred thousand of your closest friends, and you feel like you've got the will of the people. But you're not even one tenth of one percent of the population.

Washington, D.C., is a monument to this fact. It's full of these museums and memorials to small parts of America, and the sum of all these parts...is it greater than the whole, or less? We don't know. We're so big that no one can count that high, not even on a computer. Too big to see all at once, like some massive work of art. Too big to see in a lifetime.

It's also the most powerful political entity the world has ever seen, powered by the most potent government ever created, backed by the world's first military to be exponentially more powerful than the military in second place.

That's America. Not good, not bad. Big, and powerful. It might be ours, but it might not. Is it any wonder we like to tell jokes about the people who run it? We do it to cover up our fear.