By David Bolling
I used to think Washington, D.C. was my home. I wasn’t born there but I spent the most significant years of the turbulent Sixties living there, working on Capitol Hill, living on the edge of Foggy Bottom, near the Watergate, on the perimeter of George Washington University, a 10-minute walk from the Lincoln Memorial and a similar distance from the public boathouse on the Potomac River where you could always rent a canoe.
I walked the halls of Congress, covered miles in the hallways of the Senate and House office Buildings, and I ate my share of the famous Senate Bean Soup, offered every day in the Dirksen Building café. It had Navy beans, ham hock, onion, some parsley and butter. I think it cost about a quarter. Now, I’m told, it’s over three dollars. Still a good deal.
Back then you could walk from office to office without pass or permit, there were no guards or metal detectors at the doors, even though there were non-stop protests and demonstrations all over town – against the war in Vietnam, for civil rights, an end to poverty and equal access to higher education.
Then Martin Luther King was assassinated, Washington blew up and part of it burned down, and I found myself in an Urban League rumor command center trying to calm frightened citizens on the phone while I watched buildings burn on 17th Street outside the office window.
The Poor People’s Campaign and Resurrection City followed, 5,000 people camping in the mud as a self-governing community on the National Mall.
I left in 1970, but family members continued to aggregate there, my father was deeply connected in D.C., and he lived to 104. So I kept returning, and more of us still live there than elsewhere.
But I had not been back since the beginning of Trump II. I was totally unprepared.
The famous reflecting pool, a body of water to which most of us never gave much thought – except perhaps when drunken tourists or frat boys from GW jumped or fell in – is now the world-famous victim of a “vandal” attack. So say the signs fixed to the chain-link fencing surrounding the still-under-reconstruction pool. The signs are, of course, a blatant lie. And everyone knows it. And the liar doesn’t care.
The name and face of the Liar-in-Chief are everywhere now. My father was involved in the planning and funding for the United States Institute of Peace, a spectacular new building at 23rd and Constitution Avenue, created to practice and promote peace-making over war-fighting. Donald Trump, who has contributed nothing to Peace, has his name gratuitously affixed on the building.
You can no longer walk along Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, and now the arms of enormous cranes sprout from the former East Wing and hang over the city. Meanwhile, gilded monuments keep popping into view, covered in 23.75-karat gold leaf.
Next door to the White House is the monumental Executive Office Building, a magnificent aggregation of marble blocks that Trump wants to paint white, despite being told the paint will compromise the stone’s durability, and that, as with the Golden Gate Bridge, the paint will have to be constantly re-applied.
The president’s appropriately scowling visage (the retribution look) appears here-and-there and everywhere, most prominently, perhaps in three-story size on the front of the Department of Labor Building.
Humbly countering the megalomaniacal presence of the Trump name and face is the brilliantly conceived Immigrant Food café, featuring Lunch Without Borders, owned and staffed by real immigrants, less than half a block west of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. I had dinner there, with my brother, feeling that finally it now felt like home.
Main Photo: The public lie claiming vandals damaged the Reflecting Pool lining. All photos by David Bolling
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