Washington is a strange city: seat of the greatest power on earth, yet itself hardly consequential or powerful.
I remember the first time I visited, now over ten years ago. I was astonished and a little awed at the great scale of the Mall, the size of the Capitol, and the thought that the president lived only a little distance away. This impression persisted throughout my next few visits, all very short ones: it was a place, I thought, pregnant with the greatest power imaginable, heavy, solemn, grand, a new Rome.
But after living here for almost a year I find the opposite case more persuasive. The Capitol is a large white building. The White House is also a large white building. I rather like the Lincoln Memorial; I think it is imposing, and the Mall as a whole, especially at dusk, remains solemn, impressive, and beautiful. But there is little to mark this city as the seat of the greatest power in the history of man, as indeed it is. All of the great capitals of the past—Hatti, Thebes, Uruk, Rome, Karakorum, Tenochtitlan—possessed influence utterly pitiful in comparison to that of a nation that could, in theory, destroy the entire earth, and presently with the stroke of a pen destroys what some held to be its primary military competitor. And yet we think of these as splendid and magnificent, as uniquely splendid and magnificent, and while Washington is splendid and magnificent, it is not uniquely so. Viewed up close it is rather small.
So are its people. I have met any number of renowned and powerful lawmakers and thinkers. Many are very impressive; I am greatly honored to have met them. But once you meet them, you see that all of them are people, not heroes, prone to both cleverness and folly in a very human way. It’s especially strange to walk the streets of Georgetown, where every fourth or fifth house belongs to someone of consequence, recognizing that all these people of consequence are not yet so consequential as to have outgrown the need for housing.
Add to all this the fact that Washington is quite small: the suburbs stretch for some distance, but the city proper isn’t large, not compared to New York or London, or even Vienna, really, which is a remarkably compact city. The transportation system doesn’t even work. Again, it is not an ugly city, or an unpleasant city, or a city that feels unimportant. But it does not feel like the seat of the greatest power in the history of man.
Now at this juncture the blame may appear to lie with the city, as failing to live up to some noble destiny of power. But perhaps it is the opposite. Perhaps what we see as the greatest power on earth is of very little note. Perhaps it is almost like a grand accident or a little miracle: a great many rather ordinary people doing a great many rather ordinary things, none of them particularly aware of each other’s tasks or abilities, but all together somehow managing to create a powerful and influential entity. There is no hidden magnificence or grandeur behind any of it, but many normal people in normal offices doing their best, or less than their best, as the case may be; with perhaps a few geniuses mixed in here or there, but without the wherewithal to achieve anything noteworthy. And even these geniuses do not have any hidden genius but are at close quarters exactly what they appear to be from a distance—as opposed to that which we imagine them to be.
Enjoyed this one a lot -- think so far it's my favorite. Well written, reasonable and thoughtful.