April 29, 2007 – Even Jesus would never forgive what you do

Well, it’s been a busy couple of days since I got into the DC area, but I’ll try to sum it all up.

I got into Alexandria, Virginia the day before yesterday and met up with my college buddy, Sara, and her husband, Greg, and his son, Devon. It was Sara’s birthday, so we went out and had sushi. Awesome

The next day I was on my own for basically the whole day. Sara had to work and Greg took Devon and went in to work for a while.

I decided to take the Metro into DC and hang out until Sara got off work. I figured that I would get at least two of the Smithsonian museums out of the way before 3:30 when she was ready to go. (I have her key, so we had to go back home together.)

Yeah. I was wrong. SO wrong.

I like riding the train. I gives me a strange feeling of empowerment to be able to get around a city that I basically know nothing about on my own without actually driving. I’ve pretty much figured out where to get off for everything that I want to see and be able to walk anywhere else. And, since I got the 7-day card, I can go anywhere without paying more. Unlike NYC and Atlanta, you have to use the card to get OUT of the station. If you went further than what you paid for (unless you have the card I have), you have to pay more to get out.

It’s kinda crazy.

Coming out of the tube at L’Efant Station was a little bit overwhelming to me. Not only was I popping up in a city that I had never been to, but I was popping out into a city that I had heard so much about that I felt like I knew it backwards and forwards. At least the touristy part of it, anyway. I know nothing about the downtown area.

So, when I finally got out of the ultra-long tube, I walked a little ways and saw it: The Capitol. Then I turned to my left and there was the other one: The Washington Monument.

Holy shit! I’m here! In the seat of what, at one time, was the greatest government in the world. I’m sure I was walking around the whole day with a really goofy smile on my face.

I know it seems weird that I was so excited to be in Washington, DC, but anyone who has read any of my rants knows that, even if I don’t dig the current government, I do love my country and I think that Democracy and Freedom are the greatest ideas mankind has ever had…well, besides maybe the wheel and fire. Those are pretty cool, too.

I literally felt like Mr. Smith walking around and seeing all of this stuff for the first time. I was happier walking around the Mall than I was walking around New York…which is REALLY weird.

(Smithsonian Castle)

(Believe it or not, this is exactly what America is all about: the right to protest things you don’t like about America. We can talk bad about other peoples’ political beliefs, but NEVER about their right to voice them.)

(The American History Msueum is closed for renovations. The moose outside should’ve told you.)

Anyway, I walked around for a while and then decided that I should actually do something, so I went to the Natural History Museum thinking, ‘Just an hour or so.’

Four hours (and a WAY overpriced veggie wrap) later I was finally walking out. It was a pretty amazing museum, of course since it’s part of the Smithsonian. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was quite obviously made for kids. The placards that explain everything were of the ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex ate MEAT!!’ variety. There was certainly a lot of information, but it felt a little bit condescending at times.

(Everyone who comes here has this picture. I heard a lot of people telling their kids, ‘It’s just like in the movie!’)

(The Hope Diamond. Whoopity-doo. It’s a big fucking rock. I was lucky to get even this picture with the 50 million people peering into its rotating, security encrusted case.)

After that I only had about an hour and a half before I had to meet Sara. What to do? I definitely wouldn’t be able to make it through the Air And Space Museum in that time if it took me three or four hours to get through the Natural History Museum.

So I walked around for a little bit more and found the Sculpture Garden outside of the Hirshhorn Museum. I walked around there for a little while but that only took about 20 minutes. It’s not quite as extensive as the one in New Orleans.

(Creepy fucking bunny.)

(Will this erase the mistakes of the administration?)

(This fucking spider is following me!)

After that, I hung out in front of the Capitol a little bit and took pictures around there, but I couldn’t do that all day.

(Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?)

(Union soldiers on the war path.)

(And, just to show that there’s no hard feelings, some Confederate soldiers looking beaten and dead.)

The US Botanic Garden is right next to the Capitol (or, at least, next to where I was…I wasn’t that close to the Capitol), so I went through that.

Now, I’m not a HUGE plant guy, but it was pretty cool to walk through all of these rare plants and trees. It’s a beautiful place and well worth the time to check out.

(‘Gardens are for art!’)

(This is the stinky flower. There was a sign that said ‘Please pardon my aroma.’ And it was pretty bad. Like something long dead. But apparently it turns the flies on and that’s all that counts.)

(This is the oldest living species.)

(Strangely, I didn’t leave DC for some exotic locale. This is the jungle room.)

I finally had killed enough time to meet Sara after work.

But what to do tonight while she and Greg go out for her birthday?

Dupont Circle, of course! That’s the trendy part of downtown. It livens up on weekend nights, so it should have been jumpin’.

And, it really kind of was. It’s a cool area full of people of all kinds. It’s, I guess, kind of the 6^th Street of DC…but actually cool.

There’s a pretty awesome bookstore there called Kramerbooks. It’s 24 hours! And it’s a restaurant, too! Awesome! Weird, but awesome!

I didn’t eat there because Sara says it’s overpriced, but good.

I did, however, eat at Five Guys, which is a burger joint that apparently has quite a following here in DC. I didn’t have a hamburger, but the hot dog I had was really good. Cheap and good. Not normal!

I walked around Dupont for a while, but eventually got bored looking at all of the trendy people go by, so I took the Metro back ‘home.’

Then I went on a fruitless search for coffee…at 9pm. Everything that isn’t a restaurant or bar is closed around Alexandria by, I think, about 8pm.

Dammit. I walked all up and down King Street (the main drag here) and found nothin’. In fact, the only coffee shop I saw looked like it had been closed for hours.

Oh well. No coffee. Just home.

Nothing more to report for that day.

Today, however, is a whole ‘nuther story. Today I did the Memorial/Monument Tour. And it was pretty awesome. Lotta walking, though.

First, I walked to the Metro station. No problem. I got off at the next stop after the one I got off at yesterday, the Archive stop. It empties out at (that’s right) the National Archives. Now, I’m not exactly sure what the National Archives hold, but I think it’s something like the knowledge of the entire human race. That’s pretty fuckin’ cool, if you ask me. I’ll have to go in at some point and read up.

(The National Archive)

(The Robert F. Kennedy Dept. Of Justice. This is what’s supposed to keep us all safe and punish the bad guys. We’ll see about that.)

(The EPA. I took this because I’m an environmentalist AND a huge Ghostbusters freak.)

But that wasn’t my goal today. No no. Today was celebrating the dead.

I walked towards the Washington Monument down Constitution Ave., looking for an ATM. Strangely, nothing. By the time I made it to the Monument, I was hungry as hell and had no cash. I went to the little food tent pretty much knowing that they wouldn’t take my debit card, but trying anyway. ‘No, but that one right down there does.’

Funny, that’s the one I tried yesterday. No dice. But I’ll try again. Maybe they’ve fixed their machine by now.

Again: No dice.

‘But the one right down there does.

Now that I’ve walked basically right back where I started the day, I’m not feeling too good about this whole adventure. In fact, I’m thinking that it sucks. I finally get my overpriced, bland turkey sandwich, choke it down and start to lament on the evilness of the girls who work at these kiosks.

Now, I understand that these girls don’t make much money. But, from the looks of it, most of them are in high school or college. It’s a pretty typical job for people of that age. You don’t have to like it, but you could pretend at least a little bit. It might even make it a little bit better for you.

The girls aren’t really evil so much as completely robotic. I heard two different girls say the exact same line to a couple of ladies. Same inflection. Same words. It was weird. (By the way, why are straws not allowed, but knives are? I don’t understand at all.)

I would rather buy a sandwich from a machine than these girls. The machine has more personality.

Anyway, enough bitching about the food kiosks. On to the monuments.

You might think that the Washington Monument would be first for me. But, no. I’m saving that because I really want to go up it. And you have to get a ticket at the beginning of the day for that.

(Oh, yeah, baby. It’s big.)

Fine. I can wait.

So, instead, I walked around it.

(This little house is just to the right of the Washington Monument. I wonder if the resident is ho….nah. He’s probably in Crawford.)

To my great surprise (because I don’t have a map of DC on me at all times), the first memorial I saw was the World War II Memorial.

Here’s the strange thing about the WWII Memorial: it’s the earliest war memorialized (there is no real WWI Memorial…we’ll get to that later), but it’s the newest of all of the memorials. It was opened on April 29, 2004.

How fucked up is it that ‘The Greatest Generation’ had to wait about 60 years to get a memorial in Washington, DC?

I’ll tell you how fucked up it is. Very.

Anyway, the Memorial is absolutely beautiful. It’s obviously heartfelt and, even with hundreds of kids running around the fountain laughing and playing, it fit the mood perfectly. It’s as if these men who died in that war died so that we could keep laughing and playing. It was somber, but free, as it should be.

(That last smaller pillar is Texas. Yeah. I’m a dork.)

(This picture would have been a lot better if I had framed it right. I’ve found out that that’s a big problem for me.)

(Another one that took me a long time to get because there were millions of peole walking in front of me. And some people would just stand and stare for, like, five minutes. Honestly, if a little boy had wandered over there and stared for a little while, it would have been a perfect picture.)

All of the memorials have quotes from different people etched into the stone. This one, of course, had them from many different sources, most of them generals or Presidents. Each pillar represents a state or country that lost soldiers. The two largest pillars represent the two theatres of the war, the Pacific and the Atlantic.

Of the war memorials, this is my favorite. I could just sit near the fountain all day and watch people as they walked around reading the quotes and having different reactions to them.

But I couldn’t do that. I had to move on.

Next up was the most somber of the memorials: The Vietnam War Memorial.

It was dedicated on November 11, 1982 (only took them seven years for these guys) and has been a constant reminder of the sacrifice these soldiers made for…well, we’re not really sure, unfortunately. Something that only a few old men truly believed in. It was designed by 21 year old Maya Ying Lin, who was a Yale student.

As I was walking up to it the mood changed completely. I could tell that people were, for some reason, more reflective here. Maybe it’s because more people knew people who were directly affected by this war. Maybe it was because most people realized that these men died in a war that didn’t need to be fought. I don’t know. But, while people were able to laugh and be human at the WWII Memorial, it was nearly completely silent at the Vietnam War Memorial. As people walked by the names of the men who died, they could see themselves reflected in the black wall of names. I heard one Latina woman tell her son, ‘You daddy lost a lot of friends in this war, miho.’

(I like how you can see the reflections of the people in this one. My favorite picture of this memorial is the painting of the man holding his hand against it crying. In the reflection you see his buddies who didn’t make it back holding their hands to his.)

There were a few people taking rubbings of some of the names and there were a lot of pictures and flowers left along the wall by family members and friends.

Even at the statues of the soldiers looking at their fallen buddies, it was quiet. The mood just pervaded everywhere. No other memorial or monument had that kind of power. Not even the Korean War Memorial, which is quite similar.

One thing I missed here was the Women’s Memorial. It was nearby, but I didn’t see it anywhere. That’s too bad, too. I really wanted to catch a picture of it.

Not too far away was the Lincoln Memorial.

The government started to try to build a Lincoln Memorial in 1867, just two years after the man’s death. In 1922 the Memorial was finally completed.

I’ve seen this Memorial in so many movies that I knew exactly what to expect. Even that, though, didn’t prepare me. Lincoln, looking out at Washington, DC, looks tired. It’s as if he has finally brought the country back together and it’s now time for a rest. He’s ready to go on working, but only if he absolutely has to. He needs to just sit and think for now.

In a small room near the bottom of the Memorial to Lincoln’s right is a museum that is basically just a collection of quotes explaining what he was all about and how he felt that the Constitution was right: all men WERE created equal. But it also shows us that his main goal was to bring the Union back together, whether it means that slavery was abolished or not. There could be no halfway, though. They were either all slave states or not. He, of course, would rather not have slavery.

That kind of surprised me. What if things had gone the other way? What if he had decided that the only way to bring the Union back together was to allow slavery?

It’s an insane thought. Would we still have slaves?

(These chalices are on the outside of the Memorial.)

Next up was the Korean War Memorial. President Clinton and Republic of Korea President Kim Young Sam were on hand for its dedication on July 27, 1995. This was exactly 42 years after the war was officially ended in 1953. In three years we lost 48,000 men. But the UN lost many, many more.

Like the Vietnam Memorial, this one is a black, reflective wall. At first I didn’t see anything on the wall. Then I noticed them. Faces staring back at me. Instead of putting the names of the men who died, they etched faces into the stone. So instead of seeing ourselves among the names, we saw ourselves among the faces. It was an eerie effect.

The etchings were taken from actual photos. No, it’s not every man who died. But it shows many men doing many different things during the war.

In front of the wall were 19 soldiers walking through a field of juniper bushes and granite strips. Each man has a look of horror on his face. It’s the look of war.

On the side of the wall at the front of the men, there is a phrase carved into the granite: ‘Freedom Is Not Free.’

This was the last of the memorials that was easily accessible. The rest were kind of hidden away.

It was time for a search…and a hike.

As I was walking on the other side of the Washington Monument’s reflecting pool, I walked right in the middle of a crowd watching a lacrosse game. Strange that there should be something like this going on in the Memorial Park…but I guess that’s what all of these guys died defending: the freedom to have fun and be happy. So I guess it is fitting.

I tried to ignore the game (easy for me since I’m not so big on sports) and keep up the diligence for the remaining memorials, especially the one for my favorite President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I knew that it was within a lot of trees and such, so I figured it must be nearby.

What’s that? Could it be?! A dome in the woods?!?!

Oh…THAT’S weird. It’s a World War I Memorial…but it’s not for ALL of the men who died in the War. It’s only for the ones who were from Washington, DC.

What the fuck?!

It was authorized by Congress in 1924 and dedicated on Armistice Day 1931. It’s the only local memorial in the National Mall and the first war memorial. It was built mainly as a bandstand for the US Marine Corp Band.

So, I guess they didn’t realize that they should have made it for everyone. Does that mean that someday the soldiers of WWI will get a proper memorial? Who knows? It would be nice. I know none of them are living any longer, but it would still be a nice gesture.

I guess we’ll see.

What was very strange was the fact that there is a manhole right in the middle of it.

Again, what the fuck? Why would the sewer come through here? And if that’s not what this manhole is for, what is under this thing that people would need to get to?

Very strange.

But I still hadn’t found the FDR Memorial. Where the fuck is that thing?

Turns out that it’s pretty far away from the other memorials. It’s closer to the Jefferson Monument than any of the others.

So, I walked to the other side of the Tidal Basin and finally found it.

And it is a huge thing. Huge and beautiful.

There’s a section for each of his four terms. Each one has fountains, trees and flowers everywhere, just as he would have wanted it. It’s more of a trail than the other memorials. And every part of the trail commemorates his greatest achievements. From the New Deal to the CCC to WWII, they’re all here.

FIRST TERM

(FDR full of hope for the future and ready to take on the Great Depression.)

SECOND TERM

(There were a lot of people taking their pictures standing in the soup line as if it was a fun old time. Yeah. Poor is fun!)

These pillars were imprinted with the patterns on the wall behind them. Faces of the people who were helped by Roosevelt’s programs.)

(A man listening to FDR on the radio, hoping that his life will turn around soon.)

(‘We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.’ Roosevelt was amazing.)

THIRD TERM

(War beat him up and broke him down, just like the rocks (that all say either ‘WAR’ or ‘HATE’) on this part of the trail. The main quote for this section was ‘I hate war!’)

FOURTH TERM

(The most beautiful part of the trail was also the most somber. A relief of the funeral processions wouldn’t have come out in a picture, so here is Eleanor as the first American UN diplomat.)

Once again, this is a place that I could just sit and stare all day long. It’s a perfect memorial to our greatest President. (Lincoln, of course, being a pretty close second.)

But then I walked on. I was tired as hell, but I couldn’t come all the way out here without seeing the third built of the presidential memorials.

Thomas Jefferson was our third president and one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence. He finally got his memorial on April 13, 1943, 200 years after he was born.

The dome building houses a statue of the man and he is surrounded by bits and pieces of speeches and part of the Declaration itself. Around his head in the dome is written ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’

That’s something that everyone in our government should have to read over and over again before the sleep every night.

I sat in this place waiting for Sara to call saying that she was nearby and ready to pick me up. All I could think was, ‘What have we done to this country?’

I have to admit that there were a few times during the day that I felt a little choked up. WWII, Vietnam, Lincoln and Roosevelt all left me a little close to damp eyed.

But it was Jefferson’s Monument that really made me realize how far we have strayed from the original intention of this nation. We were never meant to be police of the world. We were meant to be a place for people to come so that they could get away from their tyrants. If that tyrant tried to infringe on our freedom or even threatened to do so, THEN we would go after them. If we were asked to help, THEN we would go after them. But we should NEVER do a ‘preemptive strike’ against someone who may or may not be a threat.

We should never let go of our civil liberties so that we can be ‘safer.’

And we should never, EVER allow one of our own leaders to become a tyrant.

Where did this country go wrong? Why have we not had a great man in the Oval Office since 1945?

Who will be the one to lift us out of this stupor that we all seem to be in? Who will lift this country to the hight that it could achieve? Who will lead us out of the complacency?

I was pondering all of these questions when Sara called and said that she was as close as she was going to get. Time to go.

We went back ‘home’ and met up with a friend of hers, Penny, for dinner. We ended up going to a brewery/restaurant, meeting another friend of Sara’s, Ted, and having a pretty good dinner. Then, Tim left us and we went to a little Irish pub back in Alexandria before heading home.

Now here we are. Nothing left but to type this up.

And those questions. Those nagging questions.

I hope we find the answer soon.