Why it hurts so much

The mob didn't just trash our democracy, they desecrated our house

I don’t know what it was like where you live on Wednesday, but chez Truscott/Harris, our house physically convulsed as the Capitol was assaulted by the mob of red hat wearing fascist ninnies.  As the television screen filled with images of Trump-empowered bullies rampaging through the halls of Congress, our kitchen sink and shower gave forth great gurgles of discontent and spewed forth backed-up sewage, filling both basins with a brown sludge.  It was as if our house in Springs was in sympathy with our nation’s house in Washington D.C., recoiling in stupefaction and horror.

We called our plumber and he responded more quickly than the multiple law enforcement agencies in Washington were able to muster to ward off the assault on the Capitol.  He quickly dug up and removed the lid on our septic system revealing the problem.  The main tank was filled to the brim with shit and would need pumping out.

So it was in our nation’s capital.  The administration in residence for the next 13 days is full of shit and needs pumping out.

My metaphor is an imperfect one for many reasons, chiefly among them that the process of ridding ourselves of the sludge of the last four years will take much longer than the vacuum pump on a septic truck.  But there is something deeper and more profound going on with what happened in Washington when the Capitol, our nation’s citadel of self-governance, was attacked and defiled by a mob incited to violence by Donald J. Trump.

Having our plumbing system back up and need a good clean-out was a pain in the ass, but what that mob did to the Capitol hurt. I wondered as I watched the ongoing assault on our television why it hurt so much, and then it came to me.  The Capitol is our house.  It has always been qualitatively and symbolically different from the other main seat of our government, the White House, a mile and a half away down Constitution Avenue.  Someone lives in the White House:  the President of the United States and his family.  No one lives in the Capitol.  It exists just for governing, for making the laws that help to make us a civilized nation and ideally, at least, hold us together. 

The Capitol has always been the easiest of the two places to visit.  When I was a boy, my grandmother would drive my brother and me from my grandparents’ home across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia, and drop us off on the Mall.  We would look through the displays in the Smithsonian, at that time occupying just the “Castle” on the Mall, and then we would make our way down to the Capitol and walk right in, two boys of 10 and 12 years, dressed in the khakis and white shirts and leather shoes insisted upon by grandma because we were going to Washington to visit a museum and the people’s house, and for that purpose, she thought we should be “properly dressed.”

My brother Frank and I would wander the halls and rotundas of the Capitol in abject amazement.  It was (and is) so grand.  The marble floors!  The great columns!  The statuary!  The portraits of great lawmakers of the past!  One day we were over on the Senate side and saw the great senator from Illinois Everett Dirksen walking through one of the rooms.  We recognized him by his headful of curly hair and the expansive, mannerly, gruff way he greeted people.  In those days, even little 10 and 12 year old boys could recognize the great Senator Dirksen from the newsreels they used to show before the Saturday matinee at the movies. 

The Capitol building was grand in the way a great museum is grand, like the Metropolitan, which we had also visited when we passed through New York City on our way back from my father’s assignment in Germany.  We sailed into the Brooklyn docks on the S.S. Patch, a retired World War II troop ship, and took the subway into Manhattan from the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights above the docks.  Both places, the Metropolitan and the Capitol, were huge and imposing and magnificent as only a great public space can be.  Growing up, we had played as boys in Monticello.  As great grandsons of Jefferson’s we were given the run of what is surely one of the grandest private homes in America.  But it is the public aspect of the Capitol that has always set it apart.  Monticello was Thomas Jefferson’s house, but the Capital is our house as citizens of this country.  What seized us as boys, and what practically overwhelms still today, is the sense of belonging there, even in the grandest of its spaces, like the Rotunda.  It is a building that exists for only one purpose, as a home for the United States Congress, a place where laws reside, not men.

That is why the mob’s trashing of the Capitol hurt so much.  It was a desecration not only of a physical space and the things within it – desks and flags and statues and offices and doors and windows – but of a home, our home.  The men and women we elect and send there every two years can, and do, change.  The laws made there can, and do, change.  The greatness of the government around which we have organized ourselves as a nation can, and does, change.

But the Capitol doesn’t change.  It houses the Congress, but it is there for all of us.  That’s why on Wednesday it hurt so much.  Because for a short time it wasn’t. That is why we must never let it happen again.  That is why we need to protect the Capitol not with police and troops and force, but with our votes.  It is ours, but only if we can keep it.