On Occupied Capitol Hill

I took the trash bins to the curb and stared at the buzzing sky. The winter clouds are hiding the fact that the days are noticeably lighter now, but they aren't hiding the helicopters. The last time this happened I was in shorts and flip flops, but that time, the threat was the helicopters and the police and petty criminal opportunists. This time, six and a half months later, the threat is from homegrown terrorists, and we have to rely on those choppers and coppers to protect us.

I love living on Capitol Hill. I love telling people I live on Capitol Hill. I hate when "Capitol Hill" is used by the national media and Americans from other parts of the country as a substitute for talking about Congress and the politicians they send here. Now, I have only lived on the Hill for six of my eighteen years in DC, but I don't think I will ever live in another part of DC again. I like going to restaurants and spotting congressional representatives. I love walking past senators on the street and giving dirty looks to the ones I don't like. I live for chatting with journos in bars and staffers in cafes and DNC folks in hardware stores. I even loved the one time I got schooled in a bar by a Republican congressman who actually voted FOR the Affordable Care Act, whom I mistakenly criticized for voting against it.

But those are not common occurrences in quotidian life. What's normal is taking the trash bins to the curb on Sunday nights, going grocery shopping at the Harris Teeter, and saying hello to the neighbors walking their dogs while doing yard work. I love living on Capitol Hill because it is a neighborhood filled with good people, a sense of community, and worldly experience. You wouldn't know normal people live on the Hill by reading national media, however, as they generally ignore the people who live here for the fake glamour of politics. The reality is that Capitol Hill is like a small town, where you run into people you know at Frager's Hardware or Tunnicliff's Tavern or Mangialardo's or the post office, dry cleaners, or city park.

Now our lives are in an upheaval, with a cacophony of surveillance and patrol helicopters roaring overhead, the streets to get most anywhere off the Hill closed, and armed troops filling the pizza joints and burrito shops.

The weak-minded lowlifes of this country mired in the pit of their own mediocrity have turned our nation's capital into a conflict zone.

Anyone who knows me at all knows I have spent much of my adult life obsessed with conflict. From the moment in Luxembourg when the school took us to both the American and German WWII cemeteries to Dr. Haag's classes on the Third Reich and Cold War to the trips to Auschwitz, Dachau, and Theresienstadt to working at the peace and reconciliation center in Ireland and working in human rights and democratic governance in the Middle East to living and working in Beirut, I've been on the periphery of it all. Yet I've never been in it. The first time I went to Belfast was the day the Easter peace treaty was signed, and fortunately, nothing happened. I saw Egyptian soldiers patrolling the streets of Cairo the first time I went to the Middle East, but nothing happened there, either.

In Beirut, there is always the threat of conflict, but while I was there, nothing really happened. There were times of increased tension when the threat of conflict was real, but people went about their daily lives because they had to. I wrote this bit about the threat of renewed conflict nearly ten years ago from today:

A taxi sat parked on the side of a normally busy street in Beirut, one of the common beaten up old Mercedes that have somehow survived as everything in Lebanon has somehow survived. The driver, whose face was as worn out as his car, slumped behind the wheel as he filled the vehicle with cigarette smoke. In the backseat were two women passengers whose worried expressions told more tales than an entire library could ever teach you. The three of them were listening to the Prime Minister's speech on the radio. Further down in desolation, another driver sat with his car door open on a darkened corner, listening intently with a hardened face, a facade, for you could sense the truth of what he felt emanating from deep within him. Shopkeepers had televisions or radios tuned in, and you knew the blue lights glowing from the windows of houses had Hariri's oddly bearded face on TV screens.

The tone of the speech was uncharacteristically defiant as the normally weak leader challenged the militia that now threatens the (relative) stability his country. The pulse of the city itself was uncharacteristically slow. This was not the Beirut that has been featured in the travel sections of Western newspapers so many times over the last two years. No, this was the Beirut of history books.

You really have to be here to understand how it feels - the air, the atmosphere, I don't know how to describe it - but it is like there are supernatural forces at work. The feeling is something deep, like the whole universe, all of existence, all of time and space and history is inside you, and you can look inside the souls of people and see their fear in all its nakedness.

During daylight hours, one doesn't notice there is something dangerously wrong here, for the fruit vendors push their carts and the taxi drivers stand on the corners and the shawarma cooks sell their mouthwatering meat. The coffee shops are filled with studying students and elderly elders and housewives both covered and not, and people buy shoes and clothes and belts and other things they don't really need just as they always would. Incessant car horns, diesel-spewing generators, and construction workers shouting from great heights to the ground below still perform the dissonant symphony known as Beirut.

But with dusk come the demons and the ghouls who have haunted this land for many millennia. The streets have been emptier, never more noticeably than last night as Hariri spoke to put Hezbollah in a position where they'd have to take responsibility for any violence that may occur. And they are responsible. No one else is threatening violence. Everyone else is sick of it, sick, sick, sick. Everyone else wants to live normal lives. Everyone else wants a job, electricity, decent internet, and good schools for their kids. It isn't fair. It isn't fair to the innocent Lebanese who have suffered time and time again for the stupidity of a few.

 

And that's kind of what it feels like to live on Capitol Hill at this moment in time, except we don't have the wisdom of experience or the weathered fear; we have a worry cloaked in naivety and a little of that American arrogance that tells us it can't happen here, really, that last week was just an abberation. We try to reason with ourselves that the threat is exaggerated, but with every bit of news that drips out about what happened last week, our brains tell us that the threat is more serious than we know. We remember all the other times, the bombing in Nashville, Charlottesville, the Rittenhouse murders, cops killing Black Americans, the Pittsburgh synagogue, kids in cages, family separations, Muslim bans, the journalist killings, the explosion of hate crimes, and we know this is already a war they are waging.

I used to describe to people that living in Beirut was like "living IN the news" because of everything that happened in and around it. Well, I am definitely living IN the news again. I see their Jesus signs at their hate rallies and think of Hezbollah, the "party of God." I see their Trump flags and think of Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, whose fat face plasters walls across Lebanon. I see their guns and think of the green rifle on Hezbollah's yellow flag, appropriately colored for their cowardice. I see their homogeneity and I think of the tribalism that defines much of the world in conflict.

So we go about our daily lives on Capitol Hill and the rest of DC hoping that the minor security inconvenience is not for naught, hoping that we can nip this Trump-inspired nazi movement in the bud before it flourishes into a permanent part of the American cultural landscape. We're all losing sleep, though some won't admit it. We tell each other to be safe this week when we're purchasing wares in the local shops or passing by on the sidewalk. We've hung lights and signs in our yards professing our joy that the end of a nightmare could be coming to a close. 

But there is a darkness we just can't shake.

Food 101

 I'll never forget the first time I saw a raw egg on a pizza. 

That wasn't even the most horrifying thing on it. No, my seafood pizza, "fruits de mer," had tentacles and prawns with eyes. I am not sure why I even ordered a seafood pizza, as we had nothing like that back in Ohio, USA, and Ohio does have good pizza. But I was in a small town in Luxembourg, which to a twenty year old Ohioan was exotic, and I wanted to try new things.

The pizza place was called San Marino. My housemates and I went there with our host family in the beginning of our junior year in Luxembourg, the first of many times we would eat a San Marino pizza. Us Miami students must have quadrupled their business that year, the first year the school was located in the town of Differdange. We ate so much pizza from there they created a carryout service just for us. 

Pizza was a good starting point for food exploration. In the Midwest, food was, er, rather unadventurous. An average Midwestern cupboard contained salt, black pepper, cinnamon, something generic called "Italian seasoning," maybe a lemon pepper mix, and a handful of stale spices used once in a new recipe that had most likely not been cooked again. Midwesterners put crumbled potato chips on top of casseroles made with cheese, sour cream, cream cheese, and cheese again, often with canned cream of mushroom soup, and called it cooking. The internet has improved Midwestern fare a great deal, but do a Pinterest search for "casserole" and you will see that they are still massacring tastebuds in droves. My mother did better than most. We always had vegetables and I am grateful for that. She also had spices.

Europe was my first exposure to a different kind of food, however. Suburban southwest Ohio in the eighties had Chinese, Mexican, and Italian, but these were blanded up for the American palate. I was exposed to real Italian food early on in that year in Europe - in actual Italy - and a particular meal in Cinque Terre where I tasted pesto for the first time (in September during real pesto season in the area where pesto was invented) showed me all that food could be. To this day it is still one of the best meals I have ever eaten.

I learned that fresh food is the way food is meant to be eaten. I learned that produce shouldn't be as expensive as it is in the US. I learned that frozen meat is a crime against nature. And I learned to respect cheese as a divine gift and not something to smother casseroles with. 

It would be some years before I would cook on my own. I learned about Arab food while studying Arabic in Monterey, CA, but I only ate it, never cooked it. A friend of mine I met there and with whom I lived when I moved to DC taught me about Indian spices. I had never heard of such wonders as cardamom, turmeric, garam masala, corriander, and fenugreek. Still I did not cook.

Then I moved to a house with him and started a garden. It was a small Italian herb garden with a couple of tomato plants, though I struggle to remember exactly what I grew. I know basil and oregano were involved. That's when I started to cook. I had to learn the basics. I had never cooked fresh broccoli. I didn't know how long chicken should cook. I didn't know what a dry rub was. I couldn't identify ginger in a grocery store. Stir fries and soups were easy enough. I made my first Thanksgiving dinner there, and the turkey turned out perfectly. I made my first homemade tomato sauce, too. I had no idea what I was doing, but it seemed to be working. I discovered I had a knack for flavors.

Then came a series of life upheavals - a mouse problem in the house after the pipes froze and exploded, depression, being passed over for a promotion, going to Eastern Europe for three months, unemployment, the Obama campaign, more unemployment. Then I got a job with a Lebanese organization, which changed everything. Living in Beirut exposed me to the best food on the planet and a people who appreciate it. Here is where I would learn that food is a lifestyle, an art, a spiritual conquest.

I grew tomatoes, peppers, and herbs at my next place. I began to collect spices. My life was still in upheaval, as in only three years I went through three jobs, a lot of it due to the Bush recession and budget cuts. The house became a nightmare of pestilence of all kinds, including bedbugs, mice, and a slumlord who stole my tomatoes and peppers. But after all that, a miracle. A recruiter called me out of the blue, and six years later, I am still with the company and am living in a place with enough space for a decent sized garden, where I grow a dozen herbs, tomatoes, peppers, all kinds of greens, potatoes, strawberries, carrots, melons, cucumbers, and whatever else I can fit into the plot. Gardening is the bulk of my free time. I am motivated to provide something nice for my neighbors to look at while also cooking food that I grow myself. The fulfillment you get when eating something you have grown is fantastic.

I have a whole kitchen wall of spices these days and create my own recipes, but I am still learning to cook. Once you stop learning, you probably start making casseroles filled with dairy fats and cans of creamed salt. I'm still trying to get timing down. I still can't poach an egg. My obsession is flavors and the weirder it sounds, the more it is a challenge I want to tackle. I make excellent chili but recently I thought, what if chili, except with shrimp, and what if you cook the chili with the juice of a whole lime, and it was delicious. I put cayenne in fruity drinks and sauces because the universe made them go together. I grind my own spice mixtures in my "kitchen lab" and name them political things like "Rosemary's Babygate" and "Ruth Bader Ginger" because I live and grow things on Capitol Hill. I buy most produce from the local farmers market and use the local butcher and fishmonger when I can. I never follow the recipe if I am using one and I try new and weird things as a rule. 

Still, I would never put a raw egg on pizza.

Goals

I made a list.

Usually I think lists at the new year are pointless. We all say this is the year I will do this or that and none of us ever really does it. We lose steam around the end of January and by spring we have forgotten what we were committed to do.

This year is truly different, though, because of the nature of our 2020. We've had ten months to reflect upon our lives without the usual distractions, and we're going to have another four or five months to continue that reflection under the same circumstances, and that is best case scenario. Many Americans have realized that the things they thought were so important - like sports - really aren't, that maybe civic engagement matters. I want to believe they've realized that, anyway. I'll refrain from haranguing the MAGA crowd right now; it seems they have not only learned nothing, but they've actively fought against learning anything at all.

This year, having nowhere to go forced me to confront my neglect of the many interests I have. Until countries closed their borders to Americans, my life revolved around the one or two trips abroad I got to take each of the last six or seven years. When I wasn't planning the trips or experiencing the trips or looking at my photographs from the trips, I was dreaming of the trips. Perhaps the most productive thing I have done in my personal time is my garden, which is a kind of tiny park my neighbors love. I am motivated by them as much as I am by the plants themselves. The rest of my time I spent watching baseball or hockey and drinking beer in bars and wasting time on social media.

One day you wake up and you realize that half your life is over and you wonder what have you actually done with it because it feels like you have all of these snapshots tucked away in a photo album collecting dust on a shelf. I have always loved living in Washington, DC and I love living on Capitol Hill and I make a good salary at a good company, but I feel unfulfilled. I think of all the pursuits I've had that I have failed to follow through on and wonder why I never let them get anywhere. The books I've wanted to write, the businesses I've wanted to start, the post-graduate degrees I've wanted to pursue...they never get done. Part of the reason is that I get distracted too easily and I jump from one thing to another without ever finishing anything. I don't know if I've always been like that or if this is an age of mobile phone development. I have the attention span of a gnat these days. Even the 500 words of this blog post at this point have taken me an hour to write, because I stare out the window, my thoughts drifting from work to the stack of unfinished books on the table to thinking about my cookbook to worrying about my plants. 

So I made a list. 

Will I stick to it?

 

Interesting Times

The terrorists are planning an attack on my city in the coming days. DC is in a state of emergency until the 21st. Disturbing reports that multiple MPD officers were part of the mob make me worried MPD won't do their jobs. (I mean moreso than usual.) Not to mention the Capitol Police, who let the mob in and took selfies with them. 

Social media corporations, which bear so much responsibility for the rise in extremism, are banning these nazis, including Mango Mussolini himself, and Parler was taken out of the Play and Apple stores so it is harder for the terrorists to organize.

I think I live far enough away from the Capitol to not be personally at risk, but it is just down the street, and the National Guard is nearby. There was a shootout car chase on the day of the insurrection a couple of blocks from me that MPD won't talk about, and there was a suspicious package found about an hour ago in the area.

This threat is not a joke.

I wish I could say I trusted security forces in the city, but too many cops side with nazis these days, and duty to country seems to have disappeared for this invisible threat they think Democrats are. Future historians who study propaganda will look back at this period as a time of mass hysteria. All I can think about is the phenomenon in the Middle Ages known as Dancing Mania where large groups of people would start dancing and wouldn't stop until they collapsed of exhaustion or died. Yes, died. (Historians still don't know exactly why this happened.)

Now large groups of mediocre people with mediocre lives are gathering in mobs and militias for some made up threat because they've been bombarded with propaganda from the wealthy and powerful, who want to use them as foot soldiers for more power. They can't grasp they're getting played. Anyone who voted for Trump who isn't in the top 25% of the wealthiest Americans is getting played. If you got a stimulus check and you voted for Trump, you've been played. 

Propaganda is one hell of a drug.

The next 11 days in DC will be highly stressful. At least many of us will be stuck at home.