A Tourist at Home
When the weather is good, I
often take the bus to my office. I suppose that is partly because the bus trip
costs $6 less than the taxi trip and I am of the Depression generation that
still thinks that $6 is a lot of money. I tell myself that it is only 60 cents
in real 1933 dollars, but that doesn't stick in my mind. Also, I really like
the bus. I like to observe the other passengers. And I get a better view of the
city and the people on the sidewalk from my seat on the bus than I do from the
back seat of a taxi, especially during one of those wild rides where I am
closing my eyes to blot out the dangers.
The bus
stop is across the street from the Watergate apartment in which I live. Twenty
years ago, possibly even 15 years ago, when I came out of the building there
would be knots of tourists, often Japanese, standing around, looking to take
pictures of the building where it happened. They are all gone now. "Watergate"
has become an abstraction, a symbol for something bad a president did. But
there are fewer and fewer people who remember just what the president did.
Hardly anyone now remembers why Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr fought a
duel, or why Andrew Johnson was almost voted out of office. So it is becoming
with Watergate.
How accommodating it is of history to have located the
break-in of the Democratic National Committee in a building with a distinctive
architectural style and name! Suppose the break-in had been at one of those
identical cubical office buildings, with names like 1150 17 th St.,
that fill downtown Washington. Would tourists have come to take its picture?
And what would we have instead of Iran-Contragate and Whitewatergate and
Filegate? Journalists would have been clichéless.
But back
to my bus. The driver is always an African-American and often a woman. I can't
get used to saying "African-American." Her ancestors probably came here long
before mine--perhaps well over a century before mine. If she is an
African-American, what am I--a Russian-American? But whatever we call her, I am
glad to see her. She has overcome centuries of race and gender prejudice to get
where she is. I am pleased to see the competence with which she wrestles that
big bus around corners, hands out transfers, and answers passengers' questions
about stops and connections. Not long ago, such competence would not have been
expected of her.
After snaking around eight blocks, we arrive at
a corner on Virginia Avenue where one can see, separated by a narrow street,
the buildings of the Federal Reserve and the State Department. What a
concentration of worldwide power! But more impressive than the power is the
concentration of homeless men lounging on the grates and the grass.
Two
blocks down on Virginia Avenue, we come to the site of my epiphany. Looking out
of the bus window one day, I saw a tall, graceful fountain in the garden behind
a building that fronted on Constitution Avenue. I had passed it dozens of times
without noticing it, perhaps because the water had not been playing before. I
suddenly had the thought that if I had been on a tour bus in Rome or Vienna,
the guide would have called our attention to that fountain and explained its
history, and we would all have marveled at it. From that moment, at least for a
while, I looked at my surroundings with fresh eyes--the eyes of a tourist.
We turn up 18 th Street and pass the rear
entrance of Constitution Hall, the property of the Daughters of the American
Revolution. I wondered how many other buildings are famous for something that
didn't happen in them. Marian Anderson didn't sing here in 1939.
I have recently seen assertions that the DAR excluded Marian Anderson from
Constitution Hall because she wanted to sing on Easter Sunday, and not because
she was "colored," as we used to say. I don't know the truth of that, but it
really doesn't matter. The truth is that conditions in America in 1939 were
such that a Marian Anderson could be excluded because of her race, and
that conditions today are such that she could not.
A little
farther up 18 th Street we see the huge building of the Department of
the Interior, which houses, among other things, the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
That is the locus of one of Ronald Reagan's favorite stories, about the
bureaucrat who was found with his head down on his desk, sobbing because his
Indian had died. That is a funny story, but it should not have been told by a
president of the United States, who should have realized that the historic
relation between the federal government and the American Indians is no laughing
matter.
As we proceed up 18 th Street, we
take on more passengers, almost all of them "African-Americans" or Hispanics.
Often I am the only "white" person on the bus. In my new stance as a tourist, I
think to myself: "How exotic. I could be on a bus in Tokyo, and all the other
passengers could be Japanese. I know so little about them, about their lives
and thoughts and feelings."
But then
I realize how superficial that attitude is. Fundamentally the African-Americans
and Hispanics and I are pretty much alike, riding on the same bus to the same
destination over the same potholes. (And we have reached a degree of liberation
that permits me to think of these potholes as Mayor Barry's potholes without
feeling guilty of racism.)
The word "fundamentally" in the previous paragraph carries
a lot of weight, but it is important to think of what is fundamental. I mean
having the experience of love and loneliness, illness and health, the joy of
children, the satisfaction of work, and the inevitability of death. Those are
the respects in which we are all alike. That is the sense in which we are all
on the same bus. Perhaps it is being 80 years of age that makes me think that
these are the overwhelmingly important and overwhelmingly common aspects of
life. But many people much wiser than I am have thought that at a much earlier
age than mine.
Nearing the end of my trip, I
realize that my observations have been largely about race. That is not
surprising. Race is the great American problem. From the standpoint of human
history, race is not the distinctive American condition--freedom and prosperity
are. But even this pretend-tourist takes that for granted. It is the race
problem--that tangled web of history, hostility, demands, frustrations,
injustice, and lawlessness--that gets, and deserves, attention. And yet, as I
think about Marian Anderson and about my fellow passengers and about the female
bus driver, I feel hopeful.
At my destination she pulls
the handle to open the door for me. I say, "Thank you." She says, "Have a nice
day."
