Last Week Travelling to DC

I spent the last week at a family reunion. It was in a town called Fort Washington, Maryland, about twenty miles south of Washington DC.

I had only limited computer access -- a few minutes a day.

Fort Washington was built on the banks of the Potomac to destroy British shipping in the War of 1812. However, the British walked around the fort to conquer DC.

There are still huge bunkers, and cannons, but few people visit the place. It is now a park inside what I think is the National Park Service. I walked the entirety of the park with my son yesterday morning in about an hour's time. We came across only three or four people walking dogs.

The house we stayed at was a rental that slept twenty. The water faucets were odd. You turned them to the middle to get water. I couldn't get used to this.

Most days I went into DC. I liked going to the National Gallery of Art. I took a guided tour of the American wing, and another of the Italian Renaissance. The Americanist tour argued that American art slips back and forth between gritty realism and high idealism. The Ashcan School followed a period of high idealism and Frenchified prettiness, she said, and showed us a Monetesque picture of New York City by Childe Hassam (see above) to exemplify this trend. Then she showed us a painting of a private boxing exhibition in which a black guy was hammering a white guy as ghoulish spectators looked on in a private club. I thought of how Ginsberg and the Beats followed the academic niceties of Wallace Stevens and Co.

The Italian Renaissance tour focused on the triumphs of Florence, and on a Leonardo da Vinci painting (the only one in the western hemisphere).

I also saw a show of Archimboldo's fruity heads, and Edvard Munch's engravings.

I visited the newish Museum of the American Indian. This exhibit was a giant guilt trip that focused on how Europeans had trashed native American culture. I wondered why they didn't have anything in the exhibit about how warlike their own cultures were, or how they kept entire cultures enslaved, and committed genocide against other tribes. You'd think they were all living in perfect harmony before the devilish Europeans arrived and forced them to work in casinos.

I finished reading Dinesh D'Souza's book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery 2010) which makes the case that we have a Luo tribesman from the year 1950 camped in the Oval Office.

I picked up a few books: Reading Obama, by a Harvard Professor, a book on Zeno's Paradoxes, a book on Lincoln's Speeches, and a children's book about a soldier in Robert E. Lee's army. I wanted to get a book of Ginsberg's photographs based on an exhibit that had been held in the National Gallery of Art, but worried it was too expensive at $20. I bought two books by Arthur Schopenhauer, too. These were all bought at a Borders in Waldorf, Maryland, about 12 minutes south of our fake home for the week.

I ate too much apple pie on Thanksiving. I intended to go to Baltimore on the way back to our real home to see the Warhol exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art (intensive Christian imagery in his last decade) but the family was sleeping comfortably. I stayed en route, making the trip in about six hours.

Now I have to finish reading thirty papers for freshman composition, and start to work up a lecture or two on Martha Nussbaum, and brush up on Peter Singer for the class on animal rights.

My older brother has gone organic, and is now eating only organic items. My younger brother is a regional consultant for 7-11. I haven't been in one of these for thirty years. They apparently still sell Slurpies, but the biggest selling item is chicken wings. My father, I found out, worked for HEW when I was in 7th grade. He went around to colleges all over the country and consulted with them on how to graduate students on time.

I did not know that, as Johnny Carson once said.

My children enjoyed connecting with their cousins. They built a teepee in the back of the yard based on what they had seen at the Museum of the American Indian. My daughter enjoyed climbing on her uncle's lap. She's only four. She's asked me to help her prepare a letter that will thank her aunt and uncle for setting up the reunion. We have no other family near us, and it is nice for our kids to get to know their many cousins. It is nice too for me to get to know my brothers and see their families. I talked a bit with my mother. We were happy. There was no drama.

One of the most haunting sites I saw was while driving home from the museums on Thanksgiving. I saw a man walking against traffic along the side of the highway with his head down. The man was thirty or forty and looked quite unhappy. The next exit was five miles further on. Was he on his way to dinner somewhere? Why was he walking against traffic? It was about forty degrees with a mild wind, but was overcast, with a slight rain. I saw a car turned upside down on the side of the highway called 495 (also called the Beltway). That looked like the un-Happiest Thanksgiving Ever! And on the news they said that on a highway called Route 1 inside of Alexandria Virginia, a jaywalker had been hit by a poultry truck the day before Thanksgiving. She had not survived to have her revenge by eating a turkey.

We ate a few million turkeys for Thanksgiving. Turkeys got one or two of us back by mowing us down in trucks. And maybe a few people got a bone stuck in their throat and croaked. Others were saved by the Heimlich Maneuver.

I wanted to get the wishbone, and wish for something, but two of the smaller children got it, and neither would reveal their wishes. Thank God everyone in my family survived, and I pray that all in yours did, too.