Emil Orlik: Three Women 1905

" … a much broader connection than I ever could have discovered had I just stayed home."

Our Exile was as much a political act as it was social. Our business went bankrupt in no small part due to the corrupt practices of the George W. Bush administration. The mortgage bubble his supply-sided economic policies promoted ultimately brought down the economy on our shoulders. He'd been doing damage to the high-tech industries our consulting firm relied upon since the very beginning of his very first term. His hasty invasion of Afghanistan, followed by his foolish incursion into Iraq on blatantly false premises, had amplified uncertainty, which is one thing every economy fears. The oughts were fraught with stupid political turbulence. We fled into Exile and the welcoming, reassuring arms of the first term of the Obama administration. Washington, DC, in those days, was a palpably hopeful place. Obama had made viable a hope many had not dared to dream. We relocated to a place very near the center of that renewed enthusiasm.

We had been politically active before being Exiled. The Muse had been an enthusiastic Dean supporter, and I'd helped write the local Democratic Party's platform that last year we were home. It seems true that all politics are local, for when we relocated into Exile, we lost those affiliations that had sustained us through the abysmal George W. years. We needn't have feared, for Takoma Park was firmly ensconced on the proper side of politics. Jamie Raskin was our neighbor there, and Montgomery County was solidly Democratic. Takoma Park has an activist history. A quorum could be quickly mustered for or against almost any issue. The city hall featured an auditorium specifically designed to host arguments, and it did.

But we were strangers there. We had no local history of political activism. With Obama in the White House for four more years, we had no issues to redress at the national level, and we were ignorant to indifference about local matters. We hadn't accumulated enough history to knowledgeably support or reject much of any proposition. We had left our political positions back in our homeland. Since The Muse worked in Department of Energy office space, we felt closer to our federal government than we'd ever felt before. We went to a Capitol Hill watering hole to watch Obama's State of the Union speeches; once wandering back toward the Metro across the Capitol complex, we ran into Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and shook hands.

We could see the consequences of our nation's political choices in our everyday lives. Even then, we could clearly see the Republican minority moving to clench whatever power they could grab. I was present at the first Capitol Hill Tea Party Rally, where the press outnumbered the protestors several to one. It was a public relations campaign unrelated to reality, populated by charlatans and attracting the usual shills. We'd heard the stories from government officials about how Bush's political appointees abandoned their posts after he lost the election to Obama, not even thinking about helping their replacements transition into their roles. The Republicans had become such a toxic force by the time we arrived in DC in early 2009 that we believed we'd probably never see them retake the White House. The shenanigans we've seen in the last few years have only served to amplify my fears that malign forces are bound and determined to steal this Democracy and run it into the ground.

We were fortunate to get Exiled to DC, where we could see the beauty of our government in action. We met and got to know many who had dedicated their lives to government service. We saw little evidence of much swampiness, except when Republicans started pitching their fables. They seemed to have come to Washington to undermine governance. They cynically chose to believe that government, even self-government, couldn't have a legitimate role to play in society. The absurd idea that it might be shrunk to size and drowned in a bathtub ignored the necessity of the government's presence. Those inconvenienced by regulations have never outnumbered the ones who were injured by the absence of them. Government spending is only sometimes wasteful, even when on unimaginable scales, but often helpful, even necessary to balance and stabilize our economy. We daren't rely upon private capital to even attempt to create more perfect unions, as if they'd want to, anyway.

I wish everyone could get Exiled to Washington to meet the myths of the place face-to-face and shake hands with their representatives in the context within which they labor for us. The honest ones there, the ones who revere their roles and themselves, continue the tradition that first defined us as a nation. Those other clowns seem to be still prosecuting the Whiskey Rebellion. If all politics are local, it might be impossible for national politics ever to get reasonable because most of our vast population will never enjoy the opportunity to live and work in DC. For me, it changed everything in my understanding of our noble experiment. It demonstrated E Pluribus Unum in person as I rode the Metro with every possible combination of people in this world. I lost my local political connections when I went into Exile, but I found a much broader connection than I ever could have discovered had I just stayed home.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz