19a. Kissinger: In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here.
20. Thursday morning I walked from Union Station toward the Mall & it seemed oddly warm for January & oddly quiet after the crowds of 2009 & 2005 & 2001
21. --2001's rooftops of snipers & blocks packed with mounted police after the disputed election of the former-president-& CIA-master's son, 2005's tall laughing Restoration white people with expensive overcoats & furs, & 2009's church-dressed Black grown-ups bending down to tell children, This is history.
22. The old man on the radio in 2009, jailed in Birmingham in the 60s, on why he was going: "I just want to be there. I just want to put my feet on the ground where this is happening."
23. Thursday morning I walked to the Capitol, which looked as usual as if it were slipping down the hill it's built on
24. & the figure balanced on the dome looked like a dancer balancing on a breaking wave, above & behind the white people with cowboy hats & Southern accents taking pictures of themselves
25. --like Manhattan in August of 2004 for the Republican convention, but many of these people poorer & sadder, a Bushmaster Firearms t-shirt, a button from Reagan-Bush 1984, smoker's coughs & laughs like those of the woman on the capitol steps in Harrisburg the day of the Electoral College vote.
26. Man in suit & overcoat : You need to come to the ranch. We'll teach you how to shoot a gun in a couple of hours.
Woman in heels: I think I'd be good.
27. How the women reminded me of the world I grew up in, where being paid attention to by a man was the most important thing in the world.
28. How amid all the Southern & Western accents I found myself thinking of the voices of Woody Guthrie & Mab Segrest & Diane McWhorter & Margaret Wrinkle, for the same reasons I went to Israel/Palestine after 9.11, to stop associating a kippa with the Jewish fascists near where I lived screaming God Bless America.
29. Guardian interview with the proprietor of the Hotel Bethlehem in Pennsylvania: "Now it's like, it's almost like I left the country for 8 years, & now it's back. The country that I grew up in is now returning."
30. How where I grew up I learned quite a lot about the white settlers befriending the Native people of the town of Scituate, who for reasons not discussed were gone, but before yesterday didn't know that the only state to ratify the Constitution without slaveholders was Massachusetts.
31. My 4th great-grandfather Henry Shaw was a Congressman from Massachusetts in that Capitol in 1819, part of the first session in the new building slave labor built after the British burned the old one in a war.
32. He served on the House Ways & Means Committee. Shaw is my middle name.
33. Henry Shaw was close to Henry Clay & was never elected from Massachusetts again after he voted for Clay's Missouri Compromise, which agreed to admit Maine as a free state if Missouri could be admitted with slavery uninterrupted.
34. How Mr Holmes of Massachusetts presented the resolution that Maine be admitted
34a. & then Mr Scott of the Territory of Missouri, aka the land of the Osage, proposed that Missouri be admitted
34b. & then Mr Strong of New York "gave notice that on to-morrow he should ask leave to introduce a bill to prohibit the further extension of slavery within the Territories of the United States,"
34c. & then Mr Shaw of Massachusetts introduced a joint resolution authorizing the transmission of House messages free of postage.
35. How I sat by the Capitol & watched worried-looking people in suits pass with House & Senate manila envelopes under their arms
36. & hoped that the EPA & John Lewis & Barbara Lee were in there copying documents & planning something.
37. "Mr Clay remarked that, since the question was put, he would say at once to the gentleman from Massachusetts, & his worthy friend the chairman of the Committee on the Post Office & Post Roads, with that frankness which perhaps too much belonged to his character, that he did not mean to give his consent to the admission of the State of Maine into the Union, as long as the doctrines were upheld of annexing conditions to the admission of States into the Union from beyond the mountains."
37a. "Equality, said he, is equity." #AmericanValues
38. Mr Holmes of Massachusetts, speaking on behalf of Maine: "Will any one say we ought not to be admitted into the Union? We are answered, yes; and that, unless we will agree to admit Missouri into the Union unconditionally, we ought not to be admitted! I hope the doctrine did not extend quite as far as that. [Mr Clay here said, in an undertone, yes it did.]"
39. What Clay called the anti-slavery objections: "certain doctrines of an alarming character--which, if persevered in, no man could tell where they would end."
40. Mr Taylor of New York: "Possessing, as we do, both a moral & Constitutional right to require of Missouri a provision against slavery, as a condition of her admission, if we fail to exert it, we shall justly incur the reproach of our contemporaries, & the malediction of posterity."
41. Mr Holmes of Massachusetts, beginning the great equivocation: "But, though my feelings are strong for the abolition of slavery, they are yet stronger for the Constitution of my country. And, if I am reduced to the sad alternative to tolerate the holding of slaves in Missouri, or violate the Constitution of my country, I will not admit a doubt to cloud my choice. Sir, of what benefit would be abolition, if at a sacrifice of your Constitution? Where would be the guaranty of the liberty which you grant? Liberty has a temple here, & it is the only one which remains. Destroy this, & she must flee--she must retire among the brutes of the wilderness--"
( 41a. Slave song: "I seek my Lord in the wilderness/For I'ma goin home." )
42. "Resolved, that the subject of improving the Indian tribes in the arts of civilized life be referred to a select committee."
43. Letter to Clay from Secretary of War J.C. Calhoun, on the Civilization of the Indians: "They are not, in fact, an independent people, nor ought they to be so considered. They should be taken under our guardianship; and our opinion, not theirs, ought to prevail, in measures intended for their civilization & happiness. A system less vigorous may protract, but cannot arrest their fate."
44. What a beautiful plan it was, the Founders' experiment, leaving aside the pesky question of the disqualification of most of humanity as full human beings.
45. What if what we've learned as liberal tolerance is a mirror of the euphemisms & evasions & moral equivocations of these white men of property.
46. What if they were right to defend each others' prerogatives even in the midst of heated disagreement, because at bottom their interests were the same
47. --but ours are not, not now.
48. Representative Barbara Lee of California, January 6: "There is no doubt that the integrity of our election was compromised."
49. Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, to CNN as I sat by the Capitol: "Chris, you gotta understand, we members of Congress have a lot of information that the public does not have. And I can tell you, over the last week or two, the classified briefings that I have been to. And if the public knew what members of Congress know, I , I," & then was interrupted.
50. How I walked past the Supreme Court & had forgotten about the Roman centurion in the frieze with his fasces.
51. Holy spirit touch us, holy spirit move us all, said the man filming himself as he walked past the portable toilets with Don's Johns just barely visible under the white stickers covering the letters
52. --as Chuck Schumer tested the sound system reading a version of the speech he'd give the next day.
53. I'd been dreading DC thronged with gleeful fascists but everyone was so subdued on Thursday, & so few, on the public grass you could hardly see in 2009 because there were so many people.
54. Help her, Jesus, someone said passing, because of my vest with NO sprayed on it in orange emergency paint.