The Benghazi Trials and the Other Washington


There are times when Washington really becomes Washington—you know, the center of the world, the exercise of executive and legislative power and prerogatives, the supreme decisions from on high, always accompanied by the circus of media coverage.

The so-called Bengazi hearings and investigations of the conduct of presidential Democratic candidate and ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by a Republican-led House Select Committee on said Bengazi, is such an occasion—a purely white-pillared and pilloried convergence of politics and policy.

The much-anticipated appearance of Clinton before that committee came as Clinton caught her stride—she had all but halted Bernie Sanders rush to the top of the polls after what even her critics called a stellar debate performance. What’s more, Vice President Joe Biden—often rumored to be running in what would be a last chance to gain the presidency he had coveted for a long time—had decided not to run.

All that was left was the Bengazi hearing—her testimony went on for over ten hours without eliciting much new information.

If you listen to the testimony over the radio, you detected a tone—it resembled something like a court proceeding. It had aspects of insistency, like someone trying to get somebody to confess something which they will never do. The Democrats on the panel, on the other hand, either handed out softball questions or did their own version of expressing moral outrage. Sometimes, you got the feeling that these people should be wearing robes-black for judges, or red for priests.

The committee promised to go on and on for as long it took to get the truth, which apparently has not been found as yet. Finding the truth in Washington is a little like buying a big money lottery ticket at a 7-11. It would be rare.

Weighty as the event was in portent and potential, it remained securely located on the Hill, as a Washington event—the one the whole world sees. Those rooms, those people, are a part of the city as only in Washington, but in another way not. They are removed from where we live here in our neighborhoods from, Georgetown to Anacostia and all hoods in between.

This is the time of festivals in the city as fall grabs hold of us all, tinting the trees with colors, parking pumpkins in our yards and on our tables. Every neighborhood worthy of the name had something going on—in Adams Morgan at the corner of Columbia Road and 18th Street, people gathered for an apple festival, complete with—what else—an apple pie contest and judges.

At Lanier Heights and elsewhere in the neighborhood, the locals put on the annual Porch Fest, in which local musicians, be they solo guitarist or gospel group or singer-songwriters, park themselves by the steps, on a porch and sing for wandering audiences going from place to place with the family of man—mom, dad, children and fido in tow.

These things can produce magic or whimsy and the sense of the season that while our town is full of things important and official and the flaying of candidates, our streets gives us breadcrumbs of song, of checking out the changes on the street where new condo projects are nearing completion. Here was a 14-year-old grandson of a friend, riffing deliciously and like a grown blues man on Clapton and B.B with an electric guitar. Here was a guy, beguiling the young ladies with his soft voice about heartache and promise. Here were groups like the Tchaikovsky Ticklers, Kentucky Jim, Gracious Me, Mute Benders, the Tumbleweeeds, the Originators, the Sound of Something.

Here were the Recovering Angels, at Joseph’s House, the hospice which services the homeless at the corner of Lanier and Ontario, near day’s end. They were dressed in go-to-meeting black, with red flowers, and tie and they sang the gospel of Jesus and sang the Lord’s prayer and lifted people up and they sang, and they said “today, we were at a wedding and a coming home and a birthday,” which is just about the circle of life in a day, and they had led a life on the streets before this and it became a head-shaking,isn’t it a beautiful five o’clock kind of moment, people coming around, having a cookie and cider a long way from Bengazi, a little like life its own self.

Night time and outside, someone was putting up a skull, a scary pumpkin, getting ready for next Saturday a week away.

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