A Sense of Community in the Hullabaloo?

Last week — does anybody still remember last week? — was, in the telling of the media, commentators, strategists and experts on the workings of government and politics, one of the most momentous weeks ever seen in Washington.

Washington, a city that has seen impeachment trials, political, character and actual assassinations, visits from the pope, heads of state and talking heads, momentous inaugurations, weddings and funerals and three Super Bowl wins — as well as birthday celebrations for buildings, institutions, former presidents and pandas.

In the waning days of the first 100 days of the presidency of Donald Trump, Washington saw the beginning of hearings on the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice, along with an improbable and startling appearance by the director of the FBI, at which he said there was an ongoing — for months — investigation into the possibility of collusion between administration officials and Russia during the course of the 2016 presidential campaign and election.

Finally, there was the mighty congressional rumble over “Repeal and Replace,” trying to pass a new law that would repeal and replace Obamacare, a project House Republicans have without interruption dreamed of day and night since it was passed in the previous president’s first administration. It was a bill — supported by the might of the administration and the president — that was almost immediately hated by everyone and led to loud and testy town hall meetings all over the country.

Far from helping anybody, it was said that its passage would lead to millions more Americans losing their insurance, among other problems. The president — at various times during his candidacy and ever after — had made it his mission to destroy and end Obamacare “immediately,” “on his first day in office” or fairly soon thereafter. The moment had come when House Speaker Paul Ryan crafted, somewhat hastily, a new health plan that repealed Obamacare and put something else in its place.

Nevertheless, the president himself intervened and pressured (cajole, threaten, intimidate and repeat) recalcitrant members of the ultra-right House Freedom Caucus to vote for the bill. The president had assured backers that it would pass. Ryan was forced to come to the White House by Friday — when a showdown vote was scheduled — to say that it wouldn’t.

It was an embarrassment for the man who had written and practiced “The Art of the Deal,” the self-styled master negotiator.

Maybe he was distracted. Half the voices out there seemed to be speaking with a Russian accent, or at least about the Trump administration’s Russian problem, which, like some unwanted stray cat that had gotten into the house, simply wouldn’t go away. The president counterpunched by tweeting that President Barack Obama had wiretapped him in Trump Tower, a claim that was again soundly trashed by the FBI director under oath last week. Trump apparently hoped that the House committee formed to investigate the Russians would investigate the alleged wiretapping instead of contacts between Trump associates and Russians.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California) — who was a member of Trump’s transition team but is now the committee chairman — added fuel to the controversy by making a late-night trip to an unnamed place at the White House, meeting with an unnamed source and getting all sorts of information about “incidental surveillance,” which he shared with the president, but not with his fellow committee members.

And so it went, and still does, with some folks on the Hill calling for his head or at least his recusal. The beat goes on, punch and counterpunch. In the middle of it all, Press Secretary Sean Spicer sparred with the media, making pronouncements of dubious veracity, picking fights about Russian dressing, and so on.

A lot of this is damning or ridiculous — often both. It is our daily diet of Trump, breakfast, lunch and dinner through the late show. It is as if we, the people, are doing a form of penance brought on by the election of a man who needs constant attention.

All this chaos-theory behavior is starting to become routine, because the daily and nightly tweets, the talk of saving the coal industry, of the wall, of refugees and immigration policies that as yet don’t exist, the son-in-law and the daughter in the White House (but not the First Lady), the daily babblings of the press secretary, are all of a piece. There is no scale, no context, no sense of priorities or weight. You can go from a refusal to throw out the first pitch at the Nationals’ season opener and switch directly to claims of fake news, go back to remembering the awkward news conference with the visiting German chancellor and the attempted undoing of Obama’s environmental regulations.

Mostly, it’s exhausting, and it all seems somehow contrived and disconnected from daily life, and it shouldn’t be. The intensity emanating from the Hill and the White House — when Trump is in residence and not recharging his batteries at Mar-a-Lago or at a rally of his base — seems not quite real. It doesn’t feel that it has a base of genuine feelings, purpose or principles, or carefully considered and rational thought.

This all feels heavy-handed and familiar at the same time. That so much importance is attached to every utterance, tweet and gesture of the president and his mostly mediocre minions suggest that we have lost our way, and forgotten the sweet things and the tragic things, the laughter and love things, the important nuts and bolts of life that remain.

I think that the most important things during that time were those things untouched by politics or by the noises coming from the glittery digital world of screen and scream.

For me, it was the lush voice of jazz singer Hanka Gregusova at the Slovakian Embassy last Friday, as she and a local trio — Kris Funn on double bass, Anthony Wonsey on piano and John Lumkin on drums — coaxed joyful feelings out of the audience. It was the presence of spring in my neighborhood, when it finally came, surviving buds, kids in the park, people to and fro on the Duke Ellington Bridge. It was seeing “Ragtime,” an enduring historical musical in a historic place, Ford’s Theatre, where we sat next to a buoyantly curious school principal named Jim Bowie from Texarkana, Arkansas.

There was a sense of community — and common joy and interest — at both occasions that seems absent in the hullabaloo generated by our elected leaders and the fragmented media trying to keep up.

Scanning the Google headlines just now, it appears that President Trump has declared war on the Freedom Caucus and that the White House Deputy Chief of Staff has left the administration. Putin again denied doing anything nefarious about our elections, and also said he was ready to meet Trump.

Some members of the media priesthood slaughtered a virtual goat to see what the omens might be.

And so it goes and so it went.