National lampoon

A recent trip to the capitol makes one wonder if we've gone too far in dethroning our heroes

by Walter Crockett

So how did you like your Washington trip? I asked my 12-year-old daughter.

"Good!" she replied.

What did you like about it?

"Stuff."

But what in particular?

"I don't know," she whined. "Everything."

And thus did the willful inarticulateness of the pre-teen defeat the best-laid plans of the calculating codger. I had accompanied my daughter and her seventh-grade class on a three-day excursion to Washington, DC, last week, hoping to write a column on the kids' reactions to the capitol city. I had planned to compare their observations to my own to come up with something profound just in time for deadline.

As it turns out, I'm having serious trouble figuring out what I think about the visit. I don't have a clue what they think about it. They did have a good time, that's for sure. And they did bring back memories -- of what, I'm not sure. Every day, thousands of high school and junior high school students from all over the country descend upon DC in shorts and matching T-shirts, with chaperones and teachers -- overrunning the motels, annoying the tour guides, depleting the inventory of cheap ground beef and salty fries at Planet Hollywood, and sending congressmen and senators scurrying up and down the capitol steps for photo opportunities.

They rush from monument to mausoleum, from library to museum, from pillar to post -- on the bus, off the bus, and on the bus again -- breakfasting on plastic-wrapped doughnuts and plastic-wrapped pastry, lunching at McDonalds, supping on rubber chicken and blubbery ribs in dreary food factories that would shut up shop tomorrow if the flow of starving students were to ebb even slightly.

They rise at 5:30 a.m. and fall asleep around midnight. They never stay in any one place long enough to get a full understanding of its significance. And -- after three or four days of flitting about -- they return to their native cities exhausted to the point of illness.

But they all seem to enjoy it -- and they all must learn something from it, mustn't they? Since I don't have a clue what they learned, I'll tell you some of what I learned.

Our bus, driven by a white-haired, big-bellied storyteller named Joe, who claimed to be a retired detective, had a VCR. Thus, I learned that Austin Powers is a fairly stupid, somewhat repulsive movie that contains more sex than adults can comfortably consume in the presence of kids. Ghostbusters, however, stands the test of time, while Men in Black is amusing, Jurassic Park is ho-hum, and Hercules is third-rate Disney. The movies we watched were "escapist entertainment" in the most profound sense. They overflowed with the burning desire of Americans to get off this planet we've wasted, to get out of this reality we can't cope with.

And the special effects in these movies made our first view of the capitol seem pretty tame. Had the Washington Monument suddenly metamorphosed into a giant cockroach with super-powers, now that would have been a sight to remember.

But even without aliens Washington is an impressive city -- all those stately columns and blocks of granite, all those hefty, important-looking buildings set low on the skyline so as not to upstage the capitol building and the Washington Monument. You can't help but feel that something grave, important, and dignified is going on here -- something beautiful even, in the sense that truth, justice, liberty, and equality are beautiful. And, after several days of monument hopping, you eventually get a feeling for the principles this country was founded on.

That feeling came to me on the last day, as we walked among the waterfalls and along the Potomac at the monument to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Low and sprawling, FDR's monument isn't as awe-inspiring as Lincoln's or Washington's. But carved on its blocks of pink South Dakota granite are some of Roosevelt's better quotations -- words that convey what this country is really all about.

"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all citizens, whatever their background," Roosevelt said. "We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."

NEVER BEFORE IN THE HISTORY of our country have its founding ideals been thrown into such sharp contrast with its seedy realities. Politicians have lied and sinned throughout history, but never before in America have their lies been subject to such merciless scrutiny and their sins uncovered with such cynical delight.

Our tour guide was a rumpled former stockbroker who met us in the morning and departed after the last monument was put to bed each night. He tended to ramble and he sometimes talked over the kids' heads, but he gave us a wealth of information, much of which a student group wouldn't have heard 30 years ago.

He mentioned Monica Lewinsky, and the kids laughed knowingly. He told us that George Washington was the richest man in the country and that his tobacco plantation at Mount Vernon, the biggest in the country, had 350 slaves. "Tobacco was sort of the cocaine of its day in the 17th and 18th centuries," the tour guide said. "A poisonous, addictive drug. They raised it with slave labor."

He pointed out that by the 1840s the tobacco growers had exhausted the soil around the capitol and made their living instead by breeding young slaves and selling them down the river. He even called into question Washington's ability to throw a silver dollar across the Potomac.

In my youth, such sordid facts wouldn't have been allowed to get in the way of our reverence for the Founding Fathers. In my youth, American heroes were gods and God was on our side.

In the '60s, we rebelled against this whitewashing of history. Now I tune in Jay Leno every night to see what clever things he'll have to say about the president's sexual appetite and penchant for campaign corruption. And as I laugh or wince at the jokes, I wonder if the pendulum hasn't swung too far away from adulation, too close to an unrelenting cynicism about the true potential of the human race.

Everywhere you go in official Washington -- not in the real Washington, a black inner city that is home to hundreds of thousands of the descendants of slaves -- everywhere you go you see evidence of slaughter. Two-hundred-eighty thousand graves in Arlington National Cemetery. More than 50,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial. Monuments to those who died in World War I, in Korea, at Iwo Jima. The price of freedom, and sometimes the price of capitalism, paid by young men sent to war by old men.

Our bus driver, Joe, wouldn't go to the Vietnam Memorial because his younger brother's name was inscribed there. So the kids' principal brought him back a rubbing of the name.

The kids had their picture taken with Sen. John Kerry, who looks as trim and handsome as a senator in a TV docudrama. They missed an appointment with Congressman Jim McGovern because the lines were so long at the Holocaust Museum, where they were deeply moved by the story of a Jewish boy's experience in Nazi Germany. I was pleased that an exhibit designed not to instill patriotism but to inspire compassion could hit its mark.

Around noon on the second day, the tour guide made an announcement that provoked the loudest applause of the entire trip. "We are going to Union Station for two things," he said. "One is lunch -- and the other is shopping." The bus rang with cheers.

Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear. Freedom to shop at Union Station. Is this a great country, or what?