Washington D.C.

by Nouri Lumendifi (Algeria)

Capitol Hill, the most powerful mound in the world. It is on this collection of office buildings, court houses and various other components of the U.S. capitol that I was dropped off on, given a map with a dark black perimeter drawn around the edge of major landmarks, a strip with a list of appointments, and told to stay. I was attending a program in entrepreneurship and global business in Washington D.C., and Capitol Hill day was an integral part of this experience, during which I was to “take ownership of the American democracy”.

I was set loose upon the capitol at 9:00 AM, Wednesday morning. I had three appointments, each with representatives from the State of Connecticut: one with Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, and two other with Senators Joseph Lieberman and Chris Dodd. My first appointment was with Mrs. DeLauro, in the Rayburn office building at 10:30. I stood in front of the capitol building and looked at my map of the Hill. Rayburn was just north of where I was standing and so I proceeded intently in that direction. I was expecting a long and arduous walk down a long city street; it was at least 95 degrees that day, with high humidity. But somewhat to my surprise, it didn’t take long to get there at all, and I was a full hour or more early for my appointment. The Rayburn building is a massive and imposing structure made of marble, with gold occasionally alluding to the grandeur of its occupants. Regal gargoyles and classically styled statues adorn its face. A sprawling staircase gives way to six massive pillars that make the building look at home on the Hill. Office workers, members of Congress, journalists and security personnel buzzed in and out of its doors, each on their own mission. Since I was early, and I was afraid to appear suspicious going through security and then just waiting around in the lobby or wandering the halls aimlessly, I decided to take a seat on a stone bench on the building’s landing.

I was sitting next to a messy grey-haired, middle aged man with an overflowing brown briefcase next to him, talking quickly on his cell phone. His voice was deep, and sounded familiar, like a newscaster’s. He carried a generic American accent, and I could not tell where he was from. I had nothing better to do, and so while I bided my time I began to listen to his conversation while reading a copy of Reason. He said that he had been informed, during a stop over in Amman on his way back to the States from some unidentified Middle Eastern country, that Hezb Allah had kidnaped two Israeli soldiers. I began to listen more closely.

“Yeah, it’s apparently gotten really bad, the Israelis are starting to move into Lebanon…I’m probably not going to be heading to Beirut anytime soon,” I kept listening as he told the other side that “It’s getting to be a huge mess”. He had a meeting, he said, hung up his phone and went into the building quickly.

I thought to myself, He sounds authoritative, he’s going into a meeting, maybe he knows what’s going on. I didn’t initially believe it. Why would Hezb Allah do anything like that now, and it would have been all over the news if Israel had done anything I Lebanon, it sounds like a rumor. Maybe he misunderstood. A limousine let out a batch of sharply dressed, Middle Eastern-looking men. Several other people walked into the building quickly at the same time, a set of three black women, a half-dozen white men. All of them walked quickly, it was almost ten o’clock. They wanted to be on time. The men from the limousine spoke in upper-class Levantine Arabic, with scowls on their faces, and sweat escaping onto their faces from their bald heads. I didn’t hear anything especially notable, and I did, it was unintelligible (they were rather far away from me). I decided from their accents that they had to be Palestinians or Jordanians, maybe some of them were Lebanese. I watched them go in. It was 9:55.

I thought about the plans my relatives had made for the summer. The Grand Canyon. Timgad. Summer camp. Summer school. Tyre. I was worried. My great-uncle, and his sons and their children had gone to Lebanon. He was from there, he had not been to his home city of Tyre since 1977. It was the ideal time to go, or at least it was. His grandchildren had yet to travel to Lebanon, and the only Arabic they knew were religious phrases. They must be terrified, I thought. Shit. I felt sweat gathering on my neck and forehead. Almost 100 degrees, and I just had to wear a business suit. Dress code.

I was very worried at this point, and, having been rebuffed for comment by several suits on their way to their meetings, and lacking any resources in the area code but one, I opened up my cell phone to try to find somebody I thought might watch the news. I looked at my school mate’s numbers, knowing that most of them either would not be up this early or did not watch the news, I decided to call Leila, who had emailed me her phone number a few days earlier in case I “needed anything”. I didn’t exactly need anything, but I wanted to know if the story was true or not, so I would know whether or not I needed to call my parents when I got back to my dormitory. So I dialed her up. She answered, I said, Hello, Leila? as any semi-rude teenager would. “Yes, who is this?” Nouri. “Oh, hi! What’s up?” I asked her if she had heard anything about this. She had not. She kindly flipped through the television news chanlels for me but could not find anything about Hezb Allah or Israel.

I wondered whether or not I should just go into the building, not least because I was afraid of being late and because I didn’t want my shirt to be uncomfortably wet from the heat. I spied a security guard taking a smoking break. I decided to ask him if going in early was wise, his and answer was affirmative. It’s viewed as being polite because it allows them to be more flexible with their schedule if you come early and the person in question is in the office, and they might not have been when your appointment was supposed to take place. I always make sure that I am at least 20 minutes early for any engagement, be it a meeting, a date, a trip, an interview, whatever. I am very rarely late, and if I am, it is usually because of somebody else, or because something is wrong.

So I headed in through security, which was surprisingly quick and light. I even set off the metal detector, with no questions asked. When I got through to the other side, I was set off to do as I pleased, there was no information or guard’s desk from what I could see.

I was struck briefly by how high the ceilings were, how wide the stairwells were, how white the marble was. It was truly a sight to see. I went up a large staircase and looked for a directory. I found two or three before actually finding the correct one that would lead me to Congresswoman DeLauro’s office. I found it, and made my way to the bronze colored elevators down the hall. I stepped in with an attractive blonde woman, who appeared to be an intern. I accidentally made eye contact with her, and she began to bite her lip. I leaned against the opposite side of the elevator and looked at my watch, 10:03 AM. She asked me my name. I said Nouri. “That’s an interesting name,” she said. This elevator ride will not be over. Her name was Holly. I straightened out my tie. She kept looking at me, up and down in a flattering way. I looked at the numbers on top of the door, we were approaching the third floor, where I planned to get off. The bell rang, the doors opened and I walked out. She followed, and it seemed as if every female in the Rayburn building was under thirty, hot and wearing a miniskirt. I walked quickly around the corner and found my way to my appointment.
The doors were open, the room was red, photographs of and awards from New Haven were all around. A young white man wearing a white shirt and black tie, holding two phones at the same time struggled frantically to take down messages and phone numbers behind a large wood reception desk. Another across from him was empty. I gave him my name and he told me to take a seat and that an aide would be with me momentarily.

I sat down on a large black leather couch and began reading a copy of a magazine with a picture of Vladimir Putin on the cover. Russian democracy, gas prices. I grew bored, and tired and began to rest my eyes. Just then, another young many popped out from a door next to me, hair parted down the middle, and black glasses. He was Rosa DeLauro’s chief aide. We would wait to see if she was able to come in, and if not he would show me around the office and answer any questions that I might have.

She didn’t show, and so he showed me her office, explained some pictures, and explained what her congressional peer rating meant. DeLauro is more liberal than something like 87% of her peers, based on her voting record, he said. He could not identify the former mayor of New Haven, with whom she was pictured on the wall, which I don’t fault him for, he was from New Britain, some ways down the coast. We talked about high school activities, he was just out of college, and so it was fresh in his memory. I took a look at her voting record, and she seemed to have voted “No” on most things I would have voted “Yes”, especially economic and foreign policy matters. Socially, I think we agreed.

I asked him if he had watched the news, and if he could verify whether or not the Hezb Allah story was true. He turned on a little Panasonic television set in her eclectic office. Nothing. He hurried into another room to check the net. A few minutes later, he emerged from the copy room, with two news stories. “We will turn the clock back 20 years on Lebanon”, Ehud Olmert. The story was so new that the accompanying photograph was from 1983, noting Israel’s previous Lebanese conflict.

I found my way to Senator Lieberman’s office, on the other side of the Hill, later on after lunch with another kid from Connecticut. All the kids from our state had the same appointment. We waited with the other four Nutmeggers for about forty-five minutes to meet the Senator. One of the kids from the program who lives in Greenwich seemed to have gone to school with, or to have gone to the same school as every aide or receptionist in the office. He was Jewish, but didn’t practice, and he was the richest of all us in the group. His school is among the best in the state, he wasn’t particularly bright, and somewhat taciturn, but he wasn’t stupid. His school seemed to dominate the conversation in waiting.

When it finally came time for the picture – there was no conversation or Q and A– I was positioned next to the Senator, along with a busty Ukranian-Jewish-American girl from Trumbull. Before the photo-op the Senator asked each of us our names, where we were from, where we went to school, and shook our hands. He remembered me from a fundraiser my parents had once attended. As soon as the flash was through, the Senator ran off to official business. My friend from Trumbull remarked that she had been positioned next to her Congressman Chris Shays as well. Of course it was because she was female, cute, and “ethnic” looking, she said. I concurred.
We didn’t meet Chris Dodd, again we met with the chief aide in a sprawling blue walled office, with model sailing ships and golf clubs in glass cases. Dodd inherited the office from his father, whose portrait hung over the fireplace in his conference room. His aide named politicians and diplomats framed on the blue walls. He, like the previous Senator, was a Jew, though not a member of Connecticut’s old Jewish community. He was born in the State of Georgia, and his accent revealed as much. He looked like the Debate Team captain that I had admired my sophomore year, Scott, but he was himself. A southern Jew whose parents had moved to Connecticut when he began studying at Brandies University in Massachusetts. He decided to work for Senator Dodd because he didn’t agree with his own representatives very Republican and very conservative views, and because he had taken up residency in the Constitution State for two years. He was highly knowledgeable and was seeking to enter academia, teaching and writing about political science and Congress. He was nervous though, as we all noticed. “I think he was really nervous because he could tell we all really wanted to meet Dodd, and he obviously wasn’t Dodd,” the Trumbullite said afterwards. “I don’t know, were you disappointed? I was disappointed”, she said. I won’t lie, I was, but just a little bit.

During all the time that I was in Washington D.C., I didn’t have many negative experiences with Jewish youths, or adults. The only ones that I found myself in disagreement with were those on television or in the newspapers, making cries of “anti-Semitism” to oppose any sympathy for innocent people in the worsening conflict. The other participants in the program came from all over the country, and the world. I met a Palestinian from Honduras; an Irish goat farmer; a Colombian from Greenwich; numerous South Asians from what appeared to be every region and state in the Union. I was the lone Arab, Arab, that is identifying myself primarily as Arab-Berber-Middle Eastern-etc. There were a few other Muslims, all of whom were South Asian, and a sizable number of African-Americans and American Latinos. I met a Venezuelan that lives in Guatemala.
The girl from Trumbull was one of my favorite people I met. She was funny, and talkative. When we would sit together at lectures and I would begin to fall asleep, she’d wake me up so I wouldn’t get in trouble, and we exchanged cross country experiences, and discussed her desire to set up a debate team at her school. We knew the same areas of Connecticut, and had similar interests and experiences (she immigrated to the US from the Ukraine around the same time I entered American schools and was also semi-trilingual, knowing about as much Russian as I know Arabic, speaking Ukrainian as I do Chaoui and mostly speaking English outside the home). We visited monuments together, and decided which were “bad ass” and which were honorable, but lame. The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials fall into the former category; the World War II monument into the latter.
I stood on the very same square at the Lincoln memorial that Martin Luther King Jr. did when he gave his “I have a dream” speech. It was a tremendous view. At the Jefferson memorial, I watched the presidential helicopter whiz by. Americans probably have more statues dedicated to liberty or the defense of liberty per capita than anybody else in the world.
I did meet one character, whose real name I never quite learned, because by the time I was introduced to his personage he had already been given the nickname “Screech“, who seemed intent on offending me and every other religious minority in the program.

Screech was from Pennsylvania (“somewhere in the middle of nowhere” was how he described his town) and his voice was shrill, his body awkwardly thin, his nose cartoonishly large, and his manner exceedingly squirrel-like. At every lecture we attended, he managed to ask some irrelevant or pointless question, seemingly just for the sake of asking questions. By the second day, when he rose to ask questions at the end of presentations, other students would snicker, say “Yo, it’s Screech!” and other juvenile things that young audiences often do.

I first met him one-on-one in the lobby of our dormitory. He, and another student from New York (Long Island), of Sephardic Uzbek Jewish descent, were looking over that days New York Times, which featured the latest pictures of the conflict in Lebanon. They were arguing over who was to fault. The New Yorker argued that Israel’s response was unfair and unjust, and tried to explain to Screech that Hezb Allah did not represent Lebanon and was not the Lebanese Army. Screech disagreed, stating that since Hezb Allah was Lebanese, Israel had the right to “destroy all of Lebanon! They need to be crippled! It must defend itself!” I had never heard such rhetoric used in public, let alone in person. It was frightening, the way he went on and on so frantically. I butted in briefly to explain that Hezb Allah was not part of the Lebanese Army, and that Lebanon is not totally controlled by Hezb Allah. He didn’t believe me, and began shouting about the evils of Muslims. This I had heard before, he obviously did not know I was Muslim, and so I decided that I would end my participation in this discussion and go to the lounge to socialize and relax.

Later on, I would be told by my friend from Trumbull, who was in his “caucus group” that he was a “religious nut”, and that he had verbally attacked a few Hindu students. He told one that Gandhi had “gone to Hell”, and that he too would burn in Hell for worshiping “Demons”. She said he had told her that her Judaism would lead her to a terrible fate. I decided to keep my distance from him. But one evening after dinner, I had come down stairs late. I got my dinner and finished after most people had already moved on to their rooms or to doing naughty things that young people do in co-educational environments. The last of us in the mess hall were myself, a Guamian student, Screech, the New Yorker, his roommate, and the Hindu who was “going to Hell”. I overheard the New Yorker and his roommate arguing with Screech over the idea of violence and the nature of the Crusades. It was rather mature, save for Screech’s banter. I heard several sentences I would deem “historically mature”, but it soon became a shouting match. That’s not how debates are supposed to be carried out, I decided. So I took a seat at their table and observed.

Judging by his arguments, I decided he was Catholic. He argued that the Crusades and the Crusaders were totally just and noble. They were needed to stave off “heathens”. It made me want to start speaking just to say “infidels”. I listened. Then I entered. I told him that historically the Crusaders, no matter how “noble” their cause, had not lived up to the myth he seemed to believe in. They pillaged Orthodox villages and churches, looted, massacred, and were generally not a benevolent bunch. “Liar!” he called me. I named massacres for, fresh in my mind from an article I had read a week or so before. He’d have none of it. The Orthodox and the Catholic Church have always been brothers! Right. Have you been to an Orthodox church? I asked. He’d not. If you talk to many Orthodox priests or historians they will often tell you about the evils (their words not mine) of the Crusaders, especially if this is a Middle Eastern Orthodox Church (which were most afflicted by the Crusades).

The New Yorker said the Crusades were comparable to jihad, after Screech told us that the Crusades were intended to retake the Holy Land from heathens. His comparison made sense, especially since he noted Bin Laden’s demand that non-Muslims be removed from the hold land of Islam. Screech screeched, “There is nothing comparable between Islam and Christianity, nothing!” I rolled my eyes. He then turned to me, finger wagging, “Does Israel have a right to exist?”

I responded with “Why?” Not because I didn’t and wanted to skirt the issue, I really wanted to know what that had to do with anything. He knew I was Muslim by now, so in his eyes, I suppose, I had lost much of my credibility and if I answered in the negative I would lose it all. He told me “it’s important.” So I said yes and asked him if Palestinians had a right to a state. He said no. I sighed and leaned back in my chair. The religious discussion resumed.

I am not a religious man, but I do believe in the Abrahamic God, and I do believe that there is wisdom in the holy books of most religions, even in the Kitab-e-Aqdass. I’m not a fanatic, and I’m not a religious expert. I believe in the basics, I don’t read hadiths (I was raised not to), I’ve been to Christian services (Orthodox and Quaker) and of course to mosque. I’ve visited Jewish temples on holidays and Shabbat, and I listen when Mormons try to convert me. I try not to judge other people’s religion when I don’t know everything about it. It isn’t my place. But Screech did. He quoted the Qur’an (not directly, but through paraphrasing and saying, “My friend said…”), and when I asked if he’d read it (knowing that he was not quoting it, but rather a dubious hadith), he said “I have read portions of it”, obviously out of context, and not the whole thing. Even if I hadn’t read it myself, I’d have known he hadn’t, because he charged that I “don’t believe Jesus is a prophet”. I was thoroughly irritated at this point, because most people who take a high and mighty stance have read the books of those they criticize and condemn. He’d not read any of the Hindu scriptures, and knew only that the religion praised multiple deities. Yet he had decided that it was impossible for a Hindu to be a “just person”. I have read the Torah, the Talmud, the Christian Bible, the Qur’an, Kitab-e-Aqdass, the Upanishads, and several other eastern religious texts. Even still, I don’t call Hindus demon worshipers as Screech called Kal (the Hindu) and myself. He asked me why I did not believe that Jews were humans but animals, and I informed him that the opposite was true. He would have none of it, he slammed his fist on the table, knocking over his plastic water cup. Snickers all around, I contained mine. I usually have a straight face; I’m told I’m a “serious” looking person.

Even though this lunatic continued shouting and slamming, every other Christian present, along with several Hindus and even atheistic students debunked him. Soon my caucus leader, a history teacher from Tennessee entered the fold. He honestly resembled Al Gore, partly because of his accent and his appearance. He asked him “Who did Jesus say had the right to judge?” after a lengthy treatise on the Council of Nicaea and other theological subjects that Screech had mischaracterized or misunderstood. He stammered out briefly, “Well, well…” before the Leader informed him that “God and God’s word may judge”. Screech shouted that “I can call a spade a spade and a demon a demon!” Which are you? You are neither. “He worships a demon and he worships millions!” he exclaimed pointing first at me and then at Kal. By now I was laughing along with Kal, because the whole scene really was comical. I began to think, I’m going to hurt somebody’s feelings if I stay here much longer laughing and so I removed myself to go prep for that night’s lecture.

I had never expected to see a Southerner “bitch out”, as Kal put it, a Northerner on a religious topic, especially on grounds of tolerance and simple respect. Washington D.C. is a lot like New York, though it struck me as being more tolerant and a hell of a lot cleaner. New York is not a terrible city. It is extremely diverse and filled with excitement. The downside is, however, that each of these different groups seems to hate another as much as it loves New York, and you can tell. Spend a week or two around Bangladeshis, Koreans, Chinese or Arabs in a black neighborhood in the Bronx, Brookline or Queens. D.C. has a much different feel to it. After my program was up, I stayed in a mostly Salvadorian and Ethiopian neighborhood, and there was not the kind of rudeness or hostility between these groups and blacks or even whites (I’ve noticed that in mostly or previously mostly black areas, white people and immigrants tend to become targets of bigotry or harassment). People were amiable and generally got along and minded their own business. What they said in their homes is a different matter, but things were very relaxed where I was. I doubt D.C. is perfect, but I think that it’s a lot different than most US cities. Most people don’t seem to have been born there, and those who are don’t seem to mind those who aren’t. Whenever I’ve been around Americans from across the country brought together they tend along and those who are divisive unnecessarily usually get put in their place. I met girls that wore rings that meant they were abstinent until marriage who were made to room with girls from Long Island that, in their own words, “Couldn’t get enough man”, and got along well, save for normal interpersonal/catty matters. Left to its own devises, I think most of America that I’ve seen would be a very odd place. Without transplants and immigrants, Americans would be hopelessly provincial. The more Americans from different places you get together, I think the better they balance out and the prettier the national face is. I like Americans.