Aldon L. Nielsen

Report from Occupied D.C.

                                                                                    “Icy roads at Georgia Ave and Decatur NW.”

An unexceptional report, except that this message in the Ring Camera Neighbors alerts came in August, with temperatures nearing 100 degrees. As they have so often done over the decades, the citizens of the nation’s capital had come up with a way to alert one another to the presence of immigration agents harassing folks in the neighborhoods. Similar moments of humor mixed with protest have erupted on nearly a daily basis. There was the “poop on the Resolute desk” art installation placed on the mall by somebody calling themselves Civic Crafted LLC. Followed most recently by a statue of Trump and Epstein dancing happily together again erected by “The Secret Handshake” in honor of National Friendship Week. That one was quickly removed by the authorities, claiming it was in violation of unspecified requirements of the permit the group had gotten from the Park Service.

           But humor aside, these acts of resistance rapidly multiplying come at a time of the most serious dangers. In June, Trump federalized the National Guard of California, sending them into the streets of Los Angeles. Our laws clearly state that the President must undertake such actions  “through the governors of the States.”  There is an exception to that rule in the insurrection acts, but curiously, Trump did not invoke those acts when bypassing California’s Governor Newsom and sending the Guard into Los Angeles against the will of Californians. The Governor won an initial ruling against the activation, but that was soon reversed by an appeals court. By then, concerns about violations of the Posse Comitatus Act had at least confined the Guard pretty much to guarding an array of federal buildings that were not under attack from anybody. Meanwhile, local journalists reported, the Guardsmen were being quartered in decidedly unsatisfactory venues, many of them reduced to sleeping on the floor. On September 2, another federal court ruled the deployment illegal, but by then it was essentially a moot point. The Guard had nothing to do, and they were doing it.

            No doubt encouraged by those developments, Illinois Governor Pritzger and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson held multiple press conferences opposing any such action in Chicago, and to date no similar steps have been attempted by the Trump administration, despite the President’s numerous racist threats against the city, threats that bear no relation to the fact that Chicago ranks in the lowest tier of large American cities when it comes to measures of violent crime. Trump seems to have shifted his attention to another city with a large minority population and a Black Mayor, in a state with a more MAGA, and thus more pliable Governor, Memphis.

            In the meantime, however, he has, as have Presidents from Nixon to now, focused his attentions on another City he has long hated, the nation’s capital. Despite seldom venturing more than a few blocks into the city from his White House fortress, Trump constantly issues proclamations about the supposed evils among the more than 700,000 citizens who live and work in Washington, D.C.  On August 11, Trump issued an executive order proclaiming an emergency and seizing control of the Metropolitan Police Department. Unlike any other city in the United States, D.C. can see its police force taken over by the President in an emergency (apparently real or wholly imaginary) for a period of thirty days, after which a joint resolution of both the House and Senate is required to continue the usurpation. Trump also issued a memorandum ordering the Secretary of Defense to mobilize the D.C. National Guard to assist in law enforcement in the city, something he had refused to do when the Capitol itself was under assault from his followers, who assaulted police officers attempting to protect our Congress. It wasn’t until Vice President Pence took it upon himself to make the call that the Guard, who had been standing by the entire time, were finally activated. (To this day, videos showing the clearing of the Capitol and its grounds have never been seen by the public.) Trump was able to send in the Guard without consulting a Governor, because there is no Governor and the Mayor has no power over the National Guard of her own District.

            A state like Wyoming, with a population two-hundred thousand fewer than D.C., has two Senators and a Congressional Representative. The American citizens who live in the capital city have no voting representation in Congress at all, only a non-voting delegate. At least when Democrats hold the majority, that Delegate is usually allowed to vote in the House District Committee, but when Republicans rule that vote is stripped away. Congress has complete control over the District’s budget, and can overrule any law that D.C.’s elected City Council and Mayor enact. Presidents have long taken advantage of these facts to foist experiments on the Capital’s citizenry that might not be welcome in state’s with at least nominal self-government, as when Nixon used D.C. to test the idea of the “no-knock warrant.” Then resident of D.C. Gil Scott-Heron wrote:

                       You explained it to me, I must admit, but just

                        For the record, you were talking shit

                        Long rapped about no-knock being legislated

                        For the people you've always hated

                        In this hellhole that you, we, call home

Congress and the President continue to hold absolute power over the local tax monies paid by the city’s population for their own purposes. For example, the Congress has forbidden the city to spend any of its own money to refer poor people to abortion aid services. In March of this year, the Congress withheld more than one billion dollars of D.C.’s own tax revenues, an act that would have been impossible in any other American city.

            So the seizure of the city Trump hates was just the latest in a very long line of assaults upon the self-determination of these American citizens. The seizure itself, though, proved to be largely performative. When I am in the city now, I live in the upscale Cathedral Heights neighborhood. We have never seen a single Guardsman in our streets (though ICE did pay a visit to our favorite neighborhood restaurant, Chef Geoff’s - a lengthy and disruptive visit that resulted in exactly zero arrests or detentions and was clearly intended simply as harassment).  Moving about the city, it quickly became clear that this occupation was never about crime. Early on, my wife and I saw a heavy presence of the Guard at Union Station, though they seemed rather aimless and bored, just as we had seen in Los Angeles. They parked several heavy armed vehicles outside the station, directly opposite the long-standing peace encampment with its large “Fuck Trump” sign. On a recent rip back from Philadelphia I saw that most of those vehicles were gone, and the Guard presence had been reduced to just a few of them wandering aimlessly around Union Station and chatting with the staff in the food court. By then, our D.C. National Guard had been reduced to such tasks as picking up litter on the National Mall. We soon learned that this duty was restricted to our Guard. The units sent by Republican Governors in Mississippi, Louisiana and West Virginia were apparently spared those duties. No, the Guard who were assigned anything remotely resembling assistance to crime fighting were spotted almost exclusively in areas, like the Mall, where TV cameras were most likely to show up.

            But the occupation was not without effect. The Guard were sent in just as the annual Restaurant Week was commencing, and patronage at the city’s restaurants and cafes plummeted precipitously, to rates even lower than those numbers already depressed by Trump’s chain saw firings of thousands of loyal government workers. Restaurant Week was extended another seven days, but that was not enough to restore the traffic to these businesses. That is just one example of the ways that this occupation has harmed the city. Our neighbors will not be daunted, though. In addition to the No Kings demonstrations, D.C. has seen constant marches and rallies against this outrage against the citizenry. As I ride my bike around the city, I constantly see signs posted in protest and accusatory graffiti. There are multiple regular vigils against the occupation, though these attract little attention from, say, the Washington Post, which grows increasingly right wing under the Bezos ownership. And the Trump repression grows daily. A peace vigil that had been across the street from the White House in Lafayette Square since 1981 was dismantled under direct orders from Trump. And ICE continues its rampage through the city, though usually out of sight of the tourists. (Tourism is also down as a result of the occupation.)  The Bondi Department of Justice was forced to abandon plans to replace the city’s police chief, but other mischief proceeds. The DOJ touts statistics that show that crime decreased during the take-over, while failing to note that it had already been decreasing. (Not to mention how many of the arrests were for such things as violating open container laws.)

            But the people resist in any small ways that they can, even in these more upscale neighborhoods where folks have Ring cameras and use the Neighbors function to warn of “icy conditions” in the city. When Trump was unable to get Ed Martin, his original nominee for the position of U.S. Attorney for D.C. confirmed by the Senate, he sent the yet more deranged Jeanine Pirro, late of Fox News, to the post. Pirro immediately ordered that all arrests made during the occupation be elevated to felonies. The people of D.C., whose BS detectors have always been sharp, have resisted this measure too, with Grand Juries taking the unusual step of refusing to return indictments. One example that went viral concerned “sandwich guy,” charged with felony assault after tossing his sub at an offending officer. While we have always heard that a prosecutor could get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich, it turned out that Pirro could not convince one to indict the thrower of a ham sandwich. The now universally admired Sandwich guy saw his charges rapidly lowered to the more appropriate misdemeanor.

            There has always been an easily noted difference between Democratic and Republican Presidents with regard fo our capital. While the days are long gone when Truman would take a hike up to Dupont Circle and back, trailing the press corps in his wake, the Dems have always been more willing to actually live in the place. Clinton was known to jog to a local McDonald’s; Obama paid a visit to Ben’s Chilli Bowl. And during Democratic Presidencies we would see “The Beast,” the President’s car, bearing the D.C. license plate with its distinctive “taxation without representation” license plates. But even under those more friendly administrations, those who live in the capital, surrounded by monuments to our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, remain third class citizens, subject to the whims of hostile representatives from other states. There is always a mode of occupation; this one has only underscored the state of subservience to which some 700,000 American citizens remain subjected.

*

Update:

Things on the ground are moving so quickly that it is not possible to keep up. Federal Judge Jia Cobb, in a closely reasoned opinion, found for the city and ruled that the deployment of the National Guard was unlawful. Fatally, the judge followed the example of other judges around the nation, and put the enforcement of her decision on hold while appeals were progressing. Just five days later, two members of the National Guard, strolling with little purpose near Farragut Square, were attacked and shot by a man who had suddenly walked around the corner. That man, who had traveled the length of the United States from Washington State to Washington, D.C., was quickly discovered to have been an active member of a CIA-sponsored “Zero Unit” in Afghanistan, essentially an intelligence and assassination team. But before the suspect had even been identified, Trump announced the further illegal deployment of five hundred more National Guard to the City. Once the identification had been made, Trump immediately blamed the Biden administration, with loud complaints about insufficient vetting. The shooter had been vetted in Afghanistan by the CIA during Trump’s own administration. He was vetted again for entry to the United States during the Biden administration, and then he was vetted again when the Trump administration, just months ago, approved him for asylum status.

            One of the two victims of the attack, Sarah Beckstrom, age twenty, has died. (The other, originally listed in critical condition, is now shown as “serious.”) Beckstrom was part of the Guard units sent from West Virginia. She should have been enjoying a pleasant tourist visit to her nation’s capital. Instead, her President and Governor had illegally sent her to D.C. with no visible purpose, thus placing her in the path of a madman from the West. Neither the assassin nor the victims were citizens of D.C., and yet it is the citizens of that city who are to bear the brunt of the occupation, and the escalating slanders against them coming from the partially demolished White House in their midst. And never the sort to let a crisis go to waste, the Trump authorities in D.C., having failed so publicly with the case against Sandwich Man, and having received an unusual number of defeats with Federal grand juries, are now taking unprecedented steps to bring federal indictments with only local Superior Court grand juries, again something we have not seen in the states. The current judicial finding is that this is allowed due to the unique legal structure of D.C. law, that unique structure being the city’s utter lack of self-determination.

            Speaking of which, the flags at the White House are not at half-mast. They were lowered in honor of Charlie Kirk by order of the President, but it seems Trump’s sympathies do not extend to the members of the Guard he has deployed to the District’s supposedly crime-ridden streets. Berkstrom gets no actual recognition as anything other than a rhetorical tool from this administration.

            But there is at least one state that lowered its official flags in her honor: her West Virginia home.

Black Ivory

 How sweet

            the sound

                        but then such sin

An instrument first

            recorded in

            Nuremberg a middle passage

That brush across

            the strings

                        piano

Swelling in the

            foreground

                        once lost

Not found till

            years after finding

                        Christ

Blindness in the

            foc’sle

                        what lyric

Could render  

            reparation

                        could float free

Of this history

            notes sunken

                        to sea floor

Dampened reed

            pressed into

                        saving service

Could such wondrous

            beauty have come without

                        woe

All in all rain must fall

            grace notes

                        eighty-eight ivory keys

Might sound a

            flood a

                        roiling sea

Those other people

            who were

                        hell

Hungered after

            others from

                        afar

Blessed themselves

            and passed

                        the horrors

Passed a Constitution charged

            ten dollars per soul

                        their duty

And ad valorem after

            personal property

                        till Juneteenth

And one hundred marching

            clarinets massed

                        against the memory

Paraded a future freedom

            to come

                        a second line

To carry us home

            funereal joy without

                        a body

Mellow Sounds before

            Black Ivory sang

                        Don’t Turn Around

Cause nothing

            in the past will

                        ever change

Ebony irony

            that major fall

                        even King David

Sang slavery

            psalmist of

                        servitude

Seventy-three psalms

            ninety-six tears

                        save me take me

To the river the waters

            come up to my neck

                        I am worn

Out crying for help

            too many

                        teardrops

When the clarinet seconds

            to the trombone moaning

                        like redemption song

Clarinets croon

            in a sea of reeds

                        an exposition

Of Moses

            among the rushes

                        a lost found

Nation of nothing

            but poetry

                        an ark

Daubed with pitch

            we drew

                        out of the waters

Baptizing ourselves

            a sea of faces

                        among them

These three

            voicing

                        liberty