James Fallows: Life in D.C., where my wife Deb and I have returned after many months in my original home on the West Coast, is disorienting in the same way as everything else in American life right now. Ninety-five percent of the time, if you’re an older white person like me, you can think everything is fine.
There’s not many tourists here. The restaurants are uncrowded. You’re not being stopped by police. But in certain parts of the city, which is what Deb and I depicted a little more than a week ago in D.C., you see an atmosphere of real fear and terror. Videos are posted every day of people being snatched off their Door Dash scooters or just taken out of schools. We haven’t anything like a firefighter being seized, as I know you have in the Pacific Northwest, but it’s that bifurcated existence. It’s completely normal—unless you look where it’s not normal.
Garrett Epps: Have you seen any interactions with occupying forces that gave you pause?
James Fallows: Only incidentally, when Deb and I have been driving around town through parts of town where there either are retail establishments or there’s a large Latino population, we’ve caught glimpses of what looked like a suspicious number of strange vehicles parked there.
One time we drove down MacArthur Avenue in Northwest D.C. and heard somebody yelling out of a store, “Stop, stop, you can’t do this, this is unfair.” We have not seen a direct confrontation, but the feeling and the pall of it is everywhere.
Garrett Epps: As you pass these armed soldiers, do you feel safe? These are armed men with somewhat spotty training for running a city. Do you feel safer than you did or do you feel safe at all?
James Fallows: Obviously the answer is no. This is crazy. It’s performative. But I am also a Boomer era, well-educated white guy. And so when I have talked with these National Guard soldiers, they’ve been polite. “What can I do for you, sir? And let me tell you about my hometown in South Carolina.”
What was the name of the movie that came out a year or two ago about the guards at Auschwitz and the family living right next door to the camp—The Zone of Interest.
There is a lot of that in the quality of D.C. right now. Most of the times, if you don’t look, it is perfectly normal. The weather is this idyllic late summer, early fall weather in D.C., which one recalls from September of 2001, when the skies are blue, the air is crisp. The weather is balmy in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
It seems like the most pleasant place in the world, and it can be if you stay out of the places where it is not. If you don’t go to that part of the town, you think, well, these National Guard guys, they’re mulching trees on the National Mall. They’re picking up trash. They’re raking and not using leaf blowers. They’re keeping D.C. safe and proper.
So it is performative. It is horrifying. It is cynical. But it makes no direct impact on me.