What do we call a country that handcuffs its own veterans in the Rotunda and then breaks for the salad course? I asked this Monday night at Eliza’s, midway through a leg of lamb that had been cooking since roughly the first arrest, and got what I’ve come to recognize as the standard Washington response: a small nod, a longer sip, and a subject change to the cherry blossoms, which apparently peaked last week and which no one at the table had actually seen.
The wire copy is straightforward enough. Dozens of United States military veterans — men and women who signed the paperwork most of Eliza’s guests have never read — were arrested inside the Capitol on Monday afternoon for protesting a war the Senate has been careful not to name. Some were in fatigues. One, according to a friend of a friend who was there, was in a wheelchair he earned in Anbar Province. The Capitol Police did what the Capitol Police do. The senators, per the day’s schedule, did lunch.
I mention this because the bipartisan lobbyist to my left — I will describe him only as bipartisan, which is the modifier he prefers and the one that has paid for his second house — put down his fork when I brought it up and said, and I am quoting, “Margaret, they knew what they were signing up for.” I asked whether he meant the war or the arrest, and he examined his cufflink for what I timed at eleven seconds before Eliza announced the lamb.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has spent thirty-one years at the National Archives and who has developed the archivist’s habit of remembering everything, told me later that the Rotunda has been the site of veteran-led protests in every administration going back to Nixon, and that the arrests always look roughly the same, and that the press releases always use the phrase “peaceful removal,” and that the phrase “peaceful removal” is doing a specific kind of work she would rather not describe over the phone. Judy is not a partisan. Judy files things.
The senators were, per public schedule, at three separate lunches Monday: one hosted by a defense contractor whose name I will not print because Eliza has asked me to be careful, one hosted by a think tank that has recently rebranded itself as a “forum,” and one hosted by nobody, because it was a working lunch, which is what senators call the lunches they take alone with their phones. None of them, so far as I can determine from the roll, was in the Rotunda. None of them, so far as I can determine from the transcripts, has said the word “veterans” aloud this week without a modifier attached — “our brave,” “our returning,” “our — ” you know the rest.
What struck me, and what I want to say plainly because I’ve noticed lately that plainness is treated in this town as a kind of poor breeding, is that a Marine in his sixties was zip-tied under the eye of the Apotheosis of Washington while, forty yards away, the men who send Marines places were choosing between the branzino and the short rib. That is not a metaphor I am reaching for. That is Monday. That is the calendar.
The bipartisan lobbyist recovered by the second glass and offered that the protesters were, in his view, “undermining leverage.” I asked whose leverage. He said, and again I am quoting, “the leverage.” Eliza asked if anyone wanted more mint sauce. A woman across the table who I believe works at Treasury said the mint was extraordinary. It was.
I want to be careful here, because I’ve been in this business long enough to know that outrage on demand is its own kind of racket, and I don’t intend to sell it. But I will say this: I have watched thirty years of administrations discover, one after another, that the surest way to keep a war going is to make sure nobody at the good tables has to say the word. The veterans said the word Monday. They said it loudly enough to get arrested for it. And the senators, to a person, said branzino.
We finished around eleven. Eliza walked me to the door and mentioned, apropos of nothing, that her nephew is thinking of enlisting. I said I hoped he wouldn’t. She said she hoped so too. Then we went back inside, because there was still the cheese, and we called it the lamb course, and we asked for the recipe.