When did we agree, exactly, that fatigues on Fourteenth Street were part of the streetscape? Was there a vote? A press conference? Or did we just look up one Tuesday morning and find a young man from Frederick County standing at parade rest outside a wine bar, and decide that the polite thing to do was order another flat white?
I walked past four of them on my way to the Metro this week. Rifles slung, water bottles in the cargo pockets, faces unreadable under the brims. A woman in front of me lifted her phone, took a photograph for what I assume was Instagram, and kept walking. The administration is calling the deployment a “public order initiative,” which is the same phrasing the State Department uses when describing other people’s countries.
Eliza had us over Wednesday. Cleveland Park, the small dining room, the lamb she does with the preserved lemon. There were eight of us, including a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, a deputy something at Treasury, and a woman who runs a foundation that I have never been able to get a clear answer about. The Guard came up exactly once, between the salad and the main, and it came up the way bad weather comes up — as a thing to acknowledge before moving past.
“It’s a lot, isn’t it,” said the foundation woman, which is the Washington formulation for I have feelings I do not intend to share. The bipartisan lobbyist examined his cufflink. The deputy something said the word “optics,” which is what people in this town say when they want to discuss a moral question without using moral vocabulary. Eliza refilled the wine. We talked about a house in Rehoboth.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to have opinions about what counts as a precedent, called Thursday morning. She said she’d watched two Humvees take the turn onto Pennsylvania Avenue at seven-fifteen and that the man at her bus stop had said, without looking up from his phone, “there’s more of them today.” Judy said it was the without-looking-up part that stayed with her. I told her I knew exactly what she meant, and we agreed not to talk about it further, which I notice is now the shape most of my conversations take.
Here is what is actually happening, in case anyone is keeping a list. Federal troops are conducting what the Department of Defense is describing as “presence patrols” in a domestic American city. The mayor was informed; her objections were noted; the deployment proceeded. Reporters have been told the mission is open-ended. The legal authority cited is a memorandum nobody has been allowed to read in full. A spokeswoman used the phrase “surge support,” which I assume she practiced in a mirror.
I keep thinking about the cufflink. The bipartisan lobbyist did not defend the deployment, and he did not condemn it, because to do either would have required him to have a position, and positions, as he has explained to me over the years, are what unserious people have. He has clients. He has relationships. He has, on Wednesday night, a small smudge on his French cuff that demanded most of his attention while a uniformed branch of the federal government redrew the line between civil and military life two miles from where we were sitting.
I have lived in this city through six administrations and watched it absorb a great deal. I have watched it absorb special prosecutors and shutdowns and a literal mob on the Capitol steps. I have not, until this month, watched it absorb a standing military deployment as a logistical inconvenience — something to route around on the way to the dry cleaner. The absorption is the story. The absorption is always the story.
At some point Eliza brought out the lamb. The bipartisan lobbyist said it was the best thing he’d eaten all summer. The deputy something agreed. The foundation woman agreed. I agreed. It was, in fact, very good. We called it the lamb course, and we asked for the recipe, and on the walk to the car I passed two soldiers outside the CVS on Wisconsin and I did not look up from my phone.