Prose and Congress

Visiting the Supreme Court may have turned out to be a bit of a bummer, but the next couple of stops on our tour of were much better. We went next to the nearby Library of Congress (specifically, the Thomas Jefferson Building).

Once you get inside, it's not the "row after row of books" you might conjure in your imagination when you think of a library. That does exist, down on the main floor -- which you can only access if you have a membership or are on a special tour. (But you do get to look down on that beautiful space from a gallery above.) Instead, the main area you actually tour is a large, beautiful foyer filled with all sorts of ornate designs. A small sample of the Library's collection is displayed throughout for museum-style viewing. Always on display (I believe) are a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, and a notable early world map said to be the first to depict the Americas.

Among the rotating exhibits was a look at the work of a political cartoonist from the Nixon/Watergate era, and a photo exhibition filled with all sorts of provocative, amusing, and thoughtful images. Both these exhibits highlighted that the Library of Congress is not solely about "books," but about the preservation and cataloguing of knowledge in many forms.

After the Library of Congress, we grabbed lunch at a nearby pizza place. I mention this not so much for the pizza (though it was fine), but for the way it showcased a wholly different "9 to 5" world in Washington, D.C. It's not that we were trying to eavesdrop, but people really carry on enthusiastic conversations in public places (and might want to curtail that, to advance their careers). On the walk to lunch, one woman was proudly declaring her 6 years of job security: she works in a U.S. senator's office. At lunch, we overheard two men planning what seemed like a minor coup d'etat of the congregation of their local church. (I didn't even mention dinner the night before, where one intern was discussing the juiciest piece of dirt she'd ever dug up on a rival politician. Only adultery, which was too commonplace to be too damning anymore.)

After lunch, we went to tour the U.S. Capitol building. As increasingly goes without saying on this trip, it was a beautiful space, inside and out. Where you get to go is limited; you can be taken to the actual floor of the House or the Senate, but you need special dispensation given in advance from your local Congressperson.

Side story: we looked into that ahead of time... but our Congressperson, thanks to a district line moving just a couple of miles in 2020, is now Ken Buck, Republican representative who actually realized a few months ago that he was no longer loathsome enough to continue in the current, MAGA-dominated incarnation of the Republican party. He actually showed a modicum of integrity and resigned from Congress, leaving his vacant seat to be filled in a special election this month. But it meant that at the time of our D.C. visit, our seat in Congress was vacant, with no one able to field any tour requests (for the Capitol or the White House, which requires similar arrangements).

Still, what you see of the Capitol on the public tour is pretty neat. You get to visit the rotunda, a cavernous round space lined with massive paintings and large statues (where people of import, including presidents, sometimes lie in state upon their deaths). You also get to visit the original main room of Congress, from when the Congress was small enough to fit in such a room. It's now home to dozens and dozens of statues. Apparently, every state is allowed to designate two statues to display somewhere in the Capitol, and many of them are assembled here. (The newest was just two weeks old, with one state recently having changed out their statue.)

We found one of the two Colorado statues down on the lower floor near the tour ticket desk -- it's astronaut Jack Swigert (the one played by actor Kevin Bacon in Apollo 13). The statue had caught our eye even before our tour began, because we actually recognized it. There is an identical statue at Denver International Airport, standing outside the train station on concourse B. (At the end of our entire trip, we'd take another photo with that one just to "collect the set.")

After the tour at the Capitol, there's a rather large museum area you can spend time in... and we did. I found this something of a mixed bag. The series of dioramas showing how D.C. (and specifically, the Capitol itself) filled in over the centuries struck me as very neat. I was less enchanted by the fawning video of the business of the Senate, painting the crassest behavior in the noblest light. (It gave me more of those "maybe some people ought to visit the basement sometime" vibes.) But overall, the Capitol was a beautiful place to visit.

We had a couple more stops before we ended our day... which I'll pick up next time.