The Washington Spectator/Tours de Farce
Ferguson, Andrew
THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR TOURS DE FARCE You know somebody's been in Washington too long when he tells you that the city "empties out" during the summer. "Nothing's going on in August," he will...
...For Washington nobodies, the sight is not so hard to take as it might seem: we're used to much worse...
...But tourists, over time, build up a natural immunity to the indignities they routinely suffer: everybody on the tram simply ignored her—the wisest course...
...Or a direct challenge ("Prove it...
...During my various trips, for example, I learned that John F. Kennedy's assassination "shocked the nation," that the Washington Monument is 556 feet high, that Arlington cemetery is "a real cemetery," that Abner Doubleday invented baseball, that the Washington Monument is 558 feet high, that much of "Scarecrow and Mrs...
...Some of us like to be reminded, once a year, what it's like to live in a city without congressmen...
...You see the point: everybody's gone...
...Its press packet is enormous—so thick, in fact, that if you took each clipping you could fill the entire Tidal Basin and still have enough left over to stuff the mouth of every guide who ever worked a Tourmobile...
...Folger couldn't have built the Shakespeare Library without his wife...
...which then entitles you to move to the back of another line the length of a Metroliner if you ever hope to see the inside of another Tourmobile...
...Balanced on the scales of human repulsiveness, even thousands of such families fail to match, say, a single Beryl Anthony...
...Drinks would come in handy on the Feminist Institute's "Feminist Tour of Capitol Hill," which is pretty much what it sounds like: a two-hour sewing club in which the tourists work eagerly on their hairshirts...
...Only male contractors worked on the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, even though women donated 75 percent of the money needed to complete it...
...Robert Ripley...
...As is always the case with statements so manifestly untrue, the point is something else entirely: what he means is that while congressmen are back terrorizing their districts, chomping greaseburgers at barbecue after barbecue, toute la Georgetown temporarily decamps as well...
...You see the point: everybody...
...Simple dismissal ("That's a load of crap...
...We can't wait to share the secrets of Washington with you...
...The Women's Bakery has the best bran muffins in town...
...Still, the bus is air conditioned, and you get to look in the windows of Gary Hart's town house...
...AF THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1989 41...
...the rest of the jokes aren't much funnier...
...Other secrets are of the maddeningly unprovable kind so beloved of perky tour-guides and the late Mr...
...Or an aggressive counterassertion ("I happen to know for a fact that it's three and a quarter times—around the moon...
...Most winningly, free drinks are served in the Ritz Carlton beforehand—an old insurance policy known to unsuccessful comedians everywhere...
...Maybe they can't wait, but you'll have to...
...Pamela Harriman crisscrosses Europe, tenderly feeling the pulses of widowed zillionaires...
...The Scandal Tour is put on by the comedy troupe Gross National Product, whose actors ride the bus and impersonate celebrity guides: George Bush, Marilyn Quayle, Paul Harvey, and so on...
...The "secrets of Washington" the Tourmobile guides dare to reveal are, more often than not, less than revelatory...
...I like the idea that Freedom is a woman," our guide said, "but why be sexist about it...
...Only six of the thirty nonprofit organizations in the Methodist building deal exclusively with women's issues—a national scandal...
...Only on this tour can you see so much, so well...
...King" was not filmed in Washington, and that the Washington Monument is 555 feet high...
...Claiborne Pell rests at the feet of some sadhu on the banks of the Ganges...
...Ben and Sally, for example, pack their rackets for a month of doubles in the Hamptons...
...Chris Dodd and Teddy check out the babes on the Cape...
...The granddaddy, the Big Kahuna, the Titan of tours in Washington is the Tourmobile, a fleet of blue-and-white trams that circumnavigates the Mall, with tangents extending to Arlington cemetery, Mount Vernon, and the Kennedy Center...
...The chances of your actually doing so, however, are only fair, for by this time all the trams are full to bursting, their windows, which you glimpse as they pass, framing a collage of chubby arms, wilted hairdos, flushed damp faces, and faint wisps of steam...
...To nail the point he will add: "Everybody leaves town...
...The most efficient method is to take a guided tour, as so many out-of-towners wisely do...
...But as the city empties itself of elected representatives and the rest of its elite, it is simultaneously engorged with tourists...
...I speak with authority, for not only have I met Beryl Anthony but I have also been trying, this summer, to duplicate the life of the Washington tourist (passing the time, as it were, until everybody comes back...
...You can see them on the Mall, whole families under the pitiless sun, trudging from one end of the shadeless expanse to the other: Dad, his face flushed and doughy, his hair matted in curlicues round the crown of his head, dragging Mom, as her hairdo rapidly wilts and the sweat stains begin to appear around the waistband of her stretch pants, and behind them trail the brats: Junior in a tank top, his shoulders adroop, his damp chubby arms swinging listlessly, and Sis with day-old clumps of cotton candy clinging horribly to her braces...
...It's just the way that everybody thought back then...
...But don't despair: you're not missing much...
...Which isn't so bad...
...the Tour-mobile brochure vows...
...You're allowed to disembark the tram at any of its stops ("free re-boarding...
...A Fawn Hall impersonator hands out little packets of shredded paper...
...In view of the Pentagon, for example, one guide chirped: "If you took out all the telephone wiring in this building, you could wrap it around the world seven and one-half times...
...Talk about facts...
...Meanwhile, the nobodys—that is, such Washingtonians as bureaucrats, slum-dwellers, crack-smokers, shop-keepers, cops, busboys, Uzi-selling black marketeers, and junior editors of conservative opinion magazines—stay and take the heat...
...The wise tourist, too, can always jump the tram and take another tour, of which there are dozens...
...The VFW building reflects "the exclusion of women from military history," never mind the numberless women who served in the Civil War by aid of cross-dressing...
...On a tour, if you plan with care and intelligence, you can get everything—the memorials, the museums, the historical sights—out of the way in four hours max and be back in your hotel watching TV before lunchtime...
...What's the proper response to such an assertion...
...And this: the statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome features a woman dressed in a robe open to her navel...
...Nothing's going on in August," he will say, with the implication (the self-delusion is breathtaking) that something of interest happens during the other eleven months...
...The Scandal Tour, for example, has recently gained much publicity...
Vol. 22 • September 1989 • No. 9
