Casual
Casual Marion Barry, In the Snow Again The thaw has set in here in Washington, D.C., and it looks like we can resume lollygagging through life. We had another snowstorm a couple of weeks back....
...The mail wasn't delivered for a week, either, giving the lie to that fabled old creed...
...shovel the snow...
...Joke about it if you like, but you can't really know it until you've lived under it-particularly with two feet of snow on the ground...
...You needn't have had a portrait of Milton Friedman on your wall to cry out for some privatization...
...Dumb Charlie's got his rig stuck in the mud again...
...In time, the novelty faded...
...Everyone likes a break from the routine...
...Snow, in any amount, affects the District more harshly than it does other places...
...but we also expect people not to be so thoughtless and witless as to place themselves in positions demanding the heroism of a weary cavalry...
...Well, not a storm exactly-more like seven inches of pretty, powdery snow, barely enough to keep a third-grader in Duluth from skateboarding to school...
...put out the fires...
...We are of course happy to help the distressed...
...By the city, that is...
...When she saw that I meant to assist, she was touching-ly grateful, and the power of Good Samaritanism was affirmed again...
...Being naturally shy, I delivered a five-minute monologue into the camera: "This is nothing compared with my boyhood in Michigan...
...They should never have been taken out in the first place...
...The driver was a young, bewildered foreign woman, fearful of my approach...
...But it was a big deal in the nation's capital, leading to semi-paralysis...
...Gee, I'd really like to report to work or visit my aunt in Gaithersburg, but I'm forced to sit in my recliner wrapped in a blanket, watching Sally Jessy") Adventure was in the air...
...As I neared maybe the fifth stuck car of one morning's walk, I thought briefly of turning away, in reproachful disgust...
...At first, it was kind of fun...
...Those who habitually reelect the mayor might have realized that we pay a price for awarding the top job to a convicted cocaine user and self-professed sex addict...
...A city that will not perform these functions soon returns its inhabitants to that state of nature from which, Hobbes tells us, the race escaped only through the agency of civil society in the first place...
...Kill the lights and draw the shades, Ma...
...But conscience pricked, and a good thing...
...I refuse to permit Nature's furies to confine me to my room...
...What the heck are you doing out here...
...Everyone likes a little flair in the mayor's office, sure...
...I began to resent those stuck cars, squealing and smoking...
...It was almost malicious in its incompetence...
...Out for a walk on Day One, I encountered a Grizzly Adams-like man with a television camera and a microphone, free-lancing for the local news...
...Can we live in a civil society presided over by a government demonstrably uncivil...
...Their owners were being greedy and selfish, imposing unnecessary burdens on passers-by...
...pick up the trash...
...he asked...
...It brings out the best in us," or so the anchormen told us, repeatedly...
...Provisions were being purchased for the elderly, and pregnant women were being rushed to hospitals in the Jeeps of strangers...
...for a few days, it seemed on the verge of dangerous...
...The exasperated Dutch embassy down the block finally hired a private contractor to do it...
...but there comes a time when you appreciate a little Robert Taft to go with your Earl Long...
...Washingtonians are amusingly skittish at the slightest drop of precipitation...
...Neighbor was helping neighbor, and it seemed that civil society was in bloom...
...He could boast that, despite everything, the city was still handing out parking tickets left and right...
...And there's something satisfying about a tiny dose of hardship...
...Cracked a colleague of mine, "If anyone should know about 'snow,' it's Marion Barry") ("Cracked...
...Jay Nordlinger...
...This was the genuine article, the most severe snowstorm since 1922, when President Harding was endeavoring to give the nation "not nostrums but normalcy," and a teapot of scandal was brewing...
...And Mayor Marion S. Barry: He was on television, speechifying, pacifying, lying...
...I took pleasure in pushing one car after another out of its predicament...
...Hey, there's something: I'm bailed out by a foreign socialist government in the face of inaction by my local socialist government...
...Patience wore thin and tempers grew short...
...My street was never plowed...
...It was not as big a deal, however, as the Blizzard of Our Times, which struck in mid-January...
...And the city government...
...Unable to drive, people took to the underground-Calcutta-like masses of them-glaring and shoving, snarling and cursing...
...The fault, truth to tell, lay with the city's government...
...The social situation was chaotic and tense...
...Isn't the city tranquil and lovely...
...Streets were unplowed and subway service was drastically curtailed...
...A truism reasserts itself and is relearned: Government in a liberal republic should fulfill its elementary responsibilities: protect citizens from crime...
Vol. 1 • February 1996 • No. 23
