Vic Socotra

15 September 2009

Change You Can Believe In

(Official Logo of the Washington Metro System)

The remarkable thing about the recent renaissance of Washington is that Mayor-for-life Marion Barry is still part of it, just as much as J. Edgar Hoover was part of the great downfall.

Former Mayor Barry is the Councilman representing Ward 8, which includes the grounds of the old District Almshouse at Blue Fields.

The two larger-than-life figures overlap in the history of our town, and Jedgar naturally had quite file on the future mayor of the District of Columbia.

Hoover was a true national figure, while Barry is a thoroughly home-grown personality, which is sort of odd. Hoover was a Washington Native, and Barry is an immigrant to the imperial city he would come to rule. He was born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and was a troublemaker- or activist, take your choice- almost form the beginning. When he graduated from little LeMoyne College in 1958 he gained the nickname “Shep,” derived from his admiration for the Soviet apparatchik Dmitri Shepilov.

Shepilov was chief of editor of Pravda, and as Stalin’s chief of PR promulgated the party line for Isvestia. The saying at the time was "In Pravda (Truth) there is no Isvestia (News), and in Isvestia there is no Pravda."

He was a national activist in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee with some of the movement greats, and is meteoric rise to become almost the Mayor for Life parallels the rise of my home-town Mayor Coleman Young.

Mayor Young’s heroic profile is similar to that of the great African nationalists who led the Continent after the fall of Colonialism. If he ran the city of Detroit into the ground, clearly there were other, higher issues at stake. Mayor Barry had a liability that Mayor Young did not share. While the car companies and the rest of the industrial base of the Motor City could decamp beyond the city limits, the Government of the United States could not.

Home Rule came to DC in 1973- well, a sort of home rule. Congress still sits atop the District, as the Founders dictated, and the blather about DC getting two Senators and a Congressman will continue for as long as the Federal district remains an intact entity.

So what if the population of the District is almost exactly that of the State of Wyoming?

That is a tangent I can’t follow this morning. There is so much more. Since Director Hoover is the man responsible for where the Nazi spies wound up, and since Mayor Barry is responsible for managing the wholesale corruption that followed his election as the Mayor in 1978, the personalities of these two men is directly related to why the Potter’s Field went missing, and why $481 million dollars is directly related to finding it again.

We could talk about the lifestyle the Mayor whittled off massive public works projects like the digging of the Metro, but I don’t have time this morning.

There is nearly three billion dollars that is going to be thrown at the grounds of St. Elizibeth’s Hospital- Saint E’s, they used to call it before the Department of Homeland Security decided to occupy the derelict grounds right next to the old Almshouse.

Get your attention? It got mine. That is the amount of money that is committed to the redevelopment of the former DC Almshouse grounds, and all the graft and payoffs that will go along with it.

I will have to get to that presently, but finding the Germans and the hundreds of indigents in the missing graveyard is possibly why those Metro cars have been parked around Big Pink lately, and why I got a loose tale from a white sedan when I cruised past DC Village, where the old Almshouse had been located.

I don’t want to sound paranoid, and surely there are some things that should be left right where they were buried. I am not going to open up the can of worms about the role Mr. Hoover had in the curious elevation of Lyndon Johnson to the Presidency; gunfire in the Vice President’s home state surely had nothing to do with either man, even though it is certainly strange that both the President and his brother, the crusading anti-mob Attorney General should have so neatly pre-deceased the Director.

One gets perilously close to real secrets there, and I have learned in this life there are things you do not want to mess with or you will become too visible. Things happen to those who are. Better to stay off the radar.

Anyway, the thing about the Almshouse is part of the story of sad bedraggled Anacostia, and the numerous indignities that have been perpetrated upon it.

A 1911 survey of the American welfare system recommended that the public asylums should “be in the country, not too far from the centers of population they are to serve. The advantages of pure air, cheap land, and pleasant surroundings, are all on the side of the country.”

The argument was that transportation and accessibility was the other key factor, to ensure that the general population did not forget it’s obligation to the poor. The worst abuses that the author’s of the survey ever found occurred in small almshouses hidden away in remote corners, inaccessible, neglected, forgotten, where "The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty."

That could just about sum up the bottom of Anacostia, where the air is fetid with the odor of the waste ponds of Blue Fields, just across the highway.

I’ll have to get to that tomorrow, though. Stay tuned. There are billions of reasons to be curious.

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