Washington Loses All Perspective on the War, and We Get to Pay the Price

My hotel is just across from the White House, almost close enough to be thrown to the ground by John Ashcroft’s boys should I misbehave.

Yes, it’s quite tense here. Cabbies listen to NPR. That’s how tense.

One of them, dropping me off on Capitol Hill, turned down the volume and asked if I thought Turkey could be persuaded to reconsider allowing U.S. troops on its soil.

War in Iraq is not a possibility in Washington, it’s an inevitability. President Bush erased all doubt Thursday night during a “news conference” that was as surreal as everything else in this town.

All the reporters were dressed alike and they all asked essentially the same polite question when the president called on them from a prepared list. Nobody here seems to notice any of this.

“Did anxiety get relieved tonight?” Larry King asked on TV after the news conference.

“Possibly not,” said Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.

Thanks, guys.

We’re headed into uncharted waters with a captain whose international experience until two years ago consisted of a trip to Mexico. The education president mispronounced “nuclear” 75 times Thursday night while saying every breathing organism on the planet could be against this war and he doesn’t care.

My anxiety was not relieved. In fact, I broke out in hives. How can you ever relax in a town where a cab ride feels like a segment on C-SPAN2?

Sure, this city has good reason to be concerned after getting hit on Sept. 11. But they’ve lost all perspective, and we’re paying the price.

When the White House commits to paying billions to Turkey for the right to put troops on its soil, but cities are left begging for scraps to pay for basic emergency services, something’s wrong.

If you can believe it, they’ve still got the “No Child Left Behind” signs up at the headquarters of the underfunded and now-forgotten Education Department.

Friends who live here ask me if it’s different in Los Angeles. No, I say. It’s different here. This whole town is a bunker.

A colleague told me his pre-kindergarten daughter was asked to form a sentence with punctuation and responded: “Is Osama bin Laden dead or alive?”

In California I used to think this war made no sense at all, but now that I’m in Washington I understand it perfectly.

We might be a bit aloof in the Golden State. Just a touch. But when it’s all war and terrorism all the time, as it is here, the nerves get jangled and you begin feeling as though you’ve got a bull’s-eye painted on your back. The natural response is to take up arms, strike up a conversation about Tommy Franks at a local bar, or plot your escape.

“Georgetown socialite and Post writer Sally Quinn has been on a chem/bio-terrorism freak-out dating back to Sept. 11,” the City Paper here reported, and she goes so far as to encourage Washingtonians to stock inflatable kayaks for evacuation on local waterways.

They need factories here. They need an industry -- any industry other than government -- with honest jobs, so people can talk about normal, everyday things. Like the Oscars.

Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti was in Washington for a few days to panhandle on Washington Mall, begging for help with budget problems back home. He’d have had better luck if he represented Turkey.

When I met him, Garcetti had already struck out at several meetings and was literally tossing pennies into a fountain, as if it were a wishing well.

“The first words out of their mouths are about the war effort and homeland security,” said a forlorn Garcetti, who politely tells members of the California delegation here that shafting schools and job-training creates its own kind of homeland insecurity.

So do Code Orange alerts. The last one cost L.A. $4.2 million.

Yeah, what about the rest of us? These folks are so obsessed with their own worries they’ve forgotten Al Qaeda was going to celebrate the millennium by blowing up LAX.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), a war hawk, was sympathetic to Garcetti’s pleas and promised to keep up the fight. But she told him to be realistic. “Money’s not growing on any trees,” she said.

Unless it’s to fund the war.

As an aside, Harman told us she had to take a detour on her way to the office. A man and his companion were arrested in the Capitol after getting through security with jars of liquid and a putty-like substance duct-taped to their bodies.

Probably just a nut-job, Harman said. But it might also have been a security test.

You never know, and maybe it’s impossible to be overprepared.

“The government needs to tell the public that everyone should have an N95 mask [which costs $1] with them at all times,” the Post’s Sally Quinn wrote. “The government should indicate that there are easy-to-use, family-friendly gas masks available that could save lives.”

If you’re staying across from the White House, shouldn’t they offer them at the hotel?

“Perhaps people could be advised to have bicycles for evacuation,” Quinn went on, “or, for those who live near water, inflatable kayaks.”

Let’s hope those who go paddling on the Potomac remember to leave no child behind.

*

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com