The Sporadic Diary

April 23, 2011

At times to say someone is a tourist is to hang an epithet on them.  A motorist with out of state license plates driving very slowing in front of me will garner the tourist label.  So will anyone who asks too many questions at the cash register.  It doesn’t make sense, it’s just a thing I have, probably inherited from my father, who once complained during a trip he took to Vancouver that he didn’t care for the place because it had too many foreigners. 

It isn’t hard to spot tourists: they usually look out of place, travel in packs, and wear garish clothing.  I know that’s the stereotypical description, but there is a germ of truth (and sometimes more) in every stereotype.  I bring up this subject because my wife, Mary, and I just got back from a mini-vacation to Washington D.C.  Our trip was during school vacation week in the northeast, so the place was crawling with tourists, and when I say crawling I mean crawling.  Of course, we were tourists too, although we defied the stereotype.  We had an advantage over the real tourists because we had lived in the area for three years in the early 1980s and so we knew our way around and had seen most of the sights before.  Furthermore, we walked everywhere, and at a brisk pace.  In other words, we weren’t crawlers and we weren’t gawkers.

The District draws a lot of tourists for obvious reasons.  Tourism must be one of its largest industries, along with lobbying and protest rallies, which, when you think about it, fall in the same category of influence peddling.

Although I had been exposed to it before, I was amazed by the number of white, delivery-style trucks that lined the main thoroughfares of the city hawking souvenirs of every conception, enough t-shirts to cloth a small country, and a seemingly endless supply of incredibly bad food.  And in every direction you looked there were armies of middle and high school students, often in matching slickers, tromping off toward their next destination.  I thought of McClellan endlessly prepping the Union troops for battles he would ultimately not fight. 

For the most part, we avoided the tourist magnets, the Smithsonian museums, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and so on, preferring instead to try our luck at places we hadn’t visited before.  Like the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court generally is not high on most people’s sightseeing list.  After all, while most Americans can name all five of the main Simpsons cartoon characters, relatively few can name our five basic legal rights.  So, one day we zipped over to the Supreme Court building and took a short tour, which is where we learned about the comparative popularity of the Simpsons.  We were so impressed we decided to come back the next day to hear oral arguments.  Hey, we thought, if few people are interested in a brief tour of the Supreme Court building, who will care about oral arguments?  Especially since the scheduled session was going to be about an environmental case, not pornography, abortion, or who should be President.

Well, were we fooled.  Even though we got to the Supreme Court building at 7:45am for a hearing at 10am, there was a long line of people already snaking its way down the steps and up the block.  They didn’t look like tourists though, as many wore dark suits, were carrying briefcases, and were reading newspapers.  Tourists don’t do that.  And there was only one, lonely delivery truck within sight.  We couldn’t see what it was selling, but I imagined t-shirts with the nine Justices on them dressed as the Simpsons.