Beacon of Freedom

By Crispin Sartwell

I am a proud and vigorous advocate of democracy. Democracy may not be the most rational, most efficient, or least irritating form of government. But it is certainly the funniest.

Nowhere is this more true than in the capital of democracy itself, the city that serves as a beacon of hope for people the world over: Washington, DC, my home town, our 95 neighbor to the south.

Beside the broad boulevards punctuated by equestrian statues, inside the gargantuan pseudo-classical marble edifices designed to inspire awe in foreign tourists and American schoolchildren on their sixth-grade trips lurk the James Traficants: the comedians of our greatness. Bless his hairless little head, and those of Richard Gephardt and Trent Lott.

But even more fun than the members of the national government - even more fun than homeland security and the IRS and the department of leaking invasion plans to the New York Times - are the locals, whose hilarious hijinks have been entertaining the world for decades.

DC Mayor Anthony Williams hired some friends to gather signatures for his nominating petitions as he runs for re-election. They needed about 2,000 names, and with a grand flourish submitted over 10,000. Unfortunately, page after page was in the same handwriting, and the petitions included such names as Martha Stewart, Saint Paul, and dead comedian Dudley Moore.

The election board that Williams himself appointed ruled that his name could not appear on the ballot, a decision that Williams whimsically condemned as "lawless." Now the signature-gathering comedians are taking the fifth through their tears. Like my momma used to say: you should have thought of that while you were cheating.

Mayor Williams, meantime, plans a write-in campaign, and says, "I'm still energized." His opponents include a bugle-playing exotic dancer and a former city councilman who was once convicted of biting a tow-truck driver.

Sadly, his opponents do not include Marion Barry, one of the great stand-up acts of American politics. Barry, you may recall, was caught smoking crack in 1990, during a time when DC was setting per capita homicide records due to a terrible epidemic of crack cocaine.

Barry kept disappearing to treatment facilities, but was eventually elected to the City Council, and then again to the mayoralty. And as an amused electorate gazed benevolently on his adventures, geological epochs were required to fix a pothole, and the DC school system admitted again that it had no idea how many children were enrolled.

Congress eventually more or less declared martial law, and removed the city from Barry's governance, placing it in the ruthlessly efficient hands of Anthony Williams. Barry was exploring yet another political comeback in March 2002, when, according to the Park Police, officers found him in a car downtown, "ingesting something." They said he had white powder on his face and cocaine and marijuana "residue" in his car.

"It's great waking up in the morning clean and sober," said Barry once, not specifying the condition in which he'd gone to bed the night before.

When apprehended, Barry had, he said, been driving his Jaguar at night down to a warehouse district of Southwest Washington to talk a female friend who needed advice. Of course, both he and police could be telling the truth. One can very well come to the aid of a female friend even with white powder under one's nose, as was perhaps noted by Barry's wife, who left him a couple of days later.

The comedian Chris Rock is apparently producing a movie about Barry, starring the comedian Jamie Foxx as the ex-Mayor. The comedian Barry, who has seen a script, calls the film project "outrageous and disrespectful." Meanwhile, Chris Rock asks "How the hell did Marion Barry get his job back [as mayor?]. If you get caught smoking crack at McDonald's you can't get your job back. They're not going to trust you around the Happy Meals."

No doubt, like Williams, Barry is feeling energized. That, as we say, is entertainment.

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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Reach him through www.crispinsartwell.com