Travel Tripych (Part 1): We get the face we deserve

There are a lot fewer smoky bars in America than there used to be. I was in one last night in what may be, if New Orleans is never rebuilt, the last city in America to ever change. Which city? Washington, D.C., of course.

The long barroom that fronts the steakhouse on Capitol Hill was at full speed when I arrived at 8 for dinner with an old friend. While stories of wiretapping, influence peddling, legislative gridlock and the politics of the war in Iraq were playing out on televisions elsewhere, it was all on display, live, along these fifty feet of oak, brass and glass.

Members of Congress milled with petitioners, lobbyists lingered with Hill staffers, former Senators shouldered up to Cabinet undersecretaries of this-or-that and the out-of-towners were little aware. Life was going on in Washington, D.C.

And then there was the smoke. No longer a metaphor for secret, backroom deals, it is now visual evidence of a commitment to practices and preferences no longer broadly admired or emulated.

It is evidence that the city and the industry it represents live separately from the day-to-day concerns of the rest of us. It has become a set-piece; an entertainment; theater, put on six times a week, with a matinee on Wednesday. It has become a long-running play with lines we know by heart.

There seem few people on the scene who recognize the drift of politics to pantomime. Fewer still to step up to stop it. It is an affront to nature.

No, not the trees, rivers and snail darter type of nature, but the nature of people and our progress. As Alex de Touqueville said after his tour of colonial America, we are a nation of joiners. We crave community, we strive to be members of the club, we conform to get picked for the team.

Yet we practice exclusion, restriction, class-ification and (fill-in-the-blank)-phobias that are as a cleaver to our body politic. A niche market, a gated community, a limited edition anything all seem like good ideas, but they erode a shared sense of community and lead, inexorably, to that bar in Washington, D.C.