Swan Lake on every channel

Collapse appears inexorable. A terrible week for believers in participatory democracy and civil liberties.

7,000 troops have arrived in my city.

Railcars one after another carrying tanks across the Potomac.

Organizers of this weekend’s “No Kings” protests around the country have deliberately excluded Washington. It’s probably the right thing to do. We don’t have to act as Make-A-Wish Foundation coordinators for Little Petey Hesgeth’s dream of shooting Americans. But the longer I sit with that, the more appalling and nauseating it gets: our president cannot be trusted to refrain from violently lashing out against peacefully assembled citizens for spoiling his little arrangement of G.I. Joes.

This city is uniquely vulnerable. There is no one who represents us who can stand up for us at a DHS press conference and absorb the body checks of imperial enforcers, triggering unanimous outrage. And at least for this weekend, there are those tanks. But I don’t think we can leave Los Angeles to do this on its own for very long.

“The Department of Homeland Security and the officers and the agencies and the departments and the military people that are working on this operation will continue to sustain and increase our operations in this city. We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor had placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

That, from Homeland Security Secretary Noem, is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard a U.S. official say, and I heard Rumsfeld. It doesn’t sound like temporary peacekeeping, even if there were in fact any real disturbance to quell. There isn’t. It’s a direct provocation by the mutant federal police state on the legitimate business of self-determination. It doesn’t seem wise to let them focus their skull-cracking resources on one city at a time, so I’m chafing at our enforced idling. As merry pilgrims across the nation come together with their piercingly astute posters, we in the District are suspended in an eerie reprieve.

Local activists have instead planned for a community gathering pointedly labeled Joy Day in a park some distance from the parade grounds. Food, music, kids’ activities.

Sounds fun, but I can’t go.

It’s Recital Weekend for the ballet. Orwell compared military parades to ballet, and the strong Soviet associations of the art form are apt amidst the Red-Squarification of America’s front yard. Echoes of August 19, 1991, when the tanks entered another city to repel the awakening of democratic reform. On that day, state television aired Swan Lake on a loop across Moscow. If that broadcast was intended to narcotize the populace against the eruption of revolution, today I’m employing the dream conditions of ballet — seasoned with the zaniness of its toddler version — as a blockade against a military occupation of my own mind.

In the other room, Zouzou is wrestling with the wild popsicle-slicked kinks of a 5-year-old’s hair to create an approximation of the high Bolshoi bun required for her dress rehearsal in a little over an hour. The rehearsal, and the show tomorrow, are downtown at the Shakespeare Theater Company’s Sidney Harman Hall. Closer to the festivities than I would be if I had the choice. In fact, if it wasn’t for the recital, we’d probably have made like most of our friends and skipped town entirely.

I’m remembering a shot of Dakota Johnson’s Susie Bannion arriving at the diabolical East Berlin dance academy in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, walking alongside the Wall. All winter muted beiges and grays, drained of the vivid neons of the Dario Argento original. As the thunderstorms approach, and the hour of performative ritual violence draws near, it feels like I’m headed out on that same walk. Checkpoints. Barbed wire. Stern questions. Dark, ancient bloodlust.

At the same time, we’re living our lives. This is our protest. Art and dance and the sheer lunacy of shepherding a few hundred small children from one routine to another on a schedule. Secret police have spread across our land in their neck gaiters and tactical gear, but we simply carry on, defying the command to collapse everything into the right’s atavistic dichotomies of scarcity and dominance, retribution and need.

It’s time to go.

***

Lunch-hour Mall joggers on a weekday are more disruptive than that.

The thunderstorms for the most part held back.

I’m torn about even posting the above prelude. That’s why I waited for two days.

Of course now it reads as more than a little hysterical, thinking my kid and I would be anxiously laboring through a one-mile odyssey from barricade to barricade. I can’t tell whether my embarrassment is first- or secondhand. Recollections of the militarized streets after Jan. 6, or at the height of the pandemic, overstuffed our expectations. All week, we received alerts about the widening security perimeters, the closed streets. Federal workers were told to work from home on Thursday and Friday. And then close to nothing. The biggest crowd I saw on the whole excursion was the one of parents and dancers milling around outside the doors to the theater before they opened.

I try not to trouble my daughter with most of these anxieties. She’s five. I’m quite bad at it, but I try. All the news out of Los Angeles and the Middle East darkened my mood for a few hours on Friday, but that mood was the only thing I mentioned to her. “I’m feeling a little down in the dumps.”

“Because Donald Trump fired you?”

Oh boy.

On Saturday, I found that there was utility even for me in the cover story. I told her that it was the Army’s 250^th birthday. I explained that when we went out that day, we would probably see the Army around the city for its birthday parade. Every time we walked outside, she sang out “Where’s the Army?” As we ambled around, from the cafe to the block party to the Metro to the theater, no army materialized, and she was bummed. Another triumph, Mr. President. Thanks. Your little march was so mismanaged that you even botched the layup of awing a child with easy boom-boom spectacle.

After dropping her off, I walked as far as I could stomach it towards the outskirts of the parade. The humidity was monstrous. A police vehicle blocked traffic. That’s hardly notable. They do that for basketball games, when the sidewalks are a lot more crowded. Please — when I say that — understand that I live in the home city of the .220 winning-percentage Wizards. I walked a few blocks further in the absence of cars, until I saw one redhatted merchant circling his little cart. I turned around. A short convoy of police vans passed me — the second one of the day — but they had no cause to turn on the sirens.

The only thing that feels meaningful about any of it is that it sidelined us for the protests. They looked beautiful from here, in the malarial gloom of naked authoritarian failure. I hope you were able to be there where you live. We are a sea of little dancers, and as long as we remain unafraid to stumble onstage and move together, they cannot close the curtain. Even if they cut the lights and music here and there, there aren’t enough of them to shut us all down, as long as we keep going. What you did by showing up is create and reinforce that belief, and it’s our job now in the face of whatever vicious onslaughts come next to hold onto it.