Roses ,in Trump's District of Columbia

     "Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses!"

          Poem by James Oppenheim, "Bread and Roses," 1912;  based on a speech by labor organizer Helen Todd, 1911

Notwithstanding Trump's assertions, Washington, D.C., was not a hell-hole of crime in 2024, when Joe Biden was president. 

It isn't a hell-hole now, either, even with a few National Guard troops.

Jennifer Angelo had a career as an attorney for the U.S. Postal Service. She and her husband Jack Mullen live in Washington, and are eyewitnesses to conditions there. She sent me a field report on an event that didn't have Trump's stamp: the National Book Festival.

Amid the conflicts that roil the politics of our country, people still live their lives. Kids play, lovers love, people read books, and book readers congregate at book fairs.

Guest Post by Jennifer Angelo 

My husband, Jack Mullen, recently posted here about Trump’s America 250 festivities and architectural vanity projects. They started with a wrestling match at the White House and today culminated in a Grand Prix car race around our beautiful city. How these spectacles honor the country I do not know, but they have made 2026 a trying time for most Washingtonians. Thus, I was delighted yesterday to attend the National Book Festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress. It came with the tag line “America 250: It’s Your Story.”

The news about Americans’ reading habits is grim. A recent Atlantic piece by Rose Horowitch ran through the numbers: Fewer than half of us read a book in 2022; only 2 percent read to a child daily; only 16 percent read for pleasure on a given day. The culprit is screens, and even our attention span there has fallen to 47 seconds. There may come a time when no one under 70 understands references to a white whale, Catch-22 or Big Brother. (Let’s hear it for the Bible, which will never go out of print and gives us many of our best literary references.)

Given the sad reading statistics, it soothed my mind and my soul to walk into the two-million square foot Washington Convention Center yesterday and find it mobbed with book lovers. I read novels, history, memoirs, mysteries, essays, and short stories. I take at least one class every year on a classic novel by Austen, Dickens, Woolf, or the like. I keep track of my books on Goodreads and routinely exceed 75 books in a year (I cracked 100 in the Year of Covid). Those in the enormous convention center crowd were my people, and just being part of it was rejuvenating.

The presenting authors included Martin Scorcs(film preservation), Kate McKinnon (debut Young Adult novel), Baseball Orioles owner David Rubenstein (upcoming book about the business of baseball), our Poet Laureate Arthur Sze (poetry in translation), and Ann Patchett (best-selling and award-winning novelist and essayist). There were more than 60 others, each of whom has a devoted audience. My enthusiasm for the crowd size did not extend to standing in line for an hour or more to hear these icons, but I was starstruck nonetheless.

The attendees’ T-shirts were on point: “Born to read, forced to socialize,” “You can never have too many books,” “Book Nerd,” and a tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Public Library. The pop-up bookstore on the huge lower level had a snake line six rows deep for the cash register. There were book-themed puzzles, mugs, shirts, and posters. A row of tables featured books for every U.S. state – Oregon featured Stubborn Twig by Lauren Kessler and a children’s book, Bing’s Cherries by Julia Kuo.

 I arrived early to grab a seat for a presentation on how audiobooks are made. My seat neighbor and I bonded right away over a favorite book reader (George Guidall). The featured narrator, Arthur Dent, was a buff Navy veteran with a deep, clear voice that was made for telling stories. An audiobook producer and an executive from the Audiobook Publishers Association completed the panel and answered questions about the technology, logistics and quality control involved in audiobooks. And because there is some debate about whether listening to an audiobook is “reading,” they reminded us that the Odyssey was passed on orally for generations. Take that, audiobook snobs!

I spoke to a woman who works in the Manuscript Room at the Library of Congress and scored a copy of Rosa Park’s hand-written recipe for pancakes. I picked up free bookmarks. I asked for directions many times. I saw a lot of young readers, and my heart soared. I would say I was one of the older people there and very much in the minority. Is there hope for reading after all?

Today, cars are racing around the Mall at 185 mph. The event’s promoter is a President who quite possibly has never read a book, even his own. He fired the Librarian of Congress and appointed Todd Blanche as its temporary head. When it comes to the city and well-educated residents of Washington, he cannot read the room. But at least he didn’t kill the National Book Festival.

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