DC this weekend

I live in Washington, DC. Funny, though. I forgot all about the Freedom March today -- no, let's present it in its full grammatically-perplexing glory: "We Support You Freedom March." Shouldn't there be commas or something there?

Today we had a brunch at our house and invited 15-20 friends. The occasion was one of the friend's move to New York, plus simply getting together friends for brunch and chats. After that, a couple of the friends went off to Takoma Park in Maryland for a folk festival. I and a few others went to Adams Morgan for the street festival -- food, music (reggae, hip hop, Sly and the Family Stone type stuff), hipsters, a guy dressed like a very fancy pirate, art, yard sales, etc. Someone told me there was another arts festival in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. Someone else mentioned that there were something like 20 street festivals of one sort or another today in DC.

Mark Gisleson of Norwegianity, I believe (sorry if I'm wrong, Mark), suggested that DCers should crash the "support you freedom march,"get detained for not having registered with DOD for the event, and then publicize the irony. But, as far as I can tell, the "you freedom march" didn't make much of a dent on DCers' lives. I see a photo on the Washington Post site showing what they say are "thousands" of freedom marchers, so some were apparently there (but, remember, DC police doesn't officially count numbers of protesters and I think that probably applies to protests against freedom haters, though the counting was much easier in this case given the relatively small size of the group and the required registration).

But the key here is that this is a town that celebrated this 9/11/2005 by being a lively and diverse town showing off its arts, wares, music, dance, food, its good old lefty politics and various activist causes, and its ethnicity -- the ethnicity that Congress and the White House see only in terms of the lady who empties the waste basket or the nanny you can't trust to keep the rare orchids correctly watered. Good for DC. It's often a dull, unimaginative, and psychologically and emotionally bureaucratic place, but sometimes it's also capable of showing that it's much more than the "freedom" this and "freedom" that bubbling from Pavlovian politicos' mouths and the events arranged to boost their own self-images and their own wars.