Aretha at Foggy Bottom

I am walking down M Street in Foggy Bottom, a light misty rain coming down on a dark November afternoon. The neighborhood is full of high-end hotels. I duck into a Starbucks to get a shot of espresso. It’s going to be a long evening, and I need to crank up.

On the street in front of the Starbucks is a black man sitting on a folding chair, his collar pulled up close to his chin and a paper cup on the pavement in front of him. We strike up a conversation and chat for a moment. His face is open and congenial, even though it’s damp outside and waiting for a lousy dollar from a passerby can’t be a great way to pass the afternoon.

Then I go into the Starbucks. Today, instead of thinking of everything “Starbucks” means, I just try to let it be simply a place with caffeine for sale. But instead I am beset with a grinding cognitive dissonance. The people ordering drinks are all white. Those serving them are black or Hispanic. I stand in line long enough to hear two beautiful pieces of music, both by black musicians—Ellington’s “Solitude,” and something by Aretha from when she was in her prime. I don’t recognize the Aretha song, but the combination of her full out, high voltage voice and those soulful harmonic progressions—the big climactic swoop down to the supertonic and then the go-for-broke dominant— a mixture of the best blues and gospel harmonies, moves me nearly to tears. I wonder if I’ll even be able to bark out my “double espresso to go” when my turn arrives or whether I’ll be choked up with emotion and bleat something inarticulate and embarrassing.

Washington D.C. is full of black people, doing everything from serving coffee to driving cabs to occupying the White House. The percentage of black people in the District of Columbia is 55.5%. For that reason, and surely for that reason only, this population, without whom this city could not function, will not be allowed representation in Congress.

While I’m standing in line I look at the front page of the New York Times. A huge photo of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed stares defiantly at me. This is not the familiar photo we’ve seen for some years now, the one of a thickset man with a sullen and dazed expression, a bushy moustache and a large expanse of hairy torso, his eyes turned away from the camera.

No, this photo is new, taken this year at Guantánamo. In this one he’s wearing a keffiyeh, looking clean and neatly groomed with an enormous expanse of grey Brillo beard that flows down his front in a full display of male authority. His eyes now are staring fearlessly into the camera. The expression is one of iron will, tempered to the steely immutability of the prophet. This face is a symbol of something profoundly, fatally at odds with our Starbuck Nation.

People are justifiably anxious about the idea of bringing this guy to justice not in the controlled secrecy of a military court but in the glaring openness of a New York courtroom. They fear it will simply be too much for the country’s psyche to handle. It’s not that we’re afraid he won’t get his just deserts. (There’s not a chance in hell that he’ll get off on an O.J. technicality.) No, it’s not that. It’s really that we simply don’t even want to contemplate this image, cannot begin to imagine the idea of a defense lawyer making a case for what? Leniency? Self-defence? Diminished capacity?

We can’t fit the notion of legal justice that most of us have learned more from “Law and Order,” “CSI” and “Perry Mason” and that presumes a defendant innocent until proven guilty applying to a figure so seemingly alien, so full of spiritual fire and the dream of end-of-time Armageddon. It just doesn’t go with our Jimmy Stewart images of justice. We’d rather he just go away, be hanged somewhere outside the country and disappear so the networks can start talking about closure and we’ll be rid of him. But it’s not going to be that easy. This trial will bring the images of the festering alienation of those that hate us right back to our front doorstep for the first time since 2001. Instead of parking our awareness of all this in far-away abstractions like “Afghanistan” and “Pakistan,” we’ll have to endure it right here in downtown New York, only a short cab ride from Dave Letterman and The Lion King. No wonder people are disturbed.

Aretha, Herbie Hancock (whom I’m listening to right now), the guy sitting on his folding chair in the rain outside Starbucks, and the 55.5% population in D.C. who aren’t allowed representation in Congress—they’d all have something to say about Jimmy Stewart’s “justice” in America. I’m sure they’re just as terrified by the calm, implacable visage of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as I am. But I know they have their own secret pain to tell about living in the USA, the sweet pain I can hear in the Herbie’s quiet and gentle substitute chords and in Aretha’s from-the-heart soulful wail.