Washington, Obamaland

Washington, I discover, is benefiting from a tourism boom fueled by Barack Obama (not unlike London, which regards the Queen as a tourist attraction herself). Shop windows are full of t-shirts and trinkets adorned with his broad toothy smile. His name is constantly overheard on streets and subways.

In front of the White House, workers are erecting a temporary stand on which Obama will swear his vows of office (see photo below). The impending inauguration has become one of the hottest tickets in the US. Hundreds of thousands of visitors will swamp DC for the event. Every hotel bed in town is booked, leading local citizens to let out their houses for tens of thousands of dollars. While trying to couchsurf, I ran into trouble – even now, weeks before the event, the town is filling up. “DC to benefit from inauguration windfall,” the local paper trumpets.
My friend Scott is calling in all favours to get a ticket to an inauguration party. He is Bill Ayer’s publicity manager, and had a role to play in helping quell the controversy over his client during the campaign (for some balanced non-Palinized information about Ayers, watch the film The Weather Underground, or at least, this lucid television interview he gave recently).
“Bush’s inauguration was an ignored formality. This one is historic, and everyone wants to be there,” Scott tells me.

The purpose of my visit to Washington is to research typography in the archives of The Smithsonian Institute. That’s how I find myself outside the Museum of American History at 8.20am on an unexpectedly sunny morning in mid December, waiting for the doors to open. To my right stands the great phallic Washington Monument, to my left the cupola dome of congress. As I wait, I read the words of James Smithson inscribed in proud Trajan in the sandstone façade of the museum: “No ignorance is probably without loss to him, no error without evil.”
I reach Joan Boudreau in the Graphic Arts Department of the museum, telephoning from the lobby. All this way, and I have to communicate by phone. Why are people afraid to meet face-to-face these days?
“I’ve located the documents you are after,” Joan tells me after I wait an hour (during which I wandered about the museum, inspecting the famous Hole-Tattered Banner, and a rather pathetic gallery of book design which gave only a cursory nod to typography – one limited to gaudy picto-scripts).
“We have 27 sets of drawings from the Lanston Monotype Corporation. Unfortunately they are located in a facility out of the city which has been closed for almost ten years due to asbestos contamination. We were hoping it would be reopened by now, but it has since been found to have a problem with lead contamination as well. Neither you or I can go in there. It will be open again once the health hazards are removed, but that’s at the mercy of federal funding, which as you know is a bit stretched right now.”
The situation would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. The Smithsonian, one of the richest museums in the world, leaves an entire building full of invaluable historic documents locked up for more than a decade, with an indefinite timeline for reopening and no budget for repairs.
I have travelled thousands of kilometres, spent more than a thousand dollars, conducted days of interviews, and all to discover that the crucial piece of evidence is hopelessly inaccessible.
Smithson was right. This ignorance is certainly not without loss to me.
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