Kafka In Washington

The Atlantic's Conor Clarke tried his darndest to see what he could. Alas..

The salient feature of the day (for just about everyone I think) was that it was basically impossible to move around and everyone's ambitions to see the speech or get close to the capitol had to be radically scaled back. It was like Children of Men or I am Legend or just about any apocalyptic movie where there's a big fence with a lot of armed guards and a crowd, but not everyone gets across to the other side and joins the saved part of humanity.

And at some point (due to a water-main break, I was told) they stopped admitting journalists at all but one entrance, but no one seemed to know which entrance that was supposed to be. One secret service guy would say "go walk to 6th street," and then his buddy at 6th would say "no no, first street is the place to be." This was repeated for a few hours. Kafka came to mind.

The only observation other I was able to make is that there were a surprising number of men in fur coats.