A Washingtonian Looks At His City.(Brief Article)

Perhaps it's just me, a Brit living in America. But Washington had a distinctly orphaned feeling as September drew to its unhappy close. The nation's heart bled for those burned and buried in New York, and for the all-American heroes dead in Pennsylvania--but not (or certainly not to the same degree) for the Federal City and the loss of one of the Pentagon's five facets. My friends in New York received shoals of anxious e-mail to see how they were. Those in Washington did not.

Why? Certainly, the Twin Towers aflame and tumbling, and the last stand in the skies over Pittsburgh, are inherently dramatic, even inspirational. Pity and terror, it seems, are not so readily summoned by the image of civil servants being dug out of bureaucratic wreckage. Yet think about it. If the passengers over Pennsylvania had not resisted so gallantly, we might be looking at the hole where the White House used to be, or at the stump of the Washington Monument, or the shattered dome of the Capitol. Perhaps that would have cut nearer to the quick.

We Washingtonians have always known our city is not loved. Even the president, that ghastly week, had been engaged in a provincial tour designed to emphasize his suspicions of the place. Since so many "locals" are in fact from somewhere else or in transit elsewhere, there's even a certain reluctance to identify with the city's home football team, the Redskins. Still, as I walk the streets I can't shake the feeling, "What if?" What if that fourth plane had come scything in? A near miss on the targets I just mentioned, or a comprehensive on-the- ground conflagration, could have destroyed the Supreme Court, or the Folger Shakespeare Library with its irreplaceable folios. Or the Library of Congress, or the Nagasaki cherry trees around the Tidal Basin, or the memorial to Mr. Jefferson. How would I be feeling now? I cannot begin to answer the question.

But I've found a clue in the way Washingtonians have rallied to a different symbol, not destroyed but nonetheless compromised. For the past several weeks we have resided in what I call "the only other capital in the world that does not have its own airport." ("Other" because Nicosia's airport has been closed ever since it was placed in no man's land by the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.) Our old National Airport was a wondrous thing; in its dinky pre-2000 incarnation it looked rather like a railway station and was almost as ...