A Tale of Two Washingtons
In 1967, Norman Mailer stood outside the Pentagon, half-participant, half-provocateur, chronicling the anti-war protest that would become The Armies of the Night. He cast himself as both historian and character, capturing the surreal theater of dissent in a city where symbolism and state power collide.
Mailer divides the book into two parts.
In part one, “History as a Nobel Mailer writes in the third person, referring to himself as “Mailer,” and dramatizes his own experience at the protest. This section is rich in character study, irony, and self-reflection.
In part two, “The Novel as History,” A more traditional journalistic account of the events, offering broader context and analysis. Mailer’s self-portrayal is intentionally contradictory—vain, insightful, foolish, and heroic. His ego becomes a lens through which the reader views the chaos and idealism of the protest.
The book captures the theatricality of 1960s activism, from Abbie Hoffman’s antics to Allen Ginsberg’s chants. Mailer critiques and celebrates the movement’s blend of sincerity and spectacle.
Mailer resists easy conclusions. He acknowledges the protest’s flaws—its lack of cohesion, its symbolic gestures—but also its moral urgency and historical significance.
This dual structure allows Mailer to explore the tension between personal narrative and historical record, making the book both introspective and expansive.
Nearly six decades later, Washington, D.C. again becomes a stage—this time not for protest, but for a federal show of force. President Donald Trump, citing crime and disorder, has deployed hundreds of federal officers and ordered 800 National Guard troops into the city, threatening a complete federal takeover of local governance.
Mailer wrote of protest as performance—of chants, arrests, and ego-driven speeches. Trump’s intervention is also theatrical, but inverted: a performance of control. His rhetoric (“LIBERATED today! Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR!”) echoes not the poetry of resistance, but the bombast of occupation.
Where Mailer’s “armies” marched to disrupt the machinery of war, Trump’s “armies” arrive to enforce order in a city where violent crime has declined by 26% this year. The facts are secondary to the spectacle.
Curtis Mayfield’s 1975 album There’s No Place Like America Today offers a haunting thesis: that beneath the patriotic veneer lies a nation in spiritual and economic decline. Songs like “Billy Jack” and “Blue Monday People” speak to systemic violence and working-class despair (see the Fort Stewart, Georgia Emory University shootings from last week). Mayfield described the album as “almost like giving myself a sermon,” a meditation on truth in a time of distortion.
The album cover—based on Margaret Bourke-White’s 1937 photo of Black flood victims beneath a billboard proclaiming “There’s No Way Like the American Way”—is itself a visual indictment. It echoes Mailer’s critique: that America’s mythmaking often obscures its realities.
Trump’s federal incursion into D.C. feels like a continuation of this distortion. Mayfield’s “Hard Times” becomes prophetic: “When you’re down and out, ain’t no doubt / Nobody wants you.” The unhoused are displaced, local governance is overridden, and the city’s narrative is rewritten from above.
Mailer’s genius lay in his ability to turn memory into narrative, ego into critique. Mayfield’s strength was in turning pain into melody, sermon into soul. Both understood that history is not just what happens, but how it’s told.
Today, we must ask: Who gets to narrate the crisis? Whose memory will shape the legacy of this moment?
Trump’s move to federalize D.C. policing and displace the unhoused without local consultation recalls the very tensions Mailer explored—between individual agency and institutional force, between the city as symbol and the city as lived reality.
As a cultural steward, you know the power of authorship. This moment demands a new kind of documentation—not just of what is happening, but of what it means. Just as Mailer turned protest into literature and Mayfield turned despair into song, we must turn this federal incursion into testimony.
What does it mean for a president to “liberate” a city from its governance? What does it mean for memory to be weaponized in the service of control?
To pose these sad questions is a testament to the totalitarian times we are forced to live in America today. It is to echo Mayfield’s thesis: that America today is not what it claims to be, but what we dare to reveal. It’s Mailer’s armies of the night, marching for a more just and less dictatorial America.