Only in Washington is it remotely likely that the jerk who just hit your car will turn out to be a Congressman.
Even in Washington, it probably requires a certain alignment of the city’ s darker stars: an evening, for instance, when streets close for a White House Christmas tree lighting, and traffic knots accordingly—just when the plutocracy’ s favorite Janesville janissary commandeers a public building for a private feast and requires those who work there to evacuate the premises.
That, at any rate, was how I happened to be driving by the Smithsonian last night, when Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY) swerved out of a lane of stalled traffic and slammed into my passing car.
Now, anyone can have a bad moment—hell, I was having a bad evening, and for all I know, he was, too—and make a significant error in judgment. I suppose Mr. Engel didn’t look around enough as he swung his steering wheel, or he misjudged my approaching speed, or something of that sort, with the result that his poor judgment is now scraped lavishly across the left rear door of my car. (His car is apparently unscathed.) And if that were the end of the matter, it would be churlish to note it publicly.
Unfortunately, the accident was only his first of several lapses in judgment over the course of an acquaintance that lasted, thankfully, only a short time.
Congressman Engel might, for example, have owned up to his error and apologized when the injured party—in no sense physically injured but feeling, be it admitted, every inch the Injured Party—hit her brakes, snapped on her blinkers, unfurled her highest dudgeon, and marched back to his car demanding to know “what were you thinking?!?.” He did not.
Still, that proves nothing other than that your average Congressman is as weak as the next person when it comes to manning (womanning?) up and taking responsibility for hurting someone else. And the Injured Party was visibly angry, after all—not yelling, and certainly not swearing (I’m a prude about that), but manifestly upset, which is seldom an inducement to unaccustomed generosity. Call it just another lapse of judgment, as drearily unexceptional as the first.
Again, though, Congressman Engel might at least have asked whether said Injured Party was in fact injured? (Her car quite clearly was.) He did not.
Still, the discovery that your average Congressman is much like your average jerk is hardly the stuff of news, least of all in this forum.
He might even, at the end of the whole tedious scene—when the crisply courteous officers of the Metropolitan Police had at last arrived and arranged the exchange of necessary information and departed; when even the Spousal Party to the Injured Party—a person known in certain infamous circles as teacherken—had driven up with assorted vehicular documents, silently recognized that the wayward car’ s driver was in fact a particular Member of Congress, and was preparing to depart;-- even then, at the very last minute, Congressman Engel might have had the good judgment, or good character, or common decency to apologize for the one moment when a bad Washington evening became, suddenly, something uglier and more redolent of the stench of Trump: the much earlier moment when the white man of great political power and privilege looked at the unknown woman whose car he had just struck and damaged and ordered her, his face contorted with rage, to shut the fuck up.
But he did not.
