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Quote by Gary J. Floyd

“Friday night, under the dim atrium lights, we sit on wrought iron chairs, drinking beer in the cool antiseptic air. Near the fake flagstones snaking through the fake trees, ferns, and the bubbling, chlorine-infused, somnolent brook. Anytown USA. A fake park superimposed on the Washington swamp. Outside, oversized windows overlook the city, streaked with: rain, humidity, and tears.”

Quote by Gary J. Floyd

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Gary J. Floyd

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“I have never really liked this city. It was forced on me against my will by ambitious parents in search of greater opportunities and better lives. That’s why everyone comes here, to this seductive monument to self-advancement or at the very least, self-preservation. It’s a city that doesn’t take risks. Men wear boxy suit jackets over golf shirts tucked into khakis. Women wear sensible skirts, pantsuits and pumps. They all pull roller backpacks behind them because of subway ads enumerating the signs and evils of scoliosis as they walk to big-box buildings made of similarly colored sandstone. You can’t get lost here because there’s nothing to lose yourself in. These avenues, at least downtown, are not built for wanderers, and these monuments are constructed to inspire awe not contemplation. But things have changed if only to protect the desire to remain the same. The streets have more barricades because the streets have more impromptu protesters, a dismal lot with their posterboard signs and hoarse-voiced chants against the monster in power and his minions. There are more armored vehicles now and more police officers in tactical gear and body armor wielding large black guns. It’s a brave new world wrapped around the old one to make it great again.”

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“Four years to the day after Fairchild's 1908 gift of the trees to Washington's schools, on March 27, 1912, Mrs. Taft broke dirt during the private ceremony in West Potomac Park near the banks of the Potomac River. The wife of the Japanese ambassador was invited to plant the second tree. Eliza Scidmore and David Fairchild took shovels not long after. The 3,020 trees were more than could fit around the tidal basin. Gardeners planted extras on the White House grounds, in Rock Creek Park, and near the corner of Seventeenth and B streets close to the new headquarters of the American Red Cross. It took only two springs for the trees to become universally adored, at least enough for the American government to feel the itch to reciprocate. No American tree could rival the delicate glamour of the sakura, but officials decided to offer Japan the next best thing, a shipment of flowering dogwoods, native to the United States, with bright white blooms. Meanwhile, the cherry blossoms in Washington would endure over one hundred years, each tree replaced by clones and cuttings every quarter century to keep them spry. As the trees grew, so did a cottage industry around them: an elite group of gardeners, a team to manage their public relations, and weather-monitoring officials to forecast "peak bloom"---an occasion around which tourists would be encouraged to plan their visits. Eventually, cuttings from the original Washington, D.C, trees would also make their way to other American cities with hospitable climates. Denver, Colorado; Birmingham, Alabama; Saint Paul, Minnesota.”

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“America isn’t the picture of barbecues, guns, freedom, and hot girls eating hamburgers you probably saw on TV. That’s the old America and one I’m not even sure ever existed. The glowies parade that picture around every time they want to put people at ease and push them back into place. DC is especially made of glowies. You can’t talk to anyone because maybe they’re gonna send you to the dungeon or maybe they know someone who can.”

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“The cost of living is first on all of our minds this important year. Yet the President [Nixon] has decided that it is a year for travel. I ask–when is he going to make a "Trip to Peking" in regard to the basic problems facing us in the United States this year? He is willing to go halfway 'round the world--yet he doesn't have time to walk ten blocks from the White House in Washington and look at the lives people are living under Phase II. (From Voices of Multicultural America)”

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“The fishing pole bends, almost to the point of breaking. If you succumb to your base desires, you will snap under that pressure. Strengthen yourself by heeding the teachings of the Higher Power. Hold steadfast to your principles. They will guide you to the light. If you remain strong yet humble, you will not snap, and you will help others proceed.”

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“Washington is certainly not a city of restaurants, any more than it is a city of theaters. It is a city of official cocktail parties and excellent home-cooked dinners with wonderful conversation afterward and that provides all the entertaining anyone needs. It's also a city of whispering, maneuvering, tattling, declaiming - a city that's still having growing pains, that naive in spite of its imagined sophistication, that's beautiful in the same way an adolescent is beautiful, though he insists on pretending to a maturity and a mellowness that he hasn't achieved.”

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