After the stress of a turbulent election night, I just had to get out of town for awhile to escape being inundated with politics. What with airfares being so cheap right now, I thought I could either go to Rome or Washington D.C.

According to all the Disney movies I’ve seen, Rome is a madhouse where wacky antics abound, and I’m not a big pasta guy. So I decided to go to Washington, D.C. I can tell you now that this was a BIG mistake and if I had really thought about the prospect of going to Washington, D.C. on the day after one of the closest elections of the 20th century, I might have decided to stay home. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Most of this city is just like it is on TV: monuments, the familiar trappings of Americana, limos, bad traffic and no parking, etc. The city, like most, is beautiful in the well-maintained portions where the tourists spend money and loaded with the homeless who depend on those tourists for their charity.

I have never been in a city where there were this many power brokers, and the contrast between the haves and the have-nots is more striking because of it.

The constant parade of tourists through D.C. makes me wonder how anyone could come away from here unconvinced that Americans have a duty to help those less fortunate than themselves. Maybe I should not be surprised.

All over the city, monuments to our greatness stand like Stygian spires that almost defy God with our hubris. The Washington Monument alone stands like the tower of Babel saying to all who gaze upon it.

What a strange symbol of secular power to take center stage in the capital of a country that is so thoroughly Christian.

I haven’t seen it yet, but the Vietnam Memorial is a must-see for me. I grew up in a strange time of transition as Americans began to take a more enlightened view about the way we left that small, ravished country and the men and women who served there.

Every guy in my high school took turns reading a now out-of-print book called “The Nam.” It was a collection of memoirs from grunts talking about their daily lives.

We learned the slang and marveled at our fathers’ generation to cope with the insurmountable. My stepfather was in Nam. He doesn’t talk about it much, but when he does, the hair on my neck stands up.

I have always been impressed that he did two tours as a Green Beret and even more so that he doesn’t brag about it.

The cynic in me likes to shrug all this patriotism off, but like most cynics, I am really a disappointed romantic at heart. I cannot help but take in all the symbols of our national pride and feel a mild swelling in the cardiac region.

I can look at the memorials to the fallen who defended freedom and monuments to the great who made America and I realize that in many ways my life stands in stark contrast to them.

The part of me that is not entirely cynical wishes I had had adversity to face. The cynic in me realizes that if I had been in a war I would have been one of those cherries that got popped his first week humping a pack in the bush or digging a latrine.

With the election up in the air, there is a magnificent buzz in the air here. Politics energize this town. Nebraska has its football. New York has everything. D.C. has the government of the United States.

Every building has history. I’ve seen two different postal museums alone and each one was 20 or 30 times the size of Beardshear and 300 times better kept up.

It is humbling, and perhaps that is why people in Washington are so friendly. What a surprise to see the center of one of the rudest nations on earth is so polite, it makes Minneapolis look like Weehauken, N.J., or some other rude town. I don’t know.

There is too much to see in such a short time, but I know I will never look at our nation’s capital the same again.