A couple of weeks ago I joined scores of fellow citizens at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., at a public reading of the Mueller report.
From noon until late into the evening, a parade of volunteers calmly managed and executed the spectacle, live streamed for all to see.
It was as Washington geeky as you could get, sitting in the Molly Smith Library, named after Arena’s venerable artistic director, listening to readers deliver three-minute excerpts, which often include lengthy legal citations and subscripts, punctuated occasionally by a loud tone while a staffer held up a large cue card emblazoned with “REDACTED”.
I can imagine eyes rolling among those who dismiss such public acts as a waste of time, some kind of liberal comfort food, or nothing more than a narrow effort to attack a disfavored president.
However, for me, the time and effort (a few hours for three minutes of reading, parking in the crowded D.C. waterfront area, and waiting for a turn that came after 9 p.m.) was not an act of defiance. It was an affirmation of our political system.
A critical part of democracy is showing up. Voting, writing a letter, marching, engaging, donating time, money, ideas and, yes, reading the text of a 400-plus page government report to a room full of strangers and the internet. (Shout out to friends in Cape Town who watched!)
These public readings in Washington and, before that, in New York City, did something very important. They gave voice to the document. They put a citizen’s face to an enormous amount of professional work by people we will never know or meet. It sent a message that the report is important, time-worthy and that serious Americans did serious work to tell the nation the truth.
Waiting for your turn to speak generates a few butterflies. What if you get a name you can’t pronounce (thankfully we were not reading the Russian interference section), or you trip up on an alphabet soup of legal citations in the footnotes (all footnotes where read aloud). Some readers got juicy stuff, re-stating a funny presidential tweet or an embarrassing transcript quotation. Others, sadly, after all the waiting, were mired in the dull but essential recording of legal references. How disappointing to wait all that time and end up with just “Gov’t Opp. To Def. Mot for Temp. Restraining Order, In the Matter of Search Warrants Executed on April 9, 2018.” I wanted an explicative!
Yet, when my time came, I didn’t recognize the text, nor even remember what I read when my three minutes were up. And it really didn’t matter. I was earnest in my delivery, but it flew by.
What mattered is that I, and so many others, humanized the report about human behavior in our government. My presence was a statement that citizens can openly and publicly speak critically of our government. There were no Chinese or Russian security guards cutting me off from sharing those words to the world. No one pointed a tank at me, tried to poison me or shot me for speaking freely. I was surrounded by a crew of helpful Arena Stage staffers in orange Mueller Reports T-Shirts handing out water to keep you hydrated and happy for your big moment. Welcome guests. Pure America.
And so the lesson is clear once you do something like this. Every drop counts. Eventually it becomes a rainfall. You can think your place as a citizen don’t matter in blizzards of presidential tweets, waves of pundits pontificating, and scores of messages from candidates to interests groups asking for money off the news cycle.
Your place does matter, if you show up.
Mueller made his appearance before Congress. He was reluctant to do so, but it was the right thing to do. I can understand how he would rather have the work of the report stand for itself. It’s impressive, and everyone should read it. But many won’t.
Perhaps Mueller’s most important final act as special counsel is to do what we did at the Arena Stage: put a human face on this report and the hard work that went into its production. Add a critical voice of reason to the discussion for a country that is still trying to understand it all.
A native of Utah, Scott Williams is a communications consultant in Washington, D.C.
Scott Williams, Utah native, is a communications consultant in Washington, D.C.