Fair enough, but the music O’Hara chose, a march composed in 1980 by John Williams, stirred something in us. We wondered: what exactly was it doing to us?

We enlisted Frank Lehman, a Tufts University music theorist with bobbleheads of John Williams in reach. He’s just published a book about the composer and the music of Star Wars.

Lehman thinks the sci-fi franchise still connects to many people’s childhoods. The Imperial March, he says, “evokes an almost child’s vision of what bad person music is.” It’s cartoony, he says, and the effect of playing it to Guard troops marching around the nation’s capital “is to puncture the seriousness” of the situation.

We’ve noticed the rupture. In a video, O’Hara followed five National Guard troops patrolling Dupont Circle with the Imperial March booming. A few steps into the song, a Guard member broke rank, flashed a smile back at O’Hara, and nodded.

But the song isn’t just evoking childhood baddies. The notes are touching something deeper.

Let’s start with the obvious: the song is weighted toward the low end of the orchestra and in a minor mode. And as every mammal knows, a low grumble means a large carnivore or primate lurks nearby. The melody repeats and repeats, burrowing itself into our minds. Dum dum dum-dum, dum dee-dum, dum dee-dum.

The darkest part of the song is its iconic chord progression. It starts with C minor, a little unsettling on its own, but then turns devilish when it jumps to A-flat minor and back again. You’ve got to feel it:

Lehman says Richard Wagner used the same progression a century earlier in Das Rheingold. In the opera, Wagner made an unsettling motif for an evil helmet called the Tarnhelm. The music was simple and effectively dark. If you listen closely, you can hear Tarnhelm-like musical ideas characterize Voldemort and Gollum. Listen to Wagner’s Tarnhelm progression and Lehman’s description of it:

Meanwhile, underneath this progression, the melody rubs up against it, creating a dissonance. We notice dissonance. Babies and other newly hatched critters shy away from it.

This march, or any march, does even more to us: it moves us without our consent. In O’Hara’s videos, National Guard troops match their steps to the song. Our brains latch onto a rhythmic sound as we move. The effect is so strong it’s helped people with Parkinson’s disease improve their gait.

The rhythm is the animating force — not too quick or too slow. “A walking gait,” Lehman says. Snare and bass drums keep time. Woodwind and brass instruments repeat the melody, leaving the rest of the orchestra with little to do. The arrangement is designed to be heard outdoors, by a crowd. Brash. Obvious. Not subtle.

There is a joy in it — in giving ourselves to something large. The march glorifies our submission. We feel endorphins as we meld into those keeping the same beat.

To march is to fall in line behind a conductor.

To march is to bring order to the independent and chaotic zig-zag of walking.

To march is to notice who is marching with us and who is not.

We’ve found any march, even when played in protest, is a strong force unleashed onto the world, and compels us to submit to it.

Beware of the march.

Sam O’Hara wrote us to say, “I’ll continue using the Imperial March. It has become a recognizable part of the protest, and it’s clearly been an effective way to communicate the message: Armed National Guard should not be policing D.C. residents as we walk around our neighborhoods.”

O’Hara continues his protests on TikTok, @freedc20009.

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The Animal Welfare League of Arlington brought the crow to her six weeks ago with a wound at his ankle from being tangled in netting, and — importantly — he couldn’t fly. Was this the work of West Nile virus? Crows are extremely sensitive to the disease. Maybe he was just a runt? It does happen. She force-fed him, which is usually a dire sign, and reckoned he had a 50/50 shot.

Now the young crow and Catherine are locked in a stare, his pink mouth open, occasionally cawing. She holds him in a pillowcase. He pinches her thumbs with his four toes. Catherine knows talking around him risks imprinting, but she taunts him, “You’re so tough! You’re so tough!”

He’s the orneriest bird she’s ever had in 13 years as a songbird rehabilitator. He kicks, bites, and prefers high-protein dog food and french fries. Soon, he and Catherine will part ways. She’ll release him where he was found: near fast-food dumpsters and fifty-foot locust trees, overlooking a stream called Four Mile Run in Arlington, Virginia. She hopes the crow will fly away from her and join the nearby flock. The worst case would be the little devil bolting from the box on foot and evading her in the grass. We don’t think it likely. His flight muscles seemed in good form in his eight-foot-square enclosure.

He is not the only bird leaving today. Catherine is going on vacation — a rarity in the life of a bird rehabber, who must devote heaps of time and money to the effort. So she will unload four other birds: another crow that will rejoin the wild near a private country club; two Eastern Bluebird juveniles that will have to fend for themselves after being given a diet of insects and worms; and a Red-bellied Woodpecker that she’ll drop off at a clinic to be euthanized. She reasoned it had ingested pesticide.

Catherine says she doesn’t rehabilitate birds so much as resurrect them. “Every bird that comes in here is dead,” she says. Discarded nestlings and grounded birds would die in the wilds of the city. She is not a vet. She is there to give birds a chance to survive in her backyard. But many — most — do not make it. And when they die, she’s burdened: Did she start solid food too soon? Did she miss a critical feeding?

“That’s how you think,” she says.

She once had an intern who necropsied birds to learn their causes of death. The intern found a deformed heart; no lung capacity; a traumatic brain injury. This helped Catherine. She could release some of the blame.

At the Department of Justice, Catherine went after rich people dodging the bankruptcy system. Then at non-profits, she devoted herself to litigating prison conditions and defending prisoners’ civil rights, sometimes freeing them. In that legal world, she says, your argument can strongly influence the outcome. She has spent a career fusing results — and blame — to her efforts.

Catherine opens the cardboard box that has been housing a quiet Thicky, Thicky, Dumb, Dumb.

“Come on,” she says and reaches toward the young crow. He leaps and flaps and strains against gravity. He looks uncomfortable in all that open space. The first flight is short: about 200 feet. He lands in a locust tree near another crow.

“That’s the best you can hope for,” Catherine says.

To be honest, we were hoping for a little more drama: a cascade of caws and parents celebrating a reunion with dances and nuzzles. None of that happens. To our untrained eyes, the released crow is awkward. He shuffles toward an oblivious crow, then takes a few steps back.

Catherine doesn’t smile or celebrate. We ask how she feels. “Good,” she says. This isn’t enough for us, so we ask again. “Satisfied,” she says and points out that birds don’t say thank you or send Christmas cards.

We thought a release would provide a catharsis, a climax to stow away for the future, when Catherine returns from vacation and must feed nestlings every half hour. But no. Catherine quietly walks away from the orneriest crow she’s had.

We must be missing something.

In June, Catherine represented an incarcerated woman seeking a compassionate release from prison. The client’s son was being abused by his guardian. Catherine lost the case and wrote to her client to apologize. Her client wrote back —

Hi Catherine,

Don’t apologize for something that’s not your fault. It was the judges decision to deny my CR not yours, and you and your wonderful team worked hard for me doing all that you could and more. I’m very grateful to you for taking a chance on me, and by doing this it helped me realize that I am worth it, I was heard… I have been a good mother to them aside from the fact that I have been absent. I will definitely keep you updated on everything so that you can stay on them to make sure I’m home with my babies when I’m suppose to be.

Catherine leans forward.

“Maybe what I’m doing — even if I don’t get the ‘win’ — still has value,” she says.

—

The young crow hasn’t moved from the branch in the locust tree and it’s getting hot. Catherine has four cardboard boxes of birds waiting in the shade.