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WASHINGTON — Plunging into tear gas-soaked chaos, police armored with riot gear and clashing with clench-fisted protesters – that’s how I imagined Bush’s inauguration while flying into D.C. on a red-eye from L.A.

What I found instead was an anti-climactic, ideological snowball fight. Epic chaos notwithstanding, it was unforgettable democratic madness nonetheless.

I guess I should begin with a simple image that encapsulated the essence of the whole event.

A freckled teenage girl with braces from Ohio scrawls the word “KERRY” with a chunk of snow on the wall of the Department of Labor building, facing the oncoming presidential motorcade on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Another prepubescent posse consisting of three rambunctious boys, also from Ohio, instinctively begin hurling little snowballs of fury at “KERRY” in rapid fire, with shouts of “you suck” in all their peewee seriousness.

I am awestruck. “Hey,” I said to one of them, “How come you’re doing that?” A 16-year-old boy retorted, “Because he sucks.”

In a weird way, that’s pretty much what it came down to on the street level, multiplied by about 100,000, give or take a few. Thousands of people flocked, flew, drove, bused, carpooled or hitchhiked from all over the country to tell Bush and all his supporters that he, and they, all suck. The supporters in turn thought the protesters equally sucky.

This political playground mud-slinging elevated (or degenerated) more than once in front of my eyes to the point of one fully grown man actually throwing an orange or a snowball at another, as a preamble to, “Come on, you wanna fight? You (insert “hippie” for liberals, “hick” for conservatives), let’s go then.”

If you can believe this, disapprovingly looking at the protesters waiting to be admitted to the parade route, a Republican returning from Bush’s swearing-in ceremony actually said without a hint of sarcasm, “Get a job, you hippies.”

Another Republican coming from the same direction (there was an odd mutual exclusivity throughout the whole thing) snapped a picture of a dark-skinned 17-year-old protester wearing a hijab, saying, “Can I take a picture of you? You ... terrorist!”

Just to be fair, I saw a nerdy-looking liberal physically taunting a Conservative who was simply chanting “four more years” when Bush’s motorcade passed.

The liberal, in pursuit, said, ”So you like war? Huh? You want more wars? Come on. Let’s have war here between the two of us!”

Which brings me to the scene when Bush finally showed up in his presidential-edition, bullet-proof, tinted-window stretch limousine, and three concurrent waves of shouting exploded from the on-looking crowd.

“Four More Years.”

“No More Wars.”

And finally, from cynicism with love, “Four More Wars.”

Repeat these slogans over and over and imagine them slowly layering atop one another like bass-lines in hip-hop beats. This was the soundtrack to somebody throwing a snowball at the Bushmobile, which was, for better or worse, as revolutionary as the protest got.

(Irony No. 672: The best-organized protesters were anarchists who, about 400-deep, made up an impressively uniformed black-block among a sea of protest.)

Of course, fueling those childish snowballs is very serious pain, hatred and misunderstanding. But the crowd was held at bay by camouflaged military officers – part of the unprecedented 8,500-man, $12 million security apparatus created in Tom Ridge’s words, “to thwart any attempts at disruption of this celebration of democracy.”

Within this crowd was a sweet little middle-class-looking woman who seemed slightly drunk, accompanied by a blind man who also seemed drunk. I had no choice but to get the scoop.

It turned out her son, who enlisted in the National Guard Reserves to pay for college, was recently activated for duty in Iraq. Being a nurse, this woman hated war, and hated even more the idea of losing her son to it.

The pain in Carolyn Church’s eyes was palpable. Looking into them I instantly understood why she was there, reacting how she was. Having been snarled at to get a job and called a hippie, she expressed her confusion at the unsolicited comments made by the conservatives against whom she had nothing personal. “I don’t understand why they say these things to me. I’m the person who takes care of them when they’re sick.”

Through all the snowball flinging, this story was the one that hit me hard. It hurt so much, because it wasn’t meant to hurt me, and realizing this led me to conclude that people who mindlessly throw snowballs suck.

Want an intellectual snowball fight? E-mail Lukacs at olukacs@media.ucla.edu.