Houston — Washington is not a swamp and never was. Would that it were. (The tale that the Capitol was built on a drained swamp is apocryphal, I’m told.) The political expression “drain the swamp” has been traced back to Socialists in the early 1900s, during a time when swamps were drained to reduce the populations of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. For over a century, politicians have used the phrase to go after the perceived bloodsuckers of their day — lobbyists, corrupt officials, wasteful spenders. But after having killed half the wetlands in our country, we should not want to drain any more swamps.

Granted, the swamp is not well suited for human habitation, but humans depend on it all the same. It filters water, removing the excess nitrogen created by agricultural runoff. It supports hundreds of species, which in turn support hundreds of others. It absorbs floodwaters. The loss of wetlands — driven by development and rising sea levels — played a major role in recent flooding on the East and Gulf Coasts.

The swamp is also the perfection of paradox. A marsh with trees. Water. Land. Both and neither.

The use of “swamp” as a pejorative ignores all of this, while reflecting an ecological ignorance and a general disparagement of the swampier regions of the country, particularly in the South. Denigration of the South often gets a pass in our society, indulged in even by those dependent on the South’s political good will. That is to say, some of my best friends live near swamps.

In popular culture, swamp folk are depicted as not only illiterate but also nearly unintelligible. They are outlaws and bootleggers and, in our older mythologies, witches, ghosts and runaway slaves. Everyone knows alligators frequent swamps, and what good follows that primeval foe? Swamps are reminders of an unconscious past before subdivisions and municipalities, a threatening wilderness of spontaneous fires smelling of decay. To drain them seems almost a mercy.