Capital Offense

I am just back from a visit to our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.  Walking around town it’s hard not to be struck by the sheer enormity, inertia and energy of the whole endeavor.  Having said that, I must also report that the city is a jumbled mess of contradictions, juxtapositions and hypocrisy; starting simply with the streets.  They must have been laid out by a drunken sailor.  Diagonal streets intersect square grids creating a dizzying mess for the accidental foot traveler.  Start out going straight up one street and you can suddenly find yourself on a completely different street without ever noticing a change in direction.  And don’t forget whether your hotel is in the NW, NE, SW or SE quadrant.  Geez.  Now, there are many parks, statues and memorials scattered all over town.  Study these memorials and you find that they are dedicated to the memory of many brave, courageous and wise founders and fighters for our country.  Strangely, there are no monuments to the ‘great’ compromisers and timid consensus builders; the whimps and wusses of our national heritage.  Wonder why that is?  One street is populated by foreign embassy after foreign embassy, another by every conceivable public interest and advocacy association and organization known to man.  And all of them clamoring for what?  Your federal tax dollars that’s what!  While you could say that the business of this town is government, and I guess that is technically true; today government is merely a euphemism for other people’s money.  When you look around this city and give it some thought, there really are no great leaders or visionaries here anymore.  Virtually everything done here really just comes down to moving money around; rewarding this group, punishing that one.  Administrations change and the direction of money movement changes course.  That’s all.  Different players, same song.  The role of Congress today sadly is to merely play elves to the President’s Santa Claus.  It’s Christmas every day here!  (Except that you can’t say ‘Christmas’ anymore)  You walk by these monstrous, gaudy, ostentatious federal office buildings and realize that they are just brimming over with bureaucrats whose only job is to find ways to make our lives more difficult and find creative ways to get at our money.  They don’t create anything, not wealth; they suck it out.  They don’t make things better or easier for people, they just make things worse.  I sincerely believe that we could level all of these boring, gray federal buildings and send all of these teeming masses of leeches out into the countryside to find real jobs and everything in our nation would instantly get better.  It is easy to see how someone could spend their entire life inside the beltway, as they say; never having to cross the Potomac and having no idea that there is anything of any importance beyond the district boundaries.  Some of them probably believe that there is nothing but wilderness and Indians from D.C. all the way to the Pacific!  They spend all of their time running around in circles in the city, talking to each other and telling each other how great and important they are.  Full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.  It is the most self-absorbed city and population one can imagine.  That and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee at Denny’s.  LOL!  And then you come to Fort White House.  Literally a fortress within the city.  How sad that our nation’s leader is virtually a prisoner inside a jail in the city that is our country’s capital.  How ironic, he is arguably the most un-free person in the land!  And right across the street from that jail are multitudes of homeless people sleeping in the gutters, literally a stone’s throw from the most powerful person in the world.  If he can’t do something about that (compassion?) should we expect him and his government to truly ‘help’ any of the rest of us? Umm, no.  The funny thing is that they will look you right in the eye and say that they can and will help you while carefully just outside the screen shot are testimonies to the fact that in reality he cannot and will not.  He is powerless.  The ultimate irony.  Nothing more than a straw man, a straw leader, a straw President.  But no one will tell him that he has no clothes.  His handlers constantly whisper in his ear how important and powerful he is.  You see, by building him up they keep their cushy jobs and coveted parking spots.  The simple reality is that I am not impressed by the people working in this town; Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, Supreme Court Justices, Cabinet members or bureaucrats.  For the most part they are here just there promoting themselves and their personal agendas.  It’s not about the Constitution and the Republic, it’s only about them.  They will lie, steal and cheat to get what they want.  It is a town of outrageous irresponsibility gilded with soaring rhetorical crap.  I shudder at the prospects for the future of the Republic.