Zen, A Chant, and a Solid 8 Hours

The nation’s Federal City is a fascinating clusterfuck. Washington, D.C. is, quite possibly, the most absurdly misunderstood city on the planet. To your tourist, it’s a city of monuments and museums —bought and paid for by the sweat tax off the balls and backs of everybody’s American ancestor. To your political hopeful, it’s the proximity to real power, a chance to interact and rub elbows with the Christs of political juice in the flesh. The Media loves this city. They all take scrum communion together on the steps of The Capitol every news day in all the languages of the world, rolling tape, scittering, scampering and scattering viewpoints that bounce horrendously off a zillion communication satellites and back into the thirsty ear of the rest of the world; the rest of the world being most decidedly anyplace that is not here. Washington is, without debate; the absolute center of the universe.  People who live here actually believe this, routinely assent to this impossible fraud as an immutable fact. Compared to the Capital of The Free World—New York City is just a seedy artist colony with delusions of grandeur, compared to the sheer power exhibited and exemplified and amplified by the Nation’s Capital. As a tourist destination, we have the hard throbbing obelisk with which to immensely fuck the rest of the world. The Great Grand and Holy See of Incomprehensible Delusion.  Maybe it’s all the microwaves. The silent nanometers. Washington is the undisputed King of the incredibly important phone call, fax, radar, e-mail or gamma ray necessary to ride herd and yank the reins of policy. Damn impressive, as Chattie would say. People who live work and interact with one another in this city are certainly impressed by themselves.  It’s all in the walk. The Power Lunch may not have been invented here, but it has been perfected here. Alpha eats Omega with a sprig of arugula with Senator Caligula. I want it in triplicate on my desk yesterday or we’ll have yer head in our salad with a dash of vinaigrette. No one would stop to blink an eye in your passing. Anyone can be replaced here. There is always the reality lurking in the back of a Washingtonian’s mind that all it really takes is a micro-series of small fuck-ups here at ground zero to become a huge fuck-up which could possibly reduce the entire planet into radioactive space-dust. For all that, there is a level of arrogant officious calm that, on almost every level, is part of the demeanor of a Washingtonian. Washington is the city of the Ultimate Poker Face. A city which is forever being written about but never truly described as any more than a city of gray functionarian pundits holding a despotic rule over the modern world.            

Things break. Much is broken in the soul of democracy. There is ever so much malfunction. Ever so much need for pyramid restoration, gilded pissoirs, and willing yammer-mammals to preen and buff the abstruse infrastructure of greed and malfeasance.