How do people afford this city?

In my new and unplanned blog series about how damn expensive life is, I explore D.C.'s cost-of-living and how increasingly unaffordable it is to live here on a non-profit or lower level government-worker's salary. I was reminded of this once again as I searched Craigslist for future housing options for the coming year. Considering that the once "cheap" and relatively well-located areas of the city like Columbia Heights are in the process of being uber-gentrified, it appears hope is lost for the automobile-lacking person who wants to live in a D.C. neighborhood that is in walking distance of a grocery store, Metro, and a few other commercial establishments that aren't liquor stores or Western Unions. The low-end of a 3 bedroom in Columbia Heights now appears to be 2800 per month or 933 per person, usually before utilities are added in.

Hypothetical: If I'm making $15 per hour at a non-profit working 8 hour days, five days a week, I make 2400 per month, before taxes, or 31.2 K per year. My D.C. income tax alone would be $400 per year plus an additional 6% of the excess income above 10,000, which in my case would be $139 per month. Federal income tax is 4,220 plus 25% of the amount over 30,650, which amounts to $4357.50 or 363.13 per month. Medicare and Social Security taxes are 199, by my calculations, so after taxes, I make 1837.87 per month. My health care premium might be around 60 per month (more if I have a "pre-existing condition"), so I'm down to 1777.87 per month. Now, subtract my 933 rent and a 50 utility check (add at least 25 more if I have cable), and I am left with 794.87. I have to eat, which we can approximate at around 250 per month and buy work clothes which maybe be around 60 per month. If I'm paying back 250 in student loans per month, I am now down to about 245, some of which I probably want to put into a retirement account (though it won't amount to the 10% of income that is recommended), the rest of which I should put in a cash reserves account. Keep in mind that Hill staffers often make significantly less than this hypothetical non-profit salary.

So the question is, why, in spite of the high cost-of-living and relatively low salary do young, aspiring public servants move to this city after graduation? I guess my reason was that it seemed like the most likely place to get the sort of occupation I've described and to meet other people with the same priorities, but often enough, people like me come to D.C. and get disconcerted that their peers aren't here for these noble reasons but rather to feed their own ambition. Members of this group are willing to stick out their financial necks to live in a city whose lackluster city services, absent mid-range dining and shopping scene, and pretty uniform group of professionals (i.e., lawyers and aspiring lawyers) can make it at times a trying place to live. Note to my peers: as long as we keep forking over our rent money (and I'm guilty like you), D.C. will continue to be increasingly unaffordable to people like us.

This flight from affordability is of course egged on by D.C.'s subscription to the standard mode of urban renewal today: gentrify, gentrify, gentrify. The luxury condos and shopping complex with the likes of a Target that have swept through Columbia Heights within the past year are a clear culprit for the recently increased rents; they're also the culprit for the continued lack of entreprenuerial character that D.C. maintains. Increasingly, D.C. has become a city for the very well-off, the young cash-strapped, and the long-time residents who seem to have fairly little say in any of this planning. Why I continue to live here, I don't know.

The Silenced Majority

I know I often conjecture about the disparity of concerns between the media and the American people, often without any evidence save the nagging sense that the D.C. media's preoccupation with reporting on the trivialities of political strategy has indirectly contributed to the series of giant pickles we now find ourselves facing as a nation. The Andrea Mitchells and Chris Matthews are the Neros of our time, fiddling as the world--in some cases literally--burns.

There was a great article in a Times blog about the disconnect between the Washington media and the general populace and it manifests itself every time a public figure is badgered to explain himself after criticizing Bush and his administration. As this Times piece points out, the recent upbraidal of Jimmy Carter seemed to be a case of D.C. media imposing cocktail party decorum:

Something seems a little out of whack between the mainstream media and the American people. Take the arguments of the past few days over former President Jimmy Carter's remarks about the Bush administration and the consequences of its particular brand of foreign policy. Carter didn't attack President Bush personally, but said that "as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," which can't really be too far out of line with what many Americans think.
In coverage typical of much of the media, however, NBC Nightly News asked whether Carter had broken "an unwritten rule when commenting on the current president," and portrayed Carter's words - unfairly it seems- as a personal attack on President Bush. Fox News called it "unprecedented." Yet as an article in this newspaper <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/washington/22carter.html> on Tuesday pointed out, "presidential scholars roll their eyes at the notion that former presidents do not speak ill of current ones."

This guy is absolutely right. I'm no presidential scholar, but I seem to recall reading many times of Teddy Roosevelt's vocieferous criticism of William Howard Taft's leadership. Anyway, getting in a tizzy over whether an ex-president criticizes a sitting president sanctions the office as a regal post where all former officeholders are loyal to the myth of the office, which runs counter to the fundmanetal tenets of this lower-case republican nation.

The recent acceding of the Democrats to the timetable-free Bush war funding bill is a prime example of the party being influenced by the popular though incorrect wisdom that their original war funding bill would be viewed as taking resources away from frontline troops. The writer offers a plausible exegis on the source of the Democrats dissonance and the resulting contrition it provokes on their part to the supremely unpopular Bush administration.

I wonder whether this media distortion also persists because it doesn't meet with enough criticism, and if that's partially because many Americans think that what they see in the major political media reflects what most other Americans really think - when actually it often doesn't.

Psychologists coined the term "pluralistic ignorance" in the 1930s to refer to this type of misperception - more a social than an individual phenomenon - to which even smart people might fall victim.
[...]
In pluralistic ignorance, as described by researchers Hubert O'Gorman and Stephen Garry in a 1976 paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly, "moral principles with relatively little popular support may exert considerable influence because they are mistakenly thought to represent the views of the majority, while normative imperatives actually favored by the majority may carry less weight because they are erroneously attributed to a minority." What is especially disturbing about the process is that it lends itself to control by the noisiest and most visible.
[...]
Think of the proposal to put a timetable on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, supported, the latest poll says, by 60 percent of Americans <http://pewresearch.org/pubs/473/closeness-to-troops-boosts-support-for-war-but-not-by-much> , but dropped Tuesday from the latest war funding bill <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/washington/23cong.html> .

As the title suggests, there is as much a silent majority today as there was back when Nixon first uttered the powerful phrase at the height of the Vietnam War, but this majority is even more silenced by the D.C. media's insistence upon what concerns the "average American." If you've listened to members of the mainstream media over the years, the average American has not been too concerned with the Downing Street Memo, the Abramoff scandal, the Libby conviction, the U.S. Attorneys firings, ad infinitum. Using this logic, some members of the media fail to report on any of these incidents in a meaningful way and instead analyze the culpabilty of the players as a question of how well they spin their innocence. As a result, the media has shirked its duty to bring attention to the plagues to a democratic society--venality and autocracy--by claiming unjustifiably that the American people are too stupid to care.

In San Francisco

I'm at my friend Steph's in San Francisco and have been up for almost 24-hours, though I did take some naps on the plane. My inclination when I visit new places is to make generalizations about the people who live there. When I walk into a coffee shop or store, I categorize everyone as a San Franciscan and view their actions as reflecting upon the vibe of their city. The crazy man who yelled at the clerk at Green Apple Books in Inner Richmond about how he "controls his own money" and "wants to be respected" (yeah, this guy was nuts--he was even carrying a rain stick!) is an emblem of the zany tendencies of some of the San Fran residents. The kind people who smiled at me when I moved my bags out of the way for them on the bus are imbued with a California calm that allows them to be much more considerate and thoughtful than the people out East. Today a car almost hit me making a right turn when I had the right of way, but rather than speeding through the turn or glaring at me, the driver actually waved apologetically. It's nice that people have some remorse for their unintended recklessness. Is this San Franciscan, though? Is speeding like a frazzled, over-caffeinated a-hole Distrcit of Columbian? Why is it so tempting to generalize about a locale, anyway?

The D.C. Public Library in all of its glory

In doing a search on the D.C. Public Library's online catalog, I came across location categories including: Assumed lost, Claims lost, Branch closed until mid-February 2003, Gone Astray, Gone Astray between branches, Gone Astray for a Long Time, Lost, Lost and Paid for, Material Long Overdue, Missing titles Discovered in weeding, Undergoing repair, Unknown. As for the item category, my personal favorite category is: Brief titles entered on the fly. All of this makes a lot more sense if you visit the MLK main branch.

Rosslyn: probably a lost cause

The Washington Post reports today that the Arlington County Board approved construction of two high-rises in the Rosslyn neighborhood that, if built, will be the tallest in the Washington Metro area. According to the Post:

Arlington officials say they hope the project will transform Rosslyn, a commuter-clogged suburb crammed with outdated boxy buildings, into a modern development that would attract more tourism.

I would hardly call Rosslyn "commuter-clogged"--the area never seems that busy too me, but it is definitely an area that is home to few. "Outdated boxy buildings" is about as apt a description as any of the unremarkable cement edifices that make the view across the Potomac from Georgetown such an eyesore.

Still, it will be pretty difficult for two towers to change the character of this character-less part of the D.C.-area. The problem with Rosslyn, as with so many other parts of Northern Virginia, is that it lacks distinctive features and that street life mostly shuts down after 7. The designs of the highrises pictured in the Post article appear to deviate little from the dull steel and glass prototype that characterize today's urban towers. Just as the cement buildings of the 1950s-70s appear outdated now, the glass edifices will evoke anachronism a decade or two down the road.

The testimonial from a Rosslyn resident also seems incredibly misguided:

Roa Lynn of Rosslyn said she recently had lunch outside in Shirlington, "alfresco," she noted, and her neighborhood looked bleak in contrast.

"I was struck by how harsh and unpleasant the Rosslyn streetscape is," Lynn said. "I beg you please to approve this project today. Make my neighborhood as nice as the other neighborhoods in Arlington."

First, erecting highrises are hardly the formula for mitigating the harshness of a streetscape. Second, though Shirlington's small, pedestrian-friendly downtown area--all two blocks of it--is certainly more ideal than Rosslyn's, can't we set our sights a little higher than "other neigborhoods in Arlington?" Especially in regards to the businesses in some of these areas, particularly Ballston and Shirlington, which represent more of the same big box blandness that now infests so much of this nation.

Worst of all, this new highrise campaign will only encourage the use of the wholly unbefitting "Manhattan on the Potomac" slogan by Rosslyn business owners who clearly have never visited Manhattan. Ultimately, I remain pessimstic about a renaissance of Rosslyn, which seems condemened to the fate of providing residence to nine-to-five office workers, chain restaurants, Marriotts, and the closest Metro to Georgetown. Nevertheless, I wish this weird neighborhood to my East luck.

Giving myself and Eavsdrop D.C. shoutout

I just remembered that I had submitted two quotes to the blog Eavesdrop DC, which charitably posts lines that D.C. residents hear in passing that are generally unintentionally funny. Mine were posted a little while ago, but I forgot to check back until now. Well, here they are:

But the grass would be so whiny!

Guy to Woman friend in line at Murky Coffee in Clarendon: The floor here is so chic. They must have been like, how can we make this floor look chic? Let's strip off all of the tile. It's so emo. Hey, you know what I want? Emo grass. That stuff cuts itself.

posted by EavesdropDC @ 11:51 AM 1 comments

Can’t get enough of your love, metro

Metrorail conductor with sensual Barry White-esque voice pulls his blue line train into Pentagon: "Pentagon."

Metrorail employee standing on platform: "Hey, you're sounding good."

Conductor: "Thanks, man. Keep it light."

--Pentagon Metro station

posted by EavesdropDC @ 9:57 AM 0 comments

Bard pun, continued

My favorite co-worker Ben-jammin'* (just kidding, other co-workers) is doing my work for me. No, not my real work but my blog work. He has spotted a pun related to D.C.'s Shakespeare Fest. Here it is, care of the Washington Post:


"The Shakespeare in Washington festival kicks off six months of no-holds bard. "

I think every editor must love articles about Shakespeare, because they are so easy to title. The bard lends itself to endless puns, none of them very good but all easily-conjured when they need to be, which for editors is probably in the wee hours. I haven't yet been to any Shakespeare in Washington events, which I feel kind of bad about, and I half suspect that I will not end up going to any of the events, either. First of all, I don't really know what Shakespeare play I want to see--my favorites of those I have read are King Lear and Love's Labour's Lost--but I don't have a burning desire to see either. I don't particularly want to see a Shakespeare play that I haven't read, because I usually feel I don't understand the play on just a cold viewing. I've also decided that since Shakespeare Fest is six-months long, surely I will be able to make it to at least one event. Because of its long duration, though, I have not made the effort to actually participate, comfortable with the fact that six months seems like a long time in my world, until suddenly it's June and I'm walking to work dripping with sweat and noticing that the last Shakespeare Fest event happened the night before.

*Benjammin' is not my original nickname for Ben. It is actually trademarked to Jake.

Can't we all just get along?

It didn't take me long to be inspired to blog about something again. All it took was another netroots vs. centrist Democrat flamewar. In yesterday's Post, there's a front page article about the ongoing argument between well-known Democratic net activists like Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and the group Working for Us against Ellen Tauscher, a Democratic Rep. from California. I am not surprised that Tauscher is slightly put off by this campaign, because it has deliberately called her out as a centrist appeaser, but I can't blame them for doing so. After all, one thing I am constantly amazed at--amazed as in, I want to bang my head against a wall and yell Doh! a million times--is how frickin' quickly the Democrats will cede their battle even if they haven't nearly lost it. The majority of the country seems to be against a troop increase in Iraq, and no one save the very rich are satisfied with our current health care policy and economic situation, and yet the Democrats feel like they have to temper their every move with assurances that they won't move too far to the left. No one cares, guys! Just get stuff done, fercryinoutloud. I know it's hard. We have a media that wants the presidential election to happen tomorrow--not gonna lie, I wouldn't mind if it did--and the Republican party clearly wants to get nothing done unless it benefits rich people who are trying to pass their full estate along to their children, but in spite of this people want to see some results from Washington. No one benefits from the rhetoric of self-defeat except for Republicans, whose interests are very narrow. So please, Ellen Tauscher and the like, don't create a straw man "far left" to bolster yourself. It seems self-serving and disingenuous, and it helps no one.

D.C. Drivers, get a grip

I have several gripes against the ethos of Washington D.C. and the rest of the "inside the beltway" territory, and underlying a lot of them is the prevailing Type A attitude of the people who live here. The Type A attitude is on display all the time: when commuters sprint to catch their Metro train during rush hour even though another one is two minutes behind it (running into fellow commuters in the process), when subway riders won't move to the center of the train car to make room for those behind them because they want to be close to the door, when people regard social functions as nothing more than an opportunity to "network," and worst and most fatally of all, when drivers disregard pedestrians merely because they are in a hurry.

I don't know if the bus driver who struck and killed two women who had the right of way at the intersection of 7th and Pennsylvania on Wednesday night was in a hurry, but the driving in this city is so abominable, so aggressive, so careless of pedestrians, so selfish, that this tragedy is not as surprising as it should be. Even today, two days later, as I crossed that same intersection, cars were still racing down Pennsylvania to make the light, broaching the tenuous transition between the yellow and red bulb with reckless nonchalance. Why drivers here are so wound-up is beyond me, because I think they would be happier people if they weren't, but D.C. police need to crack down on the insanity of offensive driving.

The Politico, a review

I subjected D.C.'s newest periodical to a harsh criticism a couple of weeks ago, though I heldout the possibility that my scorn was undeserved. Don't worry, it pretty much wasn't. The Politico is the typical, out-of-touch, superfluous D.C. rag that I've become used to. Why we need another one, I don't know, but The Politco's columns include a representative sampling of all of the usual pundit pet causes and analyses: wouldn't it be great to see a bipartisan presidential ticket in '08? (never going to happen, shouldn't happen, and Joe Lieberman and John McCain is hardly bipartisan), a fruitless debate between some guy from the CATO Institute and someone else about whether the West is becoming more libertarian or more liberal, and a fluff piece about 2008 potential candidates' websites.

Politico isn't a lost cause. If nothing else, their inside Congress reporting is useful, because it brings up practical considerations about members of Congress that aren't often raised. An article about the aged Congress ,which looks at the variety of age-related health problems of our elected officials, raises the question of whether a person with chronic health issues can adequately serve:

[S]uggestions that an enfeebled senator consider retirement haven't been broached, even considering the distressing example of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., who spent the final year of his term, at age 100, in and out of Walter Reed Army Medical Center here.

Politico's coverage of lobbyists is also useful, because, as much as we might like to forget it, they are an integral and yet relatively little-publicized part of the policy process. The local beat is the natural terrain of a magazine like Politico, and it should stick to that rather than engage in the type of useless speculation that permeates like oxygen throughout this city.

Same Party; Different Political Orientations

I was reading the Wikipedia article "Culture of the United States" to try to summon an idea of what on earth I would say if I were to respond to a request for a freelance article about American culture for a magazine targeted at international students. I probably won't actually write such an article, because I find culture, especially one's own culture pretty difficult to portray. However, I will impart what I find distinct about American political culture, which has lately been framed as urban vs. rural and less to do with difference between the regions of the United States.

I used to think that the former embodied the main polarity between political perspectives. Yet, from living in D.C., I am discovering that regional distinction is still relevant. Thus, West Coast Democrats are different from Midwestern Democrats are different from East Coast Democrats. I think East Coast politics values the establishment opinion. It tends to emphasize what experts are saying. It is risk-averse and in recent history is best embodied by an entity like the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group. To me, East Coast politics--whether Democratic or Republican--is pretty frustrating and more elitist than I would have earlier liked to believe. It is probably makred by more cynicism than anywhere I've been, even though in other parts of the country, there is certainly fair distrust of Washington at all times. Here on the East, though, and maybe especially in Washington, people can easily fall into the trap of making a self-fulfilling prophecy out of the view that ideals are alien to politics. On the other hand, Midwestern politics tends to invoke the more hopeful tenets of democracy--participation, informed citizenry, a faith in the American dream or at least in rehabilitating it. From what I can tell of West Coast politics, it values the novel, innovative, and pioneering. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, who plans to make California a beacon of energy efficiency and universal healthcare. Neither has happened yet (they are proposals at the moment), but both aspirations are often discarded as too impractical by the powers that be. Western politics values similar things but may have a bit more of a libertarian character. My thesis about regions has its limits, certainly. Massachusetts has already instated a universal healthcare provision, and it of course, sits on the East, not the West Coast.

As you can see, I'm a bit disenchanted with the way things work in D.C. With so many experts, think tanks, issue advocacy groups, and lobbying firms headquartered in one place, often far away from the actual people they represent or claim to represent, it is easy to see how those "inside the Beltway" become aloof and in some respects is an argument for vigorous federalism.

D.C. Metro vs. Chicago El

Today's Washington Post includes a comparison between D.C.'s Metro and Chicago's El. Surprisingly, writer John Kelly warms to the El, though maybe that's because he realizes how great Chicago is in general:

Last month the entire Kelly family -- our dog, Charlie, included -- piled into the minivan so we could drive 12 1/2 hours and spend Christmas in Evanston, Ill., a gem of a town on the banks of one of the finer Great Lakes and home to My Overachieving Sister-in-Law.

There's no better way to experience a neighborhood than to be in possession of a dog. Forced to walk Charlie at least twice a day to empty him, My Lovely Wife and I drooled at the handsome houses on Orrington Avenue and across from Centennial Park.

Yes, Evanston, which neighbored my hometown and was itself my hometown for four odd years, is a "gem." Even though where I currently live in NoVa kind of reminds me of Evanston, Evanston's Victorian-style homes, eminent stone churches, concentrated downtown, and its perch on the lake makes for much more of a community feeling than the dispersed, ahistoric areas of Arlington County with extemporaneous names like "Courthouse" and "Ballston." I'm not surprised that a Washingtonian is allured by it.

Even I can't romanticize the El, though. Kelly, however, manages to do so:

In fact, when all the assorted out-of-towners took a trip en masse, one of our party was stuck, helpless, at the Transit Card machine as the train approached. He contemplated jumping the turnstile -- he's from New York -- when an amazing thing happened: The driver of the train, who could see him fumbling with his money, waited.

No subway trains are as plush as Metro's -- those carpets, that upholstery -- but I did notice that the L trains I rode were cleaner than Washington's in one way: There weren't as many newspapers. Is it possible that Chicagoans, when they carry a newspaper onto a train, actually carry it off, too? What a concept!

Does it sound like I prefer the L to Metro? Not necessarily. Those elevated platforms are cold. On the other hand, you always know where the stations are. They're perched up in the sky, not buried underground, their location marked with subtle brown monoliths.

The names of the stations are refreshingly direct, too, usually reflecting the streets they're on: Randolph, Madison, State. There's none of this New York Avenue-Florida Avenue-Gallaudet University-XM Radio-Bald Guy With a Hotdog Stand stuff.

Then again, the Windy City has two Chicago stations and two Washington stations. Woe to the person who says, "Meet you at the Chicago Station."

Red Line or Brown?

Just like our Metro, L trains echo with recorded announcements outlining prohibited behavior: No eating, no drinking, no gambling.

Did he say gambling? Whatever for?

I called the CTA to find out. Was this a particular problem? A spokeswoman would only tell me that there is an ordinance "to eliminate predatory types of behavior, such as shell games or sleight-of-hand or other games intended to cheat, defraud, or otherwise obtain money or other items."

You know, that's one thing I haven't seen on Washington's subway, even if it does sometimes seem as if the simple act of taking Metro is a gamble.

Okay, he has a good point about the absurdly cobbled-together names of D.C. Metro Stations. And actually, the double occurring names of El stations aren't as much trouble as Kelly supposes, as long as you're in your part of the city. For instance, if you live in Wicker Park, you'll naturally refer to the Damen Station on the Blue line, whereas if you live in Ravenswood, you consider Damen a stop on the Brown line. Most confusing I suppose are the two Chicago stations that Kelly speaks of, which both sit on Chicago Avenue, about half a mile from each other. Still, most people refer to and frequent the one further East, which is two blocks from Michigan Avenue and one of its gateways of frightening consumption: the American Girl Doll Store-Ralph Lauren Polo Store block. The westernmost Chicago Ave. train station tends to see more office workers than visitors.

D.C.'s Metrorail: Welcome to a Terry Gilliam movie

The El and Metro aren't totally comparable. They actually have somewhat different purposes. Washington, being a much smaller city, and its downtown much more concentrated, needs a fast-moving, state-of-the-art, comprehensive rail system that serves the city as well as the more-populated suburbs. Metro needs to be able to take people from the counties in Maryland and Virginia and dump hordes of them into only a few stations that serve the downtown. The El largely just serves Chicagoans and has a more dispersed downtown to work with--though the Loop is still home to a lot of the office space in the city--with the Metra serving as the regional transit. (True, D.C. has the MARC, but that's geared more for people coming in from the likes of Baltimore). Thus, El--with its frequent slow zones--is kind of a drag to take if you're coming from the suburbs. I'm surprised Kelly, who was going into Chicago from Evanston didn't comment on this, though I guess it must be more noticeable when you're by yourself than when you're with a big group.

The El, whose charm belies its inconvenience

If you want to understand the real downside of the El though, which Kelly doesn't mention at all, read today's Tribune, which illustrates just how out-dated the El really is:

Customers on the CTA Red, Brown and Purple/Evanston Express lines still may feel like they are traveling in one big slow zone until late 2009.

Expect packed trains and even worse delays than those already caused by rickety rails, crumbling viaducts and outmoded train-signaling systems. That's the message CTA president Frank Kruesi sent to riders on the three lines last week.

Commuting times will as much as double beginning in April when the most disruptive phase of the $530 million Brown Line expansion project begins, Kruesi said.

Seriously? When I took the El in from the suburbs to work and see friends, I often got stuck in run-of-the-mill delays. Now systemic delays are certain until 2009 because of this construction, without even factoring in the run-of-the mill delays. This gets to what annoyed me about the CTA and has me appreciating the Metro: The CTA is outdated, and it shouldn't be. Chicago is a world-class city, much more so than D.C., but D.C. is the only one with the world-class public transport. Both cities should have great transport. The El stations may be more charming, as Kelly suggests, than its Metro counterparts, but the frustrations of elevated transit outweigh the benefits of being treated to a constant visual reminder of the dynamic city below.

This weekend, if you travelled on the D.C. Metro, you were treated to exceptional service and information about the closing blue line, which barely, if at all, slowed transportation between Vienna at one end of the line and New Carrollton or Largo at the other, as one might have expected. Maps of the changes in line servicing were everywhere, as were helpful Metro employees. I know that the larger El must need more track work and general updates than D.C., and therefore can't manage such straightforwardness and convenience, but there is no reason why a small city like D.C. should have a monopoly on decent public transportation (it's the federal dollars, I guess).

Please no more academic arguments...

...about anything. I'm beginning to think Washington has a glut of useless pundits (okay, not beginning to think), who not only are inadvertently paid to be useless but in fact, to make things worse. Does it really help us get any closer to figuring out whether "the surge" is a good idea (the fact that it is being called "the surge" hints that it is not) if Joe Klein goes ad hominem on Paul Krugman? Oh, wow, Joe Klein is so irreverent. He doesn't care that "illiberal leftists"(whaaa??) don't like him. Maybe if Joe Klein spent less time keeping track of how many liberal bloggers hate him and spent more time actually making detailed inquiry into whether it is a good idea or not to committ more money and troops to try and secure Baghdad--yes, secure Baghdad--he would be of some help. As it stands, does Joe Klein really help anything? Can he just go away? Can Time Magazine's abhorrent blog oh so cleverly called Swampland please vaporize into thin air? Please, go away Swampland, sink like quicksand into your swamp, into your morass of frivolity. Ana Marie Cox too. Get real jobs, all of y'all.

Bard Pun

Washington has officially ushered in the Shakespeare Festival, a six month long tribute to the playright who gave us the complex character (as opposed to the simple one dominated by humors). Just like Paris on the Potomac, Shakespeare's works and influence will permeate events all over the city, both large and small, expensive and cheap. It should be cool. However, one thing we must all brace ourselves for is the bad puns that periodicals love to employ, in particular those playing upon the word "bard," an epithet that refers commonly to Shakespeare and means a poet, playright or other scholar in Medieval and early Modern Great Britain. Many blogs and papers are keeping track of the events of Shakespeare Fest; meanwhile I am here to keep track of the bad, excessive puns written about Shakespeare Fest. So far, we have:

"Bard Times" The Washington Post, 1/5/07

As an aside, I'm really sad I missed last night's reading of Twelfth Night at the Kennedy Center, because Balki, i.e. Bronson Pinchot (who will forever be known as Balki) took part. Damn me.

Politico-Really necessary?

Exiting the Courthouse Metro station today, I came face to face with an alluring ad for The Politico. Upon arriving home, I navigated to the website to find out what the authoritative ad was promoting. Apparently, a couple of Washington Post veterans left their positions to get involed with The Politico, which looks to be a new, multi-platform reporting venture that will cover Capital Hill, the presidential race, and lobbying and issue advocacy "with enterprise, style, and impact." I have no idea what they mean by that, but I have to ask, is a project like The Politico really necessary? Doesn't D.C. already have The Hill, Congressional Quarterly, and Roll Call, not to mention The Washington Post, The Washington Examiner, and, even...ugh...The Washington Times? Does Washington really need another outlet for the chattering class to bloviate*--to make uninformed speculations about whether the country is ready for a black man or a woman as president and whether Nancy Pelosi is allowing some Rep into her inner circle? Is such reporting at all useful? It definitely is not at all original. If The Politico is what I think it is--the self-satisfied trailer that flashes all sorts of recognizeable faces doesn't look promising--it embodies the primary problem of political reporting, which covers too much on the subjects of tactics and political posturing and too little on translating what on earth our elected officials actually do each day, what legislation they are proposing and passing, and who exactly their legislation is serving.

Such journalism embodies the problem with this town in general, which is that some folks get so into the idea that they are mixing with the Illuminati, the "powerful" people, that they report on the goings on as if they were in a cafeteria surveying the social dynamics between cliques. Little do any of them realize that such a paltry minority of people know or care who most of Washington is. I enjoy a clever dig at politicians or a little Washington gossip every once in awhile, but I turn to the totally unserious Wonkette for this, not a legitimate paper, and there is a glut of entities that fulfill this need already. If I'm wrong about The Politico, and it is a serious, useful periodical, I'll be the first to admit it. If I am right, I look ever forward to reading another article about whether the nation can elect a Mormon for president or whether Giuliani can win over social conservatives.

*When looking up the word bloviate to make sure I was spelling it right--it is unlisted in my computer's dictionary--I found this very appropriate example of its usage on Dictionary.com: Anyone who has ever spent an idle morning watching the Washington talk shows has probably wondered: how did these people become entitled to earn six-figure salaries bloviating about the week's headlines?
-- Robert Worth, "Quick! The Index!", New York Times, June 3, 2001.

Metro Fare Hikes are Counter-Intuitive

In this country, the gospel of the market reigns supreme, often to the detriment of smart and far-thinking policy. Witness the recent proposal by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (aka "Metro") to raise fares during rush hour or peak time to as much as 2.10 to head off a $116 million budget deficit. On the one hand, a good public transportation system is worth the money from its riders, and the Metro is one of the better public transportation systems in the country. On the other hand, it should be expected that a public transportation system is not a money maker and is often a money loser.

What Metro is losing, however, is gained back both financially and in terms of quality of life: in the form of decreased traffic, less roadwork, and less pollution. It is in drivers' as well as rail and bus commuters' interest to have a good public transportation system, even if that means paying a little extra in taxes for it. There needs to be some sort of understanding though, that Metro is not a money-maker, that it will often lose money, and that public good services such as public transportation often do lose money. The alternatives are worse. When Metro riders say that the potential fare hikes will push them to drive to work, Metro faces the vicious cycle where it has to continue to raise fares to make up for lost revenue because of commuters who no longer ride Metro because the fares got too high.

Metro is applying incentives to change the nature of the demand of Metro riders by proposing to increase fares during high peak hours (5 to 9:30 am and 3 to 7 pm on weekdays) to encourage riders to travel in off-hours, but as letter writers to the Post have said, it's pretty difficult for most people to change their traveling times. Most of us have to be at work within the peak traveling times. Metro also might charge a higher fare on people who get off at heavy traffic stations like Farragut North, but again, there is little most people can do to change their destination train station. Market calculations of supply-demand and incentives are not intuitive to public transportation like the Metro. Ideally, the business district in D.C. would be more spread out and workers would have flex time, but as yet, peoples' working patterns are pretty rigid.

Edited to add: Virginia legislators need to increase the revenue they pay into the Metro, especially considering it services so much of Northern Virginia, and Virginia pays significantly less in taxes than D.C. or Maryland. (I'm willing to say this as a Virginia resident).

The endless D.C. argument

Commenting of mass proportions broke out on the blog DCist yesterday over a Portland, Oregon-based band's negative review of their experience at music venue DC9 in the Shaw-U Street-Howard neighborhood. (Oh, for your own edification, if you even care, every D.C. neighborhood has at least three names kind of going on. For instance, my office is located in Federal Triangle and just south of Gallery Place-Chinatown-Penn Quarter. Oh, and not too far from Capitol Hill. Yeah. Nutty!). Anyway, here's the start of the blog entry:

A recent tip from Dave at Indiefolkforever lead us to a rather unflattering portrait of our fair city. Norfolk & Western, a Portland band that visited D.C. last month, apparently didn't have a very nice time playing DC9 or visiting the U street/Shaw neighborhood in Northwest D.C. As part of a tour journal posted on Local Cut, the
band wrote:

Washington DC proved to be a less pleasant experience for all of us. DC is not the safest city in the world to begin with, and according to my sources, the club we played at was located in a particularly bad area.

I have mixed, convoluted feelings about this band's experience, the discussion that ensued on DCist, and the larger implications of this type of discussion, all of which I will try to explain.

So anyhow, this band appears to have had a bad time in our fair city, and many commenters are taking personal offense. Really, though, who's fair city is it? Not mine. I still consider myself a Chicagoan (or Chicago suburbanite), and I'm guessing most of those commenting have only been in D.C. for a couple years at most, so let's just establish that few of us are authorities on authentic D.C. (which also happens to be an oxymoron).

Anyway, the perennial argument in D.C. ever since hipsters settled the Northwest (NW D.C., this time, not the Pacific Northwest) and continued to move East, centers around how transplants/upper and middle income/white people feel discomfort towards the "real" D.C. People who come to D.C. are viewed with a skeptical eye, with everyone from suburbanites to bands from the Pacific Northwest at risk for getting slammed for not accepting D.C. as it is. Here's one comment on that blog entry that expresses such a sentiment:

[The band's] comment [on their experience at DC9] is unfortunately typical of quite a few other people I have met from the Pacific NW, and also from other crunchy "liberal" places like Vermont and Minneapolis (where I'm from). They think they're all tolerant and progressive, but aren't comfortable with actual diversity. I'm sure they thought U Street is a particularly bad neighborhood, because like 1/2 the people on the street are black.

It is true that a lot of people habor a mental map of the District that redlines most of Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, and even some of Northwest (east of 16th Street). DuPont and Georgetown are great, Adams-Morgan is fine if you stay on the main strip, and U Street is "sketchy." Seriously, someone said that last thing to me this weekend. People like that don't make it too far out of Georgetown, which is a shame, because Georgetown nightlife sucks.

Lately though, I've been thinking that it's silly to deride such people for their insulairty. For one, we're all insular to some degree, preferring to stay in places where we're comfortable. Furthermore,do hipsters really want frequenters of Georgetown bars invading U Street? U Street establishments are busy enough as it is. Still, much of the dismissive remarks made about D.C. neighborhoods are ridiculous. I've always hated the word "sketchy," part of the lexicon of the self-sheltered urban dweller because what people often mean when they apply that word is that a neighborhood is different to them, lacking in sports bars, Banana Republics, and yuppy condos.

Still, I can understand the worry about being mugged and think the derision of those who are worried about walking alone on a dark street is unfounded. Some commenters acted like the band was lucky not to get mugged:

As far as their "gang experience", sounds like the guys were just pushing their buttons. I agree it would be intimidating, but come on. They didn't get robbed or anything while they were here.

I've never gotten mugged (*big knock on wood*), but the D.C. residents who try to prove their street cred by deriding anyone who's not comfortable with the idea of winding up in a situation where they are handing their wallet to a scary man whose gun is pointed at them have either never gotten mugged either or are bloviating. No one wants to get mugged, and it should not be acceptable to get mugged. I don't care if you're in the poorest neighborhood in the city; I don't think any decent person --no matter their socio-economic situation--should be accustomed to being mugged. Too often the assumption around here is that in poor or non-white neighborhoods, crime is part of the landscape. Even if those conditions predict higher crime rates, no neighborhood prides itself on high crime, and no neighborhood wants high crime. There is this idea, not just in D.C. but all over, that urban authenticity is predicated on one's exposure to crime. It's unfortunate that crime gets elevated to a character-building experience.

Finally, and this is slightly separate from this particular incident, I get a little fed up when hipsters act as if their conception of D.C. is more authentic than anyone else's. Nothing about the modern conception of the city is authentic. For a long time, city streets were home to cesspools of waste because of inadequate sanitation systems, urban residents lived on top of each other in ramshackle dwellings, and the young and old alike labored long hours in the industrial sector with little time for leisure activities like hanging out at the local music joint. The notion that a city is a place for enlightenment and creativity is relatively recent. I always find it especially condescending when people look down on suburbanites for not living in the city and supposing it is because they are afraid of diversity and creativity. These people forget that for a long time, the American dream was to get out of the city. Only recently is the dream to move back, and it is an increasingly hard dream to attain if one's target is a city like Boston, San Francisco, New York, or even D.C. (That's why Chicago is where it's at, but anyway...).

The Most Random Group of People You'll Ever See

The group of award winners at the annual Kennedy Center Honors two nights ago could not have been a more unlikely cast of characters. Capped off by George and Laura Bush and Dick and Lynne Cheney, this is the Kodak Moment of the year:


From left, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Steven Spielberg, Dolly Parton, Zubin Mehta, and Smokey Robinson.

This photo could be the setup for an extreme version of the joke that begins "a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar..." Imagine the possibilities. Also, this must be the most overrated group of Kennedy Center honorees, excluding Zubin Mehta, with whom I'm not familiar, and Smokey Robinson, who is pretty awesome. Are the winners of this award usually this mediocre? I have never paid much attention to the event until this year, because it is kind of local news I guess, but really, who won in the past? Puff Daddy? Julia Roberts? Brian Grazer?

Anyway, in honor of the event, I've been listening to some classic Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and musing, as I do every six months or so, on what a disgrace to musical theater Andrew Lloyd Webber is.

Taxation with (some) representation?

Will D.C. finally get the House seat it deserves? Probably not from a Republican Congress, but look for the bill to resurface next year when the Democrats are in the majority.

D.C. Mayor-elect Adrian M. Fenty went to Capitol Hill yesterday and Utah prepared to redraw its congressional districts as members of both parties said a plan to add House seats for the District and Utah had good prospects for approval next year.

P.S. What's up with the re-emergence of the fedora? Seen here on Fenty:

Cities and My Very Own D.C. Travel Guide

Because I just returned from a weekend in New York City, whose land mass could probably fit 50 D.C.s, I am feeling like an inferior city-dweller. As another friend and fellow D.C. resident told me, D.C. always seems a bit of a disappointment after a weekend in New York. The truth is, the two cities cannot be compared: they are just different in their economic and therefore general composition. D.C. is furthermore just a unique city because of its preponderance of government jobs and jobs that revolve around government jobs. This of course shapes the city's character to a great degree: where an NYC or Chicago has many longstanding cultural outposts (think jazz clubs and intimate music venues), D.C. has only a few. This is because the D.C. metropolitan area has for a longtime been more a bedroom community, populated by government employees and their family. That it now vies to be a "cool" city is a newer development.

Furthermore, as a result of it having a job market centered around careers that promise greater stability than most--law, government, consulting, D.C. is a little more conservative than somewhere like NYC. That is, people in D.C. are more risk-averse (not to say NYC doesn't have this--it does, but it also is home to people with very "risky" professions such as artists). Politically, of course, D.C. is actually more liberal (or at least more Democratic-leaning) in the District and its surroundings, but culturally it's not. I had no idea that people wear leggings with flannel shirts and flats until I saw it, many times, in NYC. The celebrity sitings are cooler in NYC too. For instance, the first celebrity I saw in D.C. was Dennis Kucinich; in NYC this past weekend, I saw Michelle Williams and (I believe Heath Ledger) in Brooklyn.

So, because I need to console myself about living in a less hip, less dynamic, less urban, more conservative city--and really, I live in NoVA, which is a city-cum-suburb, I'm going to comprise a "Weekend in D.C." travel guide to prove to someone (me?) that D.C. is still...cool...right? (At least the Metro remains superior).

Just a note about the following guide: the places below to which I have not personally visited come highly recommended by others or are generally known as beloved D.C. institutions. So without further a due...

(Note: anything denoted with a $ sign costs money; anything without that notation is free!)

Friday: Museum Day

• Morning
• National Gallery (Metro: Archives-Navy Memorial or Smithsonian)
  
• Lunch
• Walk to U.S. Senate Cafeteria, Dirksen or Russell Building ($)
  
• Afternoon
• Air and Space Museum
• Freer and Hirshorn Galleries (Metro: L'Enfant Plaza or Smithsonian)
• Evening
• Jazz club on U. Street or the Black Cat ($) (Metro: U Street-Cardozo)
  

Saturday: Monument Day

• Morning
• Arlington National Cemetery and Iwo Jima (Metro: Arlington Cemetery, Rosslyn)
  
• Afternoon
• White House (tour optional) (Metro: McPherson Square or Farragut West)
  
• Old Executive Office Building
• Renwick Gallery and/or Phillips Collection ($) (had to throw in a few more great art museums, esp. the Phillips) (Metro: DuPont Circle)
  
• Dinner
• Old Ebbit Grill (Metro: Metro Center)
  
• Evening
• Walk from Old Ebbit Grill to the Washington Monument, World War II Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Vietnam Memorial, and Korean War Memorial (in my opinion, doing the memorials in the evening makes them all the more striking)

Sunday: D.C. Neighborhood day

• Morning
• Eastern Market: visit the market on 7th and North Carolina, stop for coffee at one of the nearby coffee shops, like Murky Coffee, and at Capitol Hill Books, then walk East on North Carolina to Lincoln Park (Metro: Eastern Market)
• Afternoon and Evening
• Dupont Circle, Kalorama, Georgetown: in Dupont, stop by Kramer Books, then walk up Connecticut Ave. until Kalorama Road, where there are beautiful homes (Metro: DuPont Circle)
• Evening
• Kennedy Center concert ($) (Metro: Foggy Bottom)

Please comment, take issue with, or offer suggestions to this itinerary. It is certainly a work in progress and furthermore reflects my own personal tastes, which tend towards art viewing and neighborhood exploring. Oh, and I definitely could use more restaurant suggestions. The D.C. restaurant scene is a little too lobbyist-oriented for me to be able to justify becoming an afficiando (i.e., I could not handle the expense).