Last month I went to Washington, D.C. to see what I could see. Here is a five minute essay about that. I will publish a second part on Monday.
This first part is about my impressions of the place, leading into the second which is more about the politics.
Narcotics Hieronymous
I landed late at night at Dulles and shared a taxi into town. The streets around Columbia Heights speak of America’s yesterday. Stoops and porched brick terraces, places which recall the kind of faces you do not see there today. American ones, which I found to be in vanishingly short supply.
These are streets bereft of dreams - American or otherwise. I walked briskly as an obvious stranger through a Bosch-like gallery of misery and menace, down broad streets patrolled by caroming ranters of various shades, rats, stumbling junkies and the National Guard.
Rough sleepers gouched on the steps, bodies sprawled on sidewalks like victims of a silent plague. Murmurs and sometimes shrieks of threat cut through the funk of pungent bins. This is a place in which the rag trade of low life had become business as usual.
There are posters and stickers around the place which equate the attempt to restore law and order and decency with fascism - a dreadful polarisation between extremes. To one side, obvious filth, degradation and lawlessness is a vibrant culture under siege. To the reality-based community, it is a deplorable mess in which any agent of common decency acts in a hostile environment.
On my first walk down the street towards the shopping centre a black gentleman of the road offered to shoot me to death. Later, I spotted an indifferent rat bent double beside a bin - adopting the “fent fold” exampled around him.
My attempts to have a coffee and phone my wife were punctuated by street loonies of colour shouting at roadsigns, sharp-eyed immigrants eyeing me and my phone, and sirens wailing toward some more pressing emergency than mine.
This part of D.C., and many others, is an example of the placenessness which follows demographic displacement and social collapse. The past remains, its buildings like mute witnesses to the crime scene which has replaced the people and their culture which built them. It was home to something once. So sad.
AC/DC
I went to a hotel for lunch to meet with a DC insider. I mentioned to him how seamy the place felt, and not only due to the sticky heat. Oh don’t go outside, he laughingly rejoined. You just migrate from your air conditioned apartment to an Uber and then to a place like this, and back again.
The steak I ordered resembled a burnt turd and tasted like a shoe. I am told the British Embassy staff stay here. Perhaps the waiter mistook me for one of them, which might explain the woeful chips which partnered a sirloin that looked like it had already been eaten and eliminated once before it came to me.
The lesson I learned was to never leave the confines of the AC when in DC. What lies outside is a matter best not discussed. A no-mans-land makes exclaves of the gilded portals of the finest hotels. The Ubers are prompt. The reality of the city is clearly understood but seldom named, like an embarrassing complaint which it is impolite to mention. It is as if it does and does not exist, and in this I find a metaphor for the reality created by the political economy of the West, being perilously terrible to inhabit or to honestly describe.
It is the ruled who do not have the luxury of choice in such matters.
Events, dear boy, events
Going to conservative events in DC usually means people (mainly men) in suits, light snacks, a brightly lit and air conditioned office space, and of course free booze.
If you know what you are doing you do not drink the booze. If you don’t, you do, and it shows. I had a bottle of water and some interesting popcorn whilst I watched a film about the State-partnered criminal enterprise of mass migration into Europe.
They were very nice to me at the Heritage Foundation and there is much to say that is good about some of their people. Afterwards I did have a single pint in a bar across the road, where I was hectored on to the street by a circumferential African American woman got up like a security guard for the crime of lighting a rollup outside.
The bubble
Much is said of the Westminster Bubble in Britain - being the perceived isolation of the political establishment from the reality it has created for the people it nominally represents.
The DC bubble is similar but different. If you talk to the kids - the Zoomer serfs who staff the offices of Senators and Persons of Congress - a picture emerges which bears no relation that of their elders.
We are not watching the same movie, you might think. In fact, the young aren’t watching a a movie at all. In place of the revisionist tele-visions their elders prefer, the youth are engaged by the dire predicament of their lives, which have been ruined by the interests of the political and media bonzes they serve.
In part two of my DC Diaries I go on about the D.C. bubble, disavowal over the midterm elections, and the distance between ruler and ruled as that between representation and reality.
I am off to the Restore Britain Southern Conference today. I may well be writing about that soon, too. God bless you all and have a blessed weekend.
God Bless you too, Frank. And all good God-fearing men and women out there.
What a sad state of affairs you described. It saddens me to see what has become of the west, destroyed from within. I'm in the autumn of life and managed to enjoy what was better, even if it now feels like ancient memories of a place long gone. I feel sad for my children and grandchildren that they inherit a mess I never wanted to bequeath them.
This is a fantastic piece of travel writing, Frank. Up there with the greatest. The rat ‘fent fold’ - wow
‘…hectored on to the street by a circumferential African American woman got up like a security guard …’😂😂😂👌😂😂😂😂