A Few Days in the Dark City

The Dark City is Washington, DC, aka the Dark City in the Swamp.  Last week I spent a few days there on a fancy tour connected to the Civil War and Ken Burn's series on same.  The tour was very good, showing us many fine sites that a normal visit to DC would surely miss.  The Frederick Douglass house leaps to mind, as does the National Building Museum and the Ben Lomond house near the Manassas battlefield.  The tour guides and docents were all excellent, as was the food.

On the tour, we visited a number of DC neighborhoods on the way to sites.  Gentrification is rampant.  The prices of smallish townhouses in districts that were ghettos a few decades ago are now in the upper six figures.  The more central areas in the NW sections are reminiscent of New York City's upper east side.  And numerous building cranes were evident.

As the rest of the nation slogs through the endless recession - and very slow growth - the Dark City is roaring.

Why?

That place and its surrounding suburbs are sucking the blood out of the rest of the nation via taxes & regulations: regulations necessitate major corporations to hire high priced lobbyists, whose spending goes on to fund the Dark City.  And all those government employees don't have to worry about layoffs or pay cuts.  Nope.  They just get more and more.

And then the contractors - all those firms who get Federal contracts.  They proliferate in the DC suburbs and one even hears radio ads for their services.

All this smells of swamp gas to this small town boy.  The Dark City needs the light of day to shine onto its corruption and greed.  The Federal government needs to be decentralized NOW.

This palace culture has to be gutted. Send all those agencies to the small towns and cities across America.  With the Internet, there is no need, and much downside, in centralizing everything to the Dark City.  People and employees there are completely out of touch with the common man.  They don't know how people live and work and deal with the problems in their lives. 

Our Senators and Representatives live there almost full time, too.  Their children go to school there and their wives work there.  This culture of the King's Court is sickening to an outsider, to the common man.

De-Centralize DC NOW!

Word of the Day

"Witter" - verb, intransitive [$10] British colloquial
Witter means to speak tediously on trivial matter.
Sentence:  I am always infuriated when financial news "talking head" witter rather than speak on serious matters. Air time is precious - use it wisely.