“ But at least this is an actual place. Washington’s all abstraction. It’s about access to power and nothing else. I mean, I’m sure it’s fun if you’re living next door to Seinfeld, or Tom Wolfe, or Mike Bloomberg, but living next door to them isn’t want New York is about. In Washington people literally talk about how many feet away from John Kerry’s house their own house is. The neighborhoods are all so blah, the only thing that turns people on is proximity to power. It’s a total fetish culture. People get this kind of orgasmic shiver when they tell you they sat next to Paul Wolfowitz at a conference or got invited to Grover Norquist’s breakfast. Everybody’s obsessing 24/7, trying to position themselves in relation to power. Even the black scene has something wrong with it. It’s got to be more discouraging to be poor black in Washington than anywhere else in the country. You’re not even scary. You’re just an afterthought.
—
Walter, in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom
Maybe its because we are both from St. Louis that we look at Washington the same way. No, it’s probably just because we are both human beings.
