The Lost Village

[Gary Ruskin]

Commercial Alert 			June 2, 2000

Following is a fine, sprawling article about how commercialism affects
Congress, politics and Washington DC, from the June issue of the
Washington Monthly.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0006.woll.html

The Lost Village
How the suits took over the last small town in America: Washington, DC. 
By Tom Woll

Washington is the city that people scrape and claw to get to, and then
make a career of disparaging. In no other city that I know of, do
people---important people at least---feel so superior to the place that
they themselves comprise. Members of Congress conduct a nonstop
beg-a-thon for campaign funds so that they can stay in this awful place
that they revile. Southern drawls deepen, and regional costuming becomes
more pronounced the longer they are here. 

Beltway pundits meanwhile sneer about the Beltway pundits, as if they
weren't just such pundits themselves. The major players here accuse one
another of being that which they themselves are; and this Dostoevskyian
undertone reached its peak, or nadir, in the Clinton impeachment farce,
when one after another of the President's accusers turned out to be
accusing him of things that they themselves had done---or were doing
still. Dan Burton, the Republican of Indiana who called Clinton a
"sleaze," had been the Lothario of the Indiana state legislature with a
secret illegitimate offspring. Newt Gingrich, of course, was doing it
with a young lady in the church choir.

They all feel a need to attack some part of what they are---to separate
themselves from the city that they crave to be a part of. At one level
they say to the public, "See, I'm not like the others in this degenerate
place." At another level, perhaps, they chastise themselves for the
knowledge that they are.

But before the rest of us get too huffy, we might pause and consider
whether we all aren't implicated to some degree. The Washington that
Americans love to disparage bears more than a little resemblance to the
America that they inhabit. There's a certain pandering quality to the
Beltway bashing, after all. The politician does not just say, "I'm not
like the shmucks." He or she also says, "You voters aren't like them
either." Yes, Washington has peculiarities and tics aplenty. Yet in the
end, it's the way it is because America is the way it is. It is a
distillate of a trait that DeToqueville noted long ago---the narrow
self-seeking, and the commercial culture that amplifies and reinforces
this quality at every turn.

You've read that Washington today is dominated by money, obsessed with
media and image, driven by manipulative and intrusive advertising, in
the thrall of self-interest and the short-term view. Gee, does that
sound a little like a country that I know---like a "New Economy" that I
know? In fact, the best aspects of Washington---the ones that are
disappearing---were a form of resistance to the dominant trends in the
U.S. today, rather than an acquiescence to them. In some respects, the
more Washington comes to resemble the rest of America, the worse it
gets.

Suit City

My friend says it started with the suits.

He was back in D.C. after four years in San Francisco, where he had worn
dungarees every day, and could have been taken for an IPO millionaire.
Now he was on an errand to the Hart Senate Office Building, the new one
with the big mobile in the atrium. He was wearing khaki pants and a
blazer, which for him is dressed up. But here on Capitol Hill he felt
like a schlepp. Everyone was wearing suits---not just suits, but power
suits, the kind the majority of men in the Bay Area probably don't even
own. He expected a Capitol police officer to nab him for insufficient
attire.

I've noticed this too. There have been suits on Capitol Hill---in both
senses of the word---ever since there has been a Capitol Hill. What's
different now, I think, is how pervasive they have become. Not that long
ago, clothing served to reinforce the Congressional caste system. Dark
suits for senators, lighter ones for chiefs of staff, jackets and
flannel slacks for legislative assistants, the khaki and blue blazer
uniform for interns. Now, it seems that dress up has moved down the
scale. You see interns wearing suits and white shirts as they sort the
mail. (Whether by acculturation or good sense, female interns still
sometimes show up in dungarees.) It's as though everyone is going to
interviews, which in a sense they are.

This is typically the cue for a pundit rant. Washington is dressing up
at a time when the real producers in the economy, the hearty yeomen with
the IPO rakings and nonexistent profits, are dressing down. How out of
touch. How Beltway. It is true that the Washington power corridor can
feel like a college campus on which everyone is trying to impress one
another. Yet the power centers in most major cities are besuited too.
And anyway, the question is not what they are wearing in Washington, but
why.

Follow Bill Gates or other high tech billionaires through the halls of
Congress these days and you get a clue. Those voices you hear are the
sounds of powerful people fawning. Redmond and Mountain View may be a
continent from Washington, but they revolve upon the same axis: the
money culture that affects us all. 

Politics follows commerce at virtually every turn. TV ads, demographic
targeting, focus groups, and polls---most of the scummy apparatus of
modern politics started in the business world. As commerce has engulfed
the culture---as just about every state and stage of human experience
has turned into something to buy---it should not be surprising that it
has engulfed politics too. As commerce panders to an ever-lower
denominator of self-absorption and desire, it should not be surprising
that politics does too. Washington is where we permit ourselves to see
these things most clearly, because we say that it is not ourselves. Who
dresses down, if not people who want to show that they are not the kind
of people who dress up?

Besides, whom do you think the suits are representing, anyway?

The End of Time

Not long ago I had occasion to peruse the record of Congressional
hearings from the early 1930s. The committee chairman was Senator Robert
LaFollette Jr., the Republican of Wisconsin, and the subject was the
senator's proposal for a National Economic Commission to map a path out
of the Depression. LaFollette sought comment from leading economic
experts, captains of industry, labor leaders, and the like. The thing
that is impressive today---staggering is a better word---is the depth of
the discussion, and how thoroughly the senator knew the subject at hand. 

With virtually no staff, LaFollette led the representative of the
Federal Reserve through testimony that alone occupies more than forty
small-print pages in the hearing record. It was a virtuoso performance,
and he repeats it over and over. The entire Senate staff fit into one
building back then (now there are three, plus the Capitol itself). The
hot new information technology in town was the telephone.

Yet it is hard to envision hearings like that today---probing basic
economic questions, with little regard to ideological boundaries or the
clock. Partly that's because of the ideological repression of these more
prosperous times. But partly too it is the paradox of the information
age. Amidst a deluge of fact we seem less able to ask good questions.
With a proliferation of "knowledge workers" in the form of staff, no one
seems to know enough. 

Or have enough time. In theory, more staff should mean more time in
Congress---just as more labor saving devices should give us more time in
our homes. Yet members of Congress, like the rest of us, have
practically none, and the reason comes back to money. Time and money in
Washington are like time and space in physics: different dimensions of
the same thing. If you want to know why no one has any time in Congress,
the first place to look is at the money that flows in.

The money question is more nuanced, and therefore interesting, than the
media generally portray. Campaign money buys different things in
different contexts. Speaking generally, corporate money still buys less
from Democrats than from Republicans---though the gap has been closing.
>From Republicans it buys marriage, from Democrats perhaps an off-and-on
affair. Sometimes it buys little more than time on a crowded schedule;
almost always there's a built-in caveat that compelling home state
interests come first. 

But the basic thing that money buys is time. A campaign contribution may
not always swing a vote. But it always occupies time---time in which
something else isn't getting done. It starts of course with the fund
raising itself. Dick Gephardt, the House minority leader, spends two
hours a day on the telephone asking for cash, and you can be sure that
his Republican counterparts are spending at least as much. Practically
all of them do, to some degree at least. They also spend a lot of time
at receptions and access-fests for donors, strategizing with
consultants, and the rest. The time a LaFollette might have spent
reading, today's representative must spend raising money. If the
congressional speeches on C-SPAN often seem like the calcified shells of
old ideas, wrapped in hectoring polemic, it's partly because these
people have so little time in which to reflect on new ones.

Then there is the time spent meeting with the people who gave the money.
This is more important than it might appear. Time I spend with you is
time I don't spend with someone else, including the people on the other
side of you. It is time I don't spend trying to check the truth of what
you've said. I once was involved in an obscure trade issue that involved
many of the largest corporations in the U.S. and abroad. It was the kind
of vote that liberal Democrats would use to make amends to business
lobbies because they usually faced no organized opposition from the
other side.

This time they did however---from a tiny group whose marginality was
evident in that I was among the Washington advocates. The congressional
waters did not exactly part at my approach. It would take weeks to get a
meeting with a lowly staffer. On one such occasion, I was sitting in the
reception area waiting for my audience, when a group of men, with power
suits and briefcases, emerged from the senator's office. There was a
jocular familiarity about the scene. These were lobbyists for the group
I was opposing.

Such experiences send a message, one that is reinforced on Capitol Hill
continually. It's the kind of Washington tableau that reporters forget
how to see. I once heard a veteran (too veteran, perhaps) Washington
reporter dismiss the role of money in politics on the grounds that PACs
don't always get what they want. This is true. PACs often create
stalemate; the prolixity of competing interests causes the process to
grind to a halt. For years, commercial banks, S&Ls, insurance companies,
and brokers fought to a standstill on banking reform. (The eventual
resolution showed that stalemate isn't always the worst thing.) They all
give a lot of money, but they don't all get what they want. 

Yet neither do they have to swallow much they can't abide. The key
questions are whose agendas are on the table to begin with and who gets
the congressional time. If you look at your bank charges today---the ATM
fees, the fees for using a teller or even receiving a bad check---you
just might get the impression that the main concerns of the
congressional majority on banking legislation were not yours. You would
be right. 

 The official term for the clogged congressional arteries is "gridlock."
Typically it is cited as a Washington disease. Yet Washington is not the
only place in this country where time has shrunk, and where competing
demands strain the system both individually and collectively. Members of
Congress, like the rest of us, are subject to the nonstop barrage of the
"information" economy. They, like us, have lost the quiet of the home at
night thanks to TV, the telephone, and the Web; and have lost the
wonderful enforced leisure of travel too. Sen. LaFollette rode the train
between Washington and Wisconsin. There were no cell phones or remote
e-mail. There was nothing to do but read, talk, or think. (In
Washington, the air conditioner has destroyed the enforced leisure of
summer as well.)

Washington isn't the only place in America where money drives the
agenda, nor where the gathering and spending of it consumes people's
time. In Silicon Valley, time has just about disappeared. In this seed
bed of the nation's supposed wealth, no one has any of that which wealth
is supposed to signify---free time. Regis McKenna, a consultant-guru in
the Valley, has hailed this development as the bright future of us all:
"Imagine a world," he wrote in his book Real Time, "in which time seems
to vanish and space seems completely malleable. Where the gap between
need or desire and fulfillment collapses to zero. Where distance equals
a microsecond in lapsed connection time. A virtual world created at your
command."

This may sound scary. Regis thinks it's way cool. Two hundred and
seventy million of us in the U.S. alone, seeking instantaneous
fulfillment---that is not a promising recipe for democracy, which
requires process and compromise. It could easily jam the circuits, which
it has, in the form of noise, traffic, pollution, and sprawl. It could
speed up the day to the point where there is no time at all. Our
experience of time arises from a sense of space between events. McKenna
lays out a hypothetical daily schedule for the person of tomorrow, in
which space has ceased to exist. At fifteen and thirty minute intervals,
it lists such events as "awakened by CD music, e-mail monitor, security
appliance controller," "go to office online," "keep appointment with
ŒWeight Watchers'," and "get lunch at Burger King drive through." The
day ends with: "Take two melatonin to get to sleep fast."

McKenna calls this person, without irony, the "Twenty-Four Hour
Consumer." The schedule helps explain why stress is unlikely to diminish
any time soon. And anyone who has worked on Capitol Hill will recognize
something about this schedule. The tasks are different, but the manic
tempo, the sense of entrapment in a movie that's running too fast, is
much the same as what our representatives endure. The people who are
creating the future have created it for Washington as well. Washington
lags behind the culture at large, but this does not speak in the
capital's disfavor.

Spaced Out

Washington is composed of at least three cities. There is the official
Washington of government and lobbyists; the black Washington that covers
most of the city's expanse; and the far Northwest quadrant in which
reside most of the white and influential. For years, Dupont Circle has
been a buffer zone between the first and the third---between the
government enclave that people come to work in, and the neighborhoods in
which people actually live. 

South of the Circle, along Connecticut Avenue, are the graceless modern
boxes of lobby and trade association land, where rents run in the
vicinity of $48 a square foot and where the uniform is suit and tie even
on sweltering summer days. North of the Circle people wear t-shirts and
there are still, miraculously, low-rent buildings where operations like
this magazine survive with fingers crossed. Sam Smith, the local
essayist, calls the Circle the "border checkpoint through which you pass
to go from community to facility."

Through the '70s and '80s, the forces of improvement marched up the
avenue, routing the eccentric and impecunious in their path. This
magazine occupied a suite near the Mayflower Hotel in the '70s, with
seven individual offices for $500 a month. That building has given way
to a high-end office emporium. The Dupont Circle Building, once owned by
the Machinists Union and a rabbit warren of quixotic causes, has gone
the same sad way. But the movement to eradicate low-rent contrariness
from the nation's capitol---a movement which Smith calls "demographic
cleansing"---somehow stopped at the Circle, more or less. 

In recent months the line has fallen. A company by the name of Starwood
Realty has purchased a row of buildings north of the Circle, and has
evicted the freelance writers and the community-minded architecture
firm. The Newsroom, the District's best out-of-town newspaper store, had
to move, as did a second-hand-book store. The new tenants, whoever they
are, most likely will represent "improvement" only in the narrow sense
in which developers and economists use that term.

I mention this because that bursting of the geographic dam is suggestive
of something larger that has happened in Washington---and in the culture
generally---over the last generation or so. It is a form of enclosure,
the colonizing of human space on behalf of moneyed interest. Much as the
Enclosure Acts of 18th century England redefined the commons as real
estate and forced small farmers from their land, so the
hyper-commoditized real estate of Washington has re-rendered the city in
the image of those who pay the higher rents. Square foot by square foot,
it has forced out those who speak from different values and seek
different ends.

To put this another way, money defines not just time in Washington. It
defines space as well; and this steers people in the direction in which
money flows. In the '60s and '70s, it was possible to get by on very
little. There were cheap apartments in Adams Morgan, group houses in
Dupont Circle and Glover Park, and furnished rooms in the old West End.
A book of 10 tickets at the Circle Theater, on Pennsylvania Avenue, cost
20 dollars. A plate of spanakopeta at the Astor restaurant at 18th and M
was $1.95---with salad and roll.

Power to the Shoppers

The good old days weren't always so good. But they were less expensive,
which meant more space, psychological as well as physical, and thus a
greater sense of possibility. The future begins in low-rent zones; they
are the kitchens of the next thing. The original Apple computers came
from a garage; Microsoft manages its monopoly from a sprawling office
campus. In Washington, where the business is policy and (occasionally)
ideas, cheap office space is the equivalent of Steve Jobs' family
garage. When it disappears, so does thinking that challenges the
dominion of the moneyed. 

What's left are amply-funded opinion-tanks that provide intellectual
justification for the providers of those funds. (The term "think" tank
implies a mental destination that is not predetermined, which is not the
case. Name any such institution in town---Heritage, for example, or
CATO---and an issue, and most people in political Washington could tell
you exactly where the place stands.) We get old ideas packaged as new
ones, the old political economy pretending to be new. We get the
enclosure of political and intellectual space, and it all starts with
rent. 

Rents here aren't yet as bad as in San Francisco or New York. But they
are starting up the same steep ramp, and this turns the inner compass
needle toward the paycheck, even in people who'd rather think of
something else. It produces a constant state of worry that some
slicked-back sharpie in a t-shirt and Armani shades could drive up and
put you on the street.

Housing is just the start. The cheap repertory movie theaters like the
Circle and the Biograph are gone---the former thanks to George
Washington University's real estate empire, the latter to a CVS drug
store. Budget restaurants like the Astor are gone too. North of the
Circle, there's just one cheap pizza parlor left. If you live in Boston,
New York, San Francisco, Seattle, then you know the scene. In a thousand
different ways, the city now says to newcomers: If you can't pay, you
don't play. This is on top of the heavy load of financial obligation
that young people now bring with them. One of the most clever and
insidious acts of the Reagan Administration was to cut student aid and
replace it with loans. The Reaganites knew that young people carrying
major debt would be less likely to become low-paid trouble-makers.

Such changes have taken place largely beneath the radar of the
established media, in large part because media salaries have increased
with the rents. (George Will does not worry about Mr. Hippo-Sleazo
driving up with an eviction notice.) But they have altered the context
of politics here in a fundamental way. Since time and space are
different dimensions of the same thing, it's not surprising that the
same forces that have taken over time in Washington, have claimed its
space as well---legislative as well as geographic.

Nader's Vaders

When the first wave of activists came to D.C. in the '60s they found a
sleepy capital of gray men of the kind pictured in the Time and Newsweek
magazines of the day. The power axis was defined largely by the Chamber
of Commerce, the AFL-CIO, the Congress, and the president. The deals
were done in quiet; media was a secondary consideration. Trade
associations were in New York; the lobbyists were in D.C.

A Ralph Nader could feel a little like a kid who finds an empty
playground basketball court with a new rim and net. There was political
space to claim, and the media, still chafing from the repression of the
McCarthy years, was eager to take on the status quo. Operating out of
phone booths and from a tiny office in the old National Press Building,
a Nader could vault over the back-room deals and speak directly to the
public. For a number of years, in opinion polls, he ranked up with the
president and the chief justice of the Supreme Court as the most
influential people in America. 

But Nader et al. spawned their own antithesis. The story has been told
many times: how the trade associations swarmed into Washington,
corporations expanded their lobby ranks, the opinion tanks cast their
spell on the reportorial class, and so-called astro-turf campaigns
stirred up a facsimile of grassroots support to undercut the advocates
who could not afford such tactics. The result is evident today.
Washington's legislative space has become as crowded as its office
space---with equally high rent. The campaign-finance system is the DOS
of this machine---and I'm talking in part about the supposed reforms of
the 1970s, which in some ways made the problem worse.

Before those reforms put a limit on individual contributions, a member
of Congress could load up on money from a handful of interests, and thus
be free to take on the rest. They might even have a benevolent angel who
wanted them in office to do the right thing. This effect was evident
especially in rural states, where corporate interests were not strong,
campaigns were relatively cheap, and the major interest groups---family
farmers for example---were benign. The so-called Common Cause reforms
changed all that. With a tight cap on individual donations, members had
to spread their nets more broadly. They had to subject themselves to
many smaller strings as opposed to fewer big ones; and this turned
Congress into a dense thicket of interest in which there is little space
to move. Thus the beating up on government---it's about the only
institution left in town that doesn't give money to campaigns. 

The enclosure of political space also has upped the ante on
contentiousness and rancor. Congress has never been a place where the
lions lie down gently with the lambs. But the kind of gang-war mentality
that prevails today is over the top. Newt Gingrich had a lot to do with
this; as a minority-party bomb thrower he turned the place into a
Beirut---and easier in than out. But money has a lot to do with this too
(and is not unrelated to Gingrich of course). Things get tense when
there is big money on the table. When that money is stirring up trouble
for you in your district, they get more tense still.

Awful Washington again. Yet, in this too, Congress is a mirror of the
country at large. The enclosure of political space in Washington is not
unlike the commoditizing of social space generally. Trying to get
through a day in the U.S. without being assaulted by ads is about as
hard as trying to move legislation in Washington without running into
the thicket of PACs. The efforts to patent and bio-engineer life for
monetary gain are the commercial equivalent of the effort to re-engineer
the political process for commercial ends. This applies to the media as
well. The disinclination of Congress to upset big donors is much like
the reluctance of the big-shot media to upset big advertisers or their
corporate bosses. When journalists at the major outlets say Congress is
a captive of moneyed interests, they too are pointing the finger at
another version of themselves.

All Over America

The enclosure of political space in Washington has been much like the
invasion of Wal-Mart into small town America. It has undermined the
political Main Street---the traditional relationships of the political
village---and left the impersonal calculus of the market in its place.
As Washington has embraced the mantras of the market, it has shown by
its own example the shortcomings of the market as a social model.

Congress itself has participated in these changes, largely through a
vast increase in staff. Not that long ago, House and Senate offices had
a small and intimate feel, like a family business. There was little
bureaucracy or specialization, few buffers between the staff and the
boss. The informality could take you by surprise. As a young public
interest intern, I once helped a Senate subcommittee prepare for
hearings involving the predations of the Penn Central Railroad. The day
before the hearings, late in the afternoon, the staff attorney realized
that no one had drafted an opening statement for the chairman. He was
busy, and there was no one else to do it. So the task fell to me. 

I sat down at a Selectric, a bit dazed to be assigned such an important
task, and proceeded to write a statement I was sure would bring the
assemblage to its feet. I was also sure that someone would revise it
before morning, so I really cut loose. The next morning I took a seat in
the hearing room, full of anticipation. Some of my own words might be
uttered, in the Senate of the United States. The chairman started
reading, and I was thrilled, and then horrified, as my sophomoric prose
came back at me from the dais, word for hyperventilating word. This was
a useful lesson on the hazards of cheesy polemic. But more importantly,
it showed how Congress was not a model of professional management in
those less bureaucratic days.

But professional management is a corporate ideal, not a democratic one.
What the Senate lacked in management, it made up for in tradition, and
ties of loyalty and trust. People called it a "club," which they
generally did not mean as a compliment, and with good reason. Yet a club
has a good side too---just as a traditional ethnic neighborhood has a
good side too, Archie Bunker bigotry and all. This was most apparent at
the staff level, where employees felt like personal assistants, like
clerks for a judge. 

As staffs expanded in the '70s and '80s, that world came apart. There
were good reasons for the expansion, or what seemed like good reasons at
the time. Congress wanted to keep closer tabs on the bureaucracy it had
created; and, after Watergate, on the imperial presidency as well. There
was a need to deal with the new legions of lobbyists, and with the
constituent mail that was pouring in as never before. There was also the
worthy cause of decentralization. The so-called Watergate Class of 1974
insisted on tempering the power of chairmen by giving subcommittees more
autonomy and staff. 

Justified and beneficial to some extent, the staff increases
nevertheless came at a price. More staff meant more points of contact
for lobbyists and more memos for the member to read at night. It meant
more data and technocracy and less time for big questions. Daily
schedules came to resemble the departure screens at LaGuardia. There was
also a large shift in the relationships between members and staff. Where
once offices were a little like family grocery stores, with all the
makeshift informality, they began to feel more like corporate
operations, with rigid hierarchies and strict separation of functions.
In this setting, employment became more fungible---more a labor market.
After elections, resumés start appearing in congressional offices from
the staffs of the defeated or retired---a migrant labor-force with issue
expertise and knowledge of the Hill to sell. Liberal Democrats find
resumés from former Republican staff. They know the issues and the
players. What difference does it make where the boss stands?

Meat Market

Washington has always been a magnet for people on the make. Back in the
Gilded Age, one enterprising congressional staff member also worked as a
newspaper correspondent and lobbyist at the same time. Today the hustle
is more buttoned-down, and hedged by ethics rules that provide an aura
of legitimacy to what might otherwise be unseemly. Build the resumé in
Congress for a few years, or at the Securities and Exchange Commission,
or at the tax division of the Justice Department, and you are ready to
sell your human capital at the law firms and lobby operations across
town. 

The migration down Pennsylvania Avenue to K Street seems to be
increasing. According to the Congressional Management Foundation, which
studies the operations of Congress, the typical staff tenure has been
diminishing. People get their visas stamped more quickly; and the more
stamps the better the caché. The day I write this, the "In the Loop"
column in The Washington Post, includes this item: "Going private Š Bill
O'Neill, legislative director to former representative Robert A. Roe
(D-N.J.) and more recently senior policy advisor to the House Government
Reform Committee under Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), is off to Sprint's
Washington office to be a director of government affairs."

I don't know Mr. O'Neill. His work for a mainstream Democrat and then a
right-wing Republican might have reflected deeply-held ideals. But there
is little question that such work on both sides of the partisan aisle
positions one nicely for a corporate job in "government affairs." There
was a time when the culture of the institution could provide a bit of
counterweight to such moves. Someone who had worked closely with the
late Congressman Wright Patman, a legendary populist on banking issues
and chairman of the House Banking Committee, might feel uncomfortable
about trying to lobby the congressman on behalf of Chase Manhattan Bank. 

But the increased liquidity of human capital in the capital---the
absence of what economists call transactional "friction" and others call
principle, or loyalty, or moral scruple---has diminished this effect.
Thus the increased scale of Congress has meshed neatly with the
commoditizing of space and time in Washington. Market economics is the
study of transactions between strangers for money. The implicit thrust
is to drive more of life into an arena in which people deal with one
another in this way. Thus, work in the nation's capital has come closer
to the market ideal, just like everything else. Life becomes a
continuing audition---thus the suits, which serve as a kind of modem
connection, an announcement that yes, I'm the kind of person you would
want to have. 

That's not entirely fair, of course. There are dedicated servants of the
public interest who wear suits every day, just as there are members of
Congress who have striven mightily to resist these trends. I have worked
with both, and that is one reason I am a little fed up with people who
obsess over the mote in Washington's eye but don't consider the beam in
their own. Before the grumbling starts again over the wicked ways of
Washington, pause just one second please. An overheated housing market,
a rapacious grasp for money, a manic drive to commoditize---and make
money from---every moment of conscious experience, an itinerant work
force that is forever on the prowl---this does sound a little like a New
Economy that I know. 

The old Washington was pre-modern, in ways both good and bad. It was
defined by folkways, tradition and personal loyalties, as well as by the
transaction of money. It had space for the contrary and eccentric. It
had time in which people could think about these things. As technology
and commerce have uprooted the last vestiges of the pre-modern from our
lives, it is little wonder that politics have followed suit. Sometimes
what we see is what we are. If Washington seems out of touch, then we
all might look around and ask whether this might be connected just a bit
to what our country has become. 

Research assistance provided by Ramona Buehler and Patrick Esposito.

Tom Woll is a writer who lives in Washington. He generally exists under
another name. 

<---------article ends here--------->

Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, marketing and
advertising.  Commercial Alert's web address is
<http://www.essential.org/alert/>. 

Commercial Alert's materials are distributed electronically via the
commercial-alert mailing list <commercial-alert@lists.essential.org>. To
subscribe to the commercial-alert mailing list, go to
<http://lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/commercial-alert> or send
the word "subscribe" to <alert@essential.org>.

PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY
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Gary Ruskin | Commercial Alert 
1611 Connecticut Ave. NW Suite #3A | Washington, DC 20009
Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax (202) 833-2406
http://www.essential.org/alert/ | mailto:gary@essential.org
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