For a while in the last 10 years we lived inside the DC Beltway. This as a matured married couple, who had spent more than 90% of our prior normal lives striving, working, parenting, traveling, obeying the law, etc. outside that self-absorbed imaginarium.
“The District” as it’s known, is full of those who are genuinely outside the mainstream of normal Americana, i.e. they’re the “the trough people.” They don’t care about such negative monikers from the provinces, because they don’t have to. There’s simply too much money & power sloshing around the banks of the Potomac.
On numerous occasions when living there, I personally heard from various DC bigshots we interacted with, the derisive term, “the little people”, to describe everyone outside their DC bubble.
FOLLOW THE MONEY: In fact, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), a subdivision of the US Commerce Department, was forced to analyze the District of Columbia, and its 68+ square miles (7+ miles are water), and its 700,000+ people (Metro is 6.3+ million).
Those BEA findings are nothing short of mind-boggling. You need to be sitting down.
For a statistical urban entity, and NOT INCLUDING, the uber-wealthy adjacent counties of Maryland & Virginia, the District’s Gross State Product (not per capita) is greater than the next 22-25 WHOLE STATES. Not bad for a town that’s only real “industry” is government.
By law, the BEA analysis does not include any federal procurements or itemized expenditures sent out from “Capitol City” (a term used in the Hunger Games), but rather is a detailed attempt to measure only what happens inside the 68+ sq. miles of the federal triangle.
This salient fact is buried in all the statistical noise emanating from our central government.
I want you to remember this when you read the all faux sanctimony & hysteria now coming forth from the multi-decade leaders of the many career-government, ‘trough people.’
To wit: US Senator Schumer (45 yrs, D-NY) compares what happened to Pearl Harbor (really, Pearl Harbor); Speaker Pelosi (44 yrs, D-CA) joined Schumer calling for “immediate impeachment & banishment”; former Sec. of Defense Mattis (51 yrs military) wants to “permanently exile” Mr. Trump, … typical of all the self-served caterwauling.
When I hear this stuff, and having lived in DC, I know they’re posturing for the echo chamber our dangerously disconnected ‘Capitol City’ has become. And they get away with it, due to the incredible concentration of US media power that has occurred since 1980. For these media dirtbags, hysterical politics has become a profit-center (i.e. “darkest day in American history”).
I say all this—not to excuse what happened there January 6th, even though the actual damages done were by extremist agent provocateurs, who saw it as an opportunity.
It’s not over, boys & girls. With America’s entirely unsustainable and patently immoral $24-$25-$26 trillion national debt (pick a number), I’m reminded of what Churchill responded in 1942, upon the British rout of Rommel’s forces in North Africa.
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Sellers is a South Park Republican who lives in incorporated Oro Valley. His background is federal tech-transfer commercialization. He is still on Facebook for the time being.