19 stories from America's capital

Many new reasons to hate my country and all that it stands for

Oops, I did another road trip! Washington DC this time. I had just an okay time, and my friend and I left a half-day early… so it goes.

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First Impressions

1. In the summer, Washington DC gets hot. 85 degrees, the sun blazing, every street paved with steaming black asphalt—it’s a real chore just to walk a block or two from the subway station.

2. Unfortunately, I often had to walk much more than a block or two! DC’s transit system is not so good. The trains do a good job of ferrying people in from the suburbs, but getting lunch in Georgetown meant a half-mile walk from the Foggy Bottom stop, and the FDR Memorial was more than a mile from any metro station. That’s a major commercial district and a serious tourist attraction! It all should be much more accessible!

3. Ah, but I won’t complain too much. My friend and I were able to stay in a nice place in Chantilly, VA, and the $5/day metro park-and-ride system worked excellently for us. I like trains a lot, and I never get to ride them in my podunk Midwestern hometown, so it was fun to commute like a real commuter for a change.

4. Chantilly is in the infamous Loudon County. It’s the richest county in the nation—a median household income of more than $150,000—and it deeply, deeply sucks. I don’t even care about all the bathroom rape and antiracist cliqueishness—it’s the cookie-cutter suburban settlements that piss me off. Here’s a satellite view of roughly where we stayed:

   

   See all the loopy, cul-de-sac-y nonsense where everyone lives, with no commercial enterprise anywhere to be found? Yeah, I hate it too.

5. Our host was generally kind and gracious (probably in part because she was quasi-related to my friend), but people in this part of the country tend not to be so amiable. Every once in a while, I’d try to make friendly eye contact with someone on the subway or on the street, and I mostly just got scowls in return, if anyone even bothered to look up from their phone. Maybe the new haircut isn’t actually working as well as I thought?… No, couldn’t possibly be that. These coastal elites just think they’re too good for me.

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Touristy Things

6. I’ve been to DC a few times before, but it’s full of cool museums and monuments, so I hit some old favorites (and got dragged to a couple new ones too).

7. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is basically all it should be. There are planes and rockets and jet engines all over the place; it’s mostly marketed for a younger crowd, but it’s hard not to have a good time. I learned, for instance, a ton about the history of commercial air travel in the US. There’s a lot of it, for one thing: apparently Delta Air Lines just turned 100 years old. Americans have been flying for leisure for a long time now!

   1. Before then, a lot of early aviation companies were propped up by the Post Office, of all things. Only after the Air Mail scandal of 1934 did most big airliners shift their focus to passenger service.

   2. That scandal, by the way, was handled terribly by the Roosevelt administration. When it was revealed that Herbert Hoover’s Postmaster General had, in 1930, awarded airmail contracts rather… amorally at the “Spoils Conference,” FDR cancelled all the contracts and told the Army Air Corps to take over. The USAAC was totally unprepared, and over the course of just a few months, more than 60 planes crashed, killing 13 airmen. They completed just 65.8% of scheduled deliveries.

   3. Roosevelt, a man consistently unwilling to sit back and let the free market fix his problems for him, broke up the United Aircraft and Transportation Company (for no apparent reason) into the modern United Air Lines, the United Aircraft Manufacturing Company (which would later merge with Raytheon), and another manufacturer called Boeing. Its namesake and the former chairman of the UATC, William Boeing, chose to resign shortly afterward at the age of 52 “rather than ever deal again with the federal government.”

   4. The museum’s curators saw things rather differently:

      

      Thank goodness for the GOVERNMENT!

8. I was also dragged along to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, a beautiful little park on the Potomac River. There was a real nice view…

   

   …but FDR himself was a cousin-marrying commie, and I have little sympathy for his New-Dealing ways, so we got right on out of there.

9. After a short visit to the World War II section of the American History museum, I was told I absolutely had to see the Old Post Office. It’s now mostly the DC Waldorf Astoria hotel, but we went in the museum entrance around back, and were immediately greeted by this beauty:

   

   The fine print there refers to Trump’s Executive Order 14253: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Truth and Sanity! In the Old Post Office, I learned that the area where it resides—now called “Federal Triangle”—used to be an infamously disgusting slum called alternately “Murder Bay” or “Hooker’s Division.” About this, I have four thoughts:

   1. Does such a history fail to honor American beauty, grandeur, and abundance? Should I have reported the exhibit?

   2. The construction of Federal Triangle was an early urban renewal project. Senator James McMillan looked at “a muddy, flood-prone, malaria-ridden, poverty-stricken region lacking in paved roads, sewer system, and running water,” and he said, “Let’s build something better here.” It took a little while to do it, but they did it, and it worked—all of DC’s many murders happen elsewhere now! This is a story about Abundance, sort of.

   3. Andrew Mellon was Treasury Secretary at the time, and he rightly hated Modern architecture. So all the Federal Triangle buildings are cool and nice-looking:

      

      The Apex Building

      

      Some archway somewhere

      

      The William Jefferson Clinton Building (originally the New Post Office)

   4. None of this should exist at all. Why is there any “Triangle” in this city? It was totally artificially planned! They could’ve made it a grid! Instead, some dumb French piece of shit scrawled this on a cocktail napkin, and fucked all of America over forever.

      

      quel batard!

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The Impending Parade

11. Throughout our visit, locals told me and my friend, “Oh, it’s a shame you won’t be in town for the parade.” This was mysterious to me, since I’d been living in a news-ignorant waking-coma since graduation, but I soon learned: Trump’s got a military parade scheduled for today, Saturday June 14! It’s the Army’s 250th birthday and, hey, look at that, it’s Mr. Trump’s 79th, wow, what a coincidence, no symbolism there I’m sure. From what I can tell, everyone in DC knows that this is silly, is (at least) mildly annoyed by all the inconvenience it’ll cause, but also is super excited to turn out and see some tanks. I’ll admit—I’m excited just to watch them on TV.

12. Actually, when we left the FDR Memorial, my friend and I spotted a few that’d been rolled into town hiding behind some trees:

    

    look cloooosely, they’re back there

    

    why is my lens always covered with shit?

    It’s fairly surreal to see military vehicles on the street. I have, *ahem*, lived in Israel before, so I’m not totally unused to things like this—soldiers with big beefy sidearms weren’t an uncommon sight at the train station—but it’s not right for it to happen here. It’s a Middle East kind of thing, not an American one.

13. I’ve been to DC before, some years ago, and I’m fairly confident saying that the vibes actually are noticeably off now in the Trump era. For instance, here’s the US Department of Agriculture building:

    

    That’s not how it’s supposed to look!

14. Trump is spending $45 million on this parade. Many federal employees have been forced to work from home for a few days, so the cost paid in lost government-worker productivity might be even higher. This is wasteful ego-stroking, and it belongs in some tinpot dictatorship, not here.

15. All that said, I’m still kinda excited to see the tanks! Tanks are cool!

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Journey, Not Destination

16. Road trips are pretty universally better than plane trips. There’s always scenery (no clouds in the way), you have pretty complete freedom over your itinerary, and there’s a lot more legroom. DC is an 8 hour drive for me—to take a plane, once you factor all the nonsense in, probably wouldn’t even be much of a speedup. And it’d certainly be a lot more expensive—so we drove.

17. From southeast Michigan to Washington DC, you pass through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and a tiny little sliver of Maryland. Michigan roads are notoriously awful, but at least you can go way over the speed limit and get out pretty quickly. In Ohio, that’s really not an option. But the toll road is smooth and it’s not so unpleasant. Ditto for Pennsylvania.

18. Rural Pennsylvania is a fairly cool place. The Allegheny Mountains aren’t actually mountains, but they’re still nice:

    

    It’s also quite folksy:

    

    Spotted at an infuriatingly stupid I-76 / I-70 junction that had me exclaiming, in fact, “JESUS.”

19. On the drive back, rush hour traffic diverted us through West Virginia’s eastern panhandle, which was somehow even more scenic. Canada’s been assaulting the northern United States with wildfire smoke for a few weeks now, but, joke’s on them, it just makes our sunsets extra pretty.

    

    photo can’t do it justice, I’m afraid; it was really much redder and brighter.