There's America—and Then There's Washington By Andrew Cohen

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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/theres-america-and-then-theres-washington/247442/

Over at Harper's, Thomas Frank has an interesting essay that touches, among other things, on the destructive disconnect that exists between Washington, D.C., and the rest of the nation. I've written about this growing gulf from a political perspective. I've written about it from a media perspective. But Frank writes about it from an economic perspective and expresses quite eloquently what those of us outside Washington, D.C often think of what goes on there.

Frank's piece, "The Bleakness Stakes," isn't yet freely available online. But here are the graphs which caught my attention. He's writing about how the District of Columbia ranked as the most "positive " place in America based upon an economic poll by Gallup in August. Frank writes:

Washington's optimism isn't that hard to understand, really. The D.C. metro area, when measured by median family income, is the richest in the nation. Six of the ten most affluent counties in America are Washington suburbs. And thanks to the federal government -- the gift that keeps on giving -- recessions almost never happen here. In fact, D.C. real estate prices are actually going up...

Frank continues:

While the familiar critique of Washington insularity gets some important facts wrong -- most federal employees are, for example, paid considerably less than people doing equivalent work in the private sector -- it gets the big story right. Washington is indeed out of touch with the suffering of the nation.

Let us venture even further down this path. The peculiar economic makeup of the Washington area makes the city a kind of naturally occurring Potemkin Village, an illusion of prosperity that has persuaded its resident journalists and pundits and policymakers to credit all sorts of unsound economic ideas.

[PATRICK]

1. And yet this donut surrounds DC Metro

When I visited it a long time ago, straying off the tourist path just a block or two was quite a shocker. Unless things have brightened all that much in what was the most mismanaged(Congressional) metro in the nation, getting in touch with both America and the consequences of Congressional failure are almost just around the corner. In similar donuts around metro cancers the attitude may be similar, except that those donuts are not so densely populated with supposed civil servants and architects.

If you are a millionaire you granted this sense of apartness. If you live a scant but sheltered hundred yards away from rural poverty or a slum you can experience so long as nothing happens visually or audibly to disturb the myopic ambiance.
There is little popular sense of inequity or reform in front of such a physical, easily available neighboring diversity. Little sense of an underlying problem such as farm declines, unemployment.

Of course leaders are supposed to work hard at just this sort of understanding, outreach, underlying problems and inequities. They are supposed to at least represent all. Leadership, representation has itself grown into a farce that cannot even imagine- or brook others imagining- real leadership or real representation. Not anymore than Big Journalism is news, or business is business, or, increasingly, education is education. Underneath typical human weakness and corruptibility is the single undivided aim to increase numerical wealth to lock away human destiny in a jar for gibbering billionaire idiots. They understand exactly what is "out there". Dilution of obscene privilege and competition for hoarded possessions. The more poverty they see, the happier they are. Anything that disturbs the sheltered enjoyment of their minor appropriated godhood calls for old fashioned repression, for which they are not innocently dumbstruck, but traditionally prepared.