In the time of one of our nation’s greatest financial failures set against the backdrop of a groundbreaking election and a war abroad, I came to Washington expecting to feel a palpable tension hanging in the Fall air. What I found was apathy in the highest degree. As two men argued over who had the harder obstacle courses, army or navy, I stood in a huddled mass of midwestern accents gawking slack-jawed at the Lincoln Memorial.

“Lincoln was the man that the slaves asked to help them fight Atlanta,” said a rotund woman to her wide-eyed flock.

As I strolled the grounds of the Smithsonian I was astonished to hear one man exclaim,”The Smithsonian is the place where we bring everything we get when we win a war. It’s like a poker game and we have a lot of stuff to offer people if they ever win against us.”

He was telling this to his waddling elderly wife. The man was dead serious. Not a hink of sarcasm could be detected. This is the world-view of the American experience.

As I approached the capitol I heard nothing but small talk about what kind of creamer to use or what car is a good drive. I realized the stuffed suits scurrying around the capitol weren’t struck with gravity of these grave times at all. Senate, congress, it’s all just a big sad Elks club meeting.

The cogs of government seem to move at the same pace regardless of the political climate in the rest of the nation. Walking the streets with open ears illuminates the mediocrity of our national leaders. These aren’t the super-human knights of good or bottom-feeding slime that we’ve painted them to be. They’re just regular boring people. No more interesting than other lawyers or accountants. I conjecture that our greatest deterrent to a terrorist attack at the capitol isn’t our top notch security or our intelligence gathering efforts, but rather our depraved indifference. If I was a suicide bomber heading up those long steps toward congress, my head filled with the righteousness of my cause and my heart ready to sacrifice my life to fight the injustices I believed had been done to my people by America, I would give up when I realized that these people barely know anything about me or my plight. To them, my sacrifice wouldn’t even register. I’d just be the reason they were late for drinks with their mistresses. I’d be the jackass who made them install a metal detector. I’d be “that guy” who screwed up the parking situation. That’s all. Nothing more. It’s a grand-scale planned community of twits and they’re really not worth the attention we pay them as a society or a world. They can do whatever they do and I’ll keep to my own life and what’s important to me as a nation of one. That’s what’s great about America, you get to decide what level of involvement you want with the government and after seeing its workings first hand, I’m as happy as ever to engage the barest minimum.

The city itself is truly a capitol stagnated in the era of which it was built. America was trying to find an identity for itself and in doing so looked to the history of other nations. The layout of the National Mall, and indeed the whole of Washington, is that of a funhouse mirrored Paris. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the disgraced master architect of our American political center, betrays his birth nationality in the city’s sprawling lawns and spoke-wheeled radiations of main streets. The monuments and central buildings expose the founding fathers’ fetish for Grecian democracy. The Washington monument is an obelisk shape, recalling the landmarks of the iconic Egyptian era. All of these pirated ideas have gelled in one place to form a mutant city to lead a mutant nation. A mongrel country that has come to symbolize the disconnection of people and ideas. A beautiful scrap heap of transplanted concepts blotting out the sun. Washington, city of government. Representative of everything and no one. A trafficking center for the flow of localized tax money and diplomats who wish they had a Star Bucks in their third world dust bowl. It’s a glorious disaster; a city devoted to the self-righteous and pig-headed notion that the self-righteous and pig-headed morons need self-righteous and pig-headed people to help them accomplish their self-righteous and pig-headed goals. America in function.