Adventures in Bureaucracy
It's been a long slog in the bureaucracy lately, and I don't think I'm the only one to feel that way. I recently took some time off and spent a lot of time in the car, where the CD of the journey was some compilation of music from the 1990's. Sure, it's not as good as 1980's music, but it'll do.
To show how much politics has seeped into my consciousness despite my desperate efforts to shut everything out until late October, I started thinking about how mean it would be for someone to put a montage of Hillary Clinton up with the music of Bell Biv Devoe for the background: "
Poison". "That girl is POISON.... never trust a big butt and a smile." Mean, but potentially funny. For some reason, I always think of that last line in a Casey Kasem voice.
So after that I wondered whether any of the other songs in the collection would apply to the other candidates. At first Obama seemed a good match for "
Hold On", with all the talk about change, but the song always annoyed me, and then I heard "
Jump Around". I really like the idea of Obama saying, "I'll serve your ass like John MacEnroe / If your girl steps up, I'm smacking the ho". Quite possibly to Hillary and Bill before the convention.
McCain was a no-brainer: "
Justified and Ancient". More for the "ancient", but the image of him driving around in an ice cream van is another interesting mental picture. Hearing it once again I wondered, as I did back in the 1990's, what this fascination with muu muus was all about, but trying to make sense out of pop lyrics is largely a game I cannot win.
Yes, it's been extremely busy in my corner of the bureaucracy, but I've always got time to fly off the handle when I see something about how design companies are paid exhorbitant amounts of money to put letters on paper. How three letters are supposed to convey a "bold commitment" is beyond me.
Still, it did convey
something.
But I still don't think it conveys something worth $28,000.
I think I would do
something like this if I had the resources to do it. Except I would make something less likely to attract hippies.
"The Awakening" is moving. I had always thought of the statue as something fixed right there at the southern end of East Potomac Park, but it's been bought and is being moved down the river to a new development. It made a good destination for long walks at cherry blossom time.
The comments are kind of a surprise. I agree with the one who asks what's going to come next. The site practically begs for something monumental. Maybe some sort of contest would help. I just hope it's not one of those modernistic heaps of twisted metal that seem to pass for sculpture these days.
Dystopian visions of the future of Washington, D.C.What ever happened to a sense of idealism and hope in the future? At what point do all the apocalyptic scenarios for the future become self-fulfilling prophecies?
Then again, I don't think there's much to worry about with this particular set of predictions coming true. The Pentagon as a peace institute, for a world where security is achieved through diplomacy and ideas? Six thousand years of human history says that's not going to happen in the next century.
A water Mall to bring life into the city? Like D.C. needs more mosquitoes. There is something poetic to it - the city rose from a swamp, and to a swamp it will return.
Elevated farmland above inner city neighborhoods? I don't think the people in those neighborhoods would take kindly to having their homes essentially buried.
Still, I guess it's not entirely wrong-headed:
"This project starts off by assuming that Washington, D.C., will decline to a certain extent," said Nataly Gattegno, an assistant professor of architecture. "Because of its pollution. Because of its lack of educational infrastructure, lack of actual infrastructure, sewage, water treatment, energy, fuel, coal plants."
Pretty safe projection, considering it's been happening since the 1970's, but the natural response has not been to build gigantic new high-density infrastructure. Instead, people have moved to Virginia and Maryland for lower density living.
They've found another thing to fret about: "
leisure sickness". It seems that people in one study reported getting sick while on vacation.
I think there may be something to it, because I've noticed the same thing. In my case, I think it may have something to do with the large amounts of dust that result from my notoriously poor housekeeping skills.
Newark, New Jersey, the Garden City in the Garden State, is
apparently undergoing some sort of revival. Who knew? I wonder if this means that Anacostia will go the same way.
2008... another year is upon us already. I hope and pray that maybe, just maybe, we will get a brief respite from the incessant campaigning for a few weeks in December before the next round gears up again.
