Mile Zero
if challenge had a taste, you'd be quite delicious
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
I'm not going to say whether the DC gun ban is good or bad policy. I can see the constitutional reasoning behind its removal by the Supreme Court. I think this is a good, moderate take on the issue.
What I will say is that today the Metro was packed with out-of-town tourists, as it often is in the summer. And call me misanthropic and elitist, but I do not feel at all safer knowing that I could be sharing those small spaces with any number of loaded firearms in the hands of people who have heard exaggerated stories about the dangers of DC and are anxious to defend themselves.
It may or may not lower crime--nobody seems to really be sure. But it definitely freaks me out.
11:32 x Thomas x /dc/gov x link x 2 comments
I think the heat is getting to someone.
People wonder why Americans don't save. But if these guys were the ones offering to help, would you?
22:11 x Thomas x /dc/photos x link x 2 comments
No, by all means, Pope. Close down a big chunk of Pennsylvania Avenue. After all, no-one ever needs to cross that.
I hate it when the city pulls this banana-republic, step-aside-little-people crap.
12:09 x Thomas x /dc/events x link x 0 comments
It's summer, and it's an election year, so there's an especially frisky crop of tourists flooding DC.
Can you sense my enthusiasm?
I work farther away from the White House and the Mall now, so I see fewer tourists wandering around outside the Metro. But I think it's no secret that DC's public transit system is the bane of my existence, and the increased presence of inexperienced foot traffic isn't helping.
Visitors to our plague-ridden national capital, I mean you no ill will. But please, when you bring your seven squabbling children into the Metro train, move fully into the compartment and don't just stand there in the doorway, gawking at the train interior as if you've never seen beige plastic and cheap imitation leather before. Please do not park your stroller across the entire escalator, forcing everyone to wait behind you during the long ride down. And for all that is holy, only one person needs to buy your ticket or SmartTrip card. You do not need to huddle around the machine in a pack, like cro-magnons before a silent, black obelisk.
Now, even to my ears, I sound a little bitter. In a conversation with a coworker, we were talking about why people here get so annoyed at tourists--after all, most of us probably were tourists here at one point. Why the lack of empathy? No doubt it's partly that the city tends to attract (and create) type A personalities. But I suspect that the transformation has more to do with familiarity with the DC Metro's capricious ways. To outsiders, we may seem to be rushing short-tempered toward the train--but we know that if we just barely miss this one, who knows when the next one will come? At any minute, the Red Line could shut itself down again due to moisture, or a train could disable itself for no good reason, holding up the whole system and doubling the crush when it has to offload passengers.
Tourists catch the brunt of this, because they're not aware of the thousand ways that Metro riders have evolved mechanisms for rushing to catch hypothetical trains. The fact that they crowd the system and make it more likely that something will break doesn't help--but that's not their fault. So I'm sorry, tourists. I didn't mean to yell. Friends?
Awesome. Now, can you please get out of my way?
08:43 x Thomas x /dc/metro x link x 0 comments
Taken on April 8th in the back car of a Metro train. It looks like one of the placards that they put in the front car to let people know which line it's on. Except that DC doesn't have--and has never had, to my knowledge--a white line. Very odd.
The first thing to come to my mind, of course, was segregated railway cars, especially since it was four days after the anniversary of the MLK assassination.
08:18 x Thomas x /dc/photos x link x 0 comments
Every time I walk by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, I always think: "They used to be in a really fancy, modern office building, but someone talked them out of it."
09:56 x Thomas x /dc/photos x link x 0 comments
"I've got three articles in here," the Street Sense vendor says proudly.
"Oh yeah?" I ask.
"This one here on the front page," he says, pointing to an op-ed about being in a relationship while homeless. "This one about the Patriots, and..." He searches for a moment, unable to find a third, but unwilling to give up a perfectly good line of patter: "...and I'm top of the sales rankings, thanks to good people like yourself."
He is indeed. In fact, he's got almost twice the number of sales of the next highest vendor, perhaps thanks (as his op-ed notes) to the natty-looking suit he wears under the bright yellow Street Sense caution vest. Although the location--corner of L and 18, in the middle of the suit-and-tie-mandatory Golden Triangle--probably doesn't hurt.
I should have asked which he enjoys more, the writing or the selling. Or does he use the former to give him an edge on the latter? It certainly worked for me.
13:21 x Thomas x /dc/local_flavor x link x 0 comments
One of my goals during the holiday period is to finish an intro jingle for CQ multimedia. We'll need special-purpose songs as well, but a general-purpose clip to "sound like CQ" will come in handy, similar to the NPR or XM channel themes. An idea I quite like is to take samples of field recordings from around the city and incorporate them into the melody.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure DC has enough of a sonic character for this kind of thing. In San Francisco, I'd put in the sounds of trolley cars. In New York, shouting and car horns would play a role. But what sounds like DC? Once I've taped the Metro, I'm not sure where else to go, other than lawmaker speeches. Any suggestions from locals?
18:34 x Thomas x /dc/local_flavor x link x 1 comment
This morning, at the corner of I and 18th, an older luxury car pulls up to the intersection. Its windows are rolled down, and salsa music spills out of it. The driver, a middle-aged man of indeterminate background, sings along loudly and--here's the good part--shakes a pair of maracas with the beat, using both hands. Hopefully he was putting them down to steer, but I never heard them miss a beat as the light changed and the car pulled away.
You don't see much of that in DC. Or anywhere else, I would hope.
11:00 x Thomas x /dc/local_flavor x link x 0 comments
Here is the problem with DC: we are going to spend some time socially with some friends this month. One of those friends is apparently very conservative. Now, I'm not in favor of segregating myself from opposing political viewpoints entirely. I don't have any particularly right-wing acquaintances myself, but that's probably more luck than anything else (and the fact that I try not to talk politics at work, of course). And in most places around the country, political viewpoints are just that: viewpoints. They can be ignored, because except for elections (assuming that your friends vote) they have no real power.
But this time, and this is what separates our fair city from others, we are meeting with someone who actually works for a major conservative institution.
In this case, Belle calls me up to ask if I'm free for that evening, mentioning slyly at the end of the call that I would need to "be polite." It's a shame that she feels the need to ask me not to start screaming uncontrollably about the fascists. Not that I would do that. I prefer muttering and spasming randomly. I can be civil. But Belle knows me, and so she reminds me to be good anyway.
This is only a problem if you actually believe what you say you believe. By which I mean, if you honestly think that policy has concrete impacts on real people, especially policies like torture, failure to respond to natural disaster, pollution, corruption, warfare, and other fun hobbies of the Worst. President. Ever... then yes, in that case, it can be a little hard to smile and chat politely with someone who is not just an enthusiast for those policies, but a paid footsoldier. In a less contentious environment, I'd probably be churlish for saying something like this, but it's not like the last few years have been filled with compromise or cooperation. In fact, they've been downright unhealthy for those on the wrong side of our lawmakers.
DC, in other words, is a bad place to have the courage of your convictions. Because half the people you know socially probably work from 9-5 to twist the system into shapes that you find absolutely reprehensible.
There are two ways to get off the horns of this dilemma. The first is to avoid the situation whenever possible, which is rarely. The other is to learn to segment the personal from the political, and subsequently to act as if the political implications of a person's job are just a funny quirk that no-one discusses. I find this distasteful, personally. I think it leads to a tendency that you see far too often around here: people unplug from the stress of the city by treating politics as just a game. They act like they're not responsible for their day jobs. It makes for a pleasant after-hours environment, but it downplays the real-world consequences of think-tank and government work.
As a result of this culture, every now and then journalists and op-ed writers complain about how activists and enthusiasts on blogs are "too partisan" and "adversarial." They have become accustomed to people who treat policy as an abstract instead of concrete. And don't get me wrong: I strongly feel that journalists should be able to cover the political debate fairly. I tried to do so myself, on the few occasions when I was paid to write about politics. That's a journalist's job. But that doesn't mean that a journalist should lack political opinions. Far from it. I think they enhance the ability to present good, objective, factual coverage. Critically-held opinions are a way of grounding coverage--of saying yes, sure, but what does that mean for real people?
In order to ignore the criticisms of the Iraq invasion in 2003 (and they did: rational anti-war viewpoints were simply not presented*), journalists had to treat that policy as entirely abstract. But war is not abstract. People die from it--worse, people are maimed and scarred, phsyically and psychologically. It's obvious, once that's taken into account, that more investigation was needed. Instead, the culture of politics-as-parlor-game prevailed, and seemingly nobody asked serious questions until it was too late. To do otherwise would have been impolite. It would have meant facing the possibility that the people those journalists interviewed and had dinner and parties with off-hours were, in fact, capable of doing monstrous things.
Well, we know how that turned out.
But don't worry. There'll be no screaming, even if there ought to be. Especially if I get it out of my system here, instead.
* You may be wondering what I consider a rational anti-war viewpoint. The problem with most of the viewpoints presented before the invasion was that they asked the wrong questions. They said something like "isn't Saddam a bad man who should go away?" or "how could a third-world country run by a corrupt kleptocrat possibly defeat us?" These were poor questions, and they were specifically poor because, as above, they presume that the policies are not about people, but simply about "spreading democracy" and whether or not we should do so.
Before we get into another war (and don't think that there aren't several presidential candidates just itching to try), perhaps we should lay out a few preferable principles:
19:37 x Thomas x /dc/annoyances x link x 1 comment
