Marked

The NPR building in Washington, DC, stands at the corner of a busy street. It looks like a giant wedge landed in the road by some uninventive creator, who perhaps only ever looked at it from a birds-eye. From the ground, the whole thing is plain and dreary-looking, save the very front, where the colorful NPR logo hangs proudly.

Five minutes to the south is the even larger behemoth Union Station. Within its walls is a secular hell populated by the miserable people of our nation's capital. What the bureaucratic gods seem to have miscalculated, however, is the fact that most people assembling at Union during the worst hours, the commute hours, are not DC locals at all (the bad guys) -- but suburbanites and Baltimorians from the north.

And then again, perhaps those were precisely the people who deserved to suffer. Certainly, anyone tainted by the poison of DC has it coming.

A few minutes from Union Station, you'll find K-Street, that home for lobbyists that is, in fact, far bigger than a single street. I saw a headline recently proclaiming that over four-hundred thousand people are employed by private organizations in Washington. The federal government employs another two-hundred thousand in the area. That's more than half a million people whom any sensible judge would sentence and subject to whatever small tortures available.

One needs only to visit the restroom in order to understand both how and why the people of Washington suffer. Whether you're sharing the urinals with an unwashed homeless man or a spiffy think tanker, you can feel that you're in an unhappy place. Your teeth will break from the smell. Somewhere in the coughing and the squirting, the indifferent momentum of the city's life cycle creeps into you.

And you feel yourself a marked man.