A brief history of douchery...

Willful blindness to your own douche-bag status is a necessary condition precedent to douchedom. And the key indicator is an overwhelming desire to point a douche-accusing finger at everyone else. Because, yeah. OF COURSE you happen to be the only non-douche in a group composed, so you say, solely of douches. We can tell because you're the one complaining about the popped collars.

A leading symptom of this particular brand of douche, which I've really only seen in D.C. is the self-righteous demand, "Justify yourself to me as a non-douche." A prime example of which was left in the comments today, " How diverse was the high school you attended back home in the midwest? How would your parents feel if you were to bring the son of a Pakistani cab driver back home with you for Thanksgiving?"

Here we have the elements of:

1) A douche who believes he can define douchery based on criteria which rules out everyone except himself and others from the same background/belief system.

2) An attitude of entitlement, "You OWE me justification for your existence."

And 3) The dizzying logic of self-hate in, "I will mock you for any perceived lack of status you might assign me by assigning you a lack of status because you have the potential to assign a hypothetical lack of status to me... "(Although I highly doubt the commenter is, in fact, the son of a Pakistani cab driver. He sounds more like someone who grew up with tales of a legitimately poor forbear's street smarts, and thinks that qualifies him as a self-made man despite his own lack of college debt).

So there, in two sentences of query, we have the magic of D.C. social forces at work. "It's not me, it's you." Because, "You're not like me." And this is proved by the implied argument, "I'm better because I'm the one telling you that you suck."

Gotta love this town.

There's only one reason to live in D.C....

According to worldtravels.com the D.C. climate is, "Highly seasonal with extreme variations between summer and winter." They helpfully added that the weather, "Has been known to be unpredictable too."

Style on the hot (unless it's really rainy and cold) streets range from J Crew, to Vineyard Vines, to Patagonia, to Lands End (but that last one is only popular for totes).

Buffeted by schizo non-native market forces and government salary expense accounts, restaurants attempt to toe the line between Applebees-like "homestyle" gluey entrees, for the transplanted midwestern palate, and completely inadequate Thai, Ethopian or Indian, for the people who want to pretend they love new cultures but really can't tell the difference. (Not one place could stay in business selling decent salt bagels?)

The admittedly large selection of museums tend toward displays meant to attract people who wish they were the kind of people who frequent the museum on weekends, but who really only like artists they've heard of before.

The natives hate the transplants. And the transplants dimly try not to be too offensive, but can't seem to help doing things like STOPPING in the middle of the metro during rush hour, apparently to ponder something which had better be damned important because it could have caused a death fourteen people behind them in the crush.

We're all here, though, hair in ponytails because of the humidity, biking through aggressively incompetent traffic and pretending the supposedly modern retreads at the Kennedy center are cutting edge opera (They very well could be, I couldn't tell the difference, I just have... suspicions...)

Why did we leave the buy-in-bulk comforts of the midwest, the glamourous weather of California, and the cozy warmth of the New England prep school where we were raised by people paid to tolerate our whims?

For bragging purposes, of course.

We're a community of more-literate-than-most and never-say-die competitors yearning to breathe more rarified air than the next guy. We let senators sexually harass us in the streets for the photo op, attempt to show off our "relevancy" by fighting over minute political points which everyone involved in the debate learned of from the same newspaper article, and crush into unimaginative events where we pay $8 for koolaid and vodka so we can later begin a story with, "That night at the Serbian Embassy..."

The natives know only a jerk or someone with an agenda would put up with a place like this. And we know it too, every time we retell the story of seeing some random CNN talking head on the train, or pay $8.50 for a sandwich on Capitol Hill. Then we shrug away the moment of clarity and call home to brag, again, that our jogging route takes us THIS close to the church J.F.K. once attended.