Washington has changed a lot, but the air of unreality remains

Current moment in the US capital has reached a particularly surreal peak.

On the streets of Washington DC, at least in its tonier quarters, well-dressed men and women wearing wireless earbud headphones ride ecologically friendly electric-powered scooters and discuss vegan offerings at new eateries.

In the adjacent halls of power, politicians discuss coups d’etat abroad and boast on television about destroying other countries’ economies.

An entire subgenre of science fiction, ranging Stanislaw Lem’s Futurologist’s Convention to the film The Matrix, is premised on entire populations lulled into mass delusions. They take pills, or are hooked up to machines, or see the world through some other type of augmented reality that masks the horrific truth.

That’s the impression Washington left during a week of reporting in the seat of the American empire.

Washington has changed dramatically over the last four decades. I first visited the city as a kid, dragged along by my parents for a ritual trip to the capital in the 1970s. I visited again to take part in political demonstrations against apartheid and US wars in Central America during the 1980s.

We squeezed into buses and slept rough on church floors or abandoned buildings turned into squats. Washington was then regarded as a dangerous, rotting city somehow befitting the industrial-scale exploitation and destruction of brown peoples’ lives plotted out by political leaders.

In the 1990s, during visits to friends, I noticed the city had begun to improve, aided by an influx of cash from lobbyists, tech companies, and foreign-funded think tanks. The swamp may result in terrible national and international policies, but it sure makes for great sushi, avocado-toast breakfasts and bike lanes.

There has long been an air of unreality in Washington, a disconnect between the world as it is and one seen through the prism of the Beltway. Once, three or four years into a stint as a Baghdad correspondent during the height of the 2000s war, I sat down in the Pentagon with a US official who’d rarely been outside of the city, who proceeded to tell me “what was really happening in Iraq”.

But the current moment in Washington has reached a particularly surreal peak. The men and women on scooters or shared bikes blather about what William Barr said about what Robert Mueller said.

The men and women with the real power, meanwhile, transfer huge amounts of wealth to the rich, while damaging the lives of ordinary Venezuelans, Iranians and Cubans with cruel sanctions meant to appease their political patrons.

Blips of reality occasionally pierce through the Matrix. Despite northwest Washington’s utopian sheen, entire stretches of the city of 800,000 are so ravaged by poverty and blight they lack a single decent grocery market.

Mentally ill and homeless men and women continue to haunt public squares. They sometimes set up camp just outside the storied think tanks where the smartest people devise solutions to the nation’s most perplexing dilemmas.

Yours,

Borzou Daragahi

International correspondent