In any case, it’s good to refortify in here before venturing forth for another day of the “DC RoE.” For, however hospitable Denver has been thus far (and so far LoDo seems like a great place — I wasn’t expecting such a walking-friendly downtown), it’s clear the most aggravating tendencies of District life have thoroughly infected this entire municipal area for the week. Like I said yesterday, having spent the past several years ensconced in academia (which has its own occasionally exasperating mores to navigate), I’d forgotten how fundamentally irritating the DC ratrace can be. Consider this full-immersion therapy.
Rule #1 of the DC life: Access — and thus the appearance, if not the fact, of exclusivity — is everything. For example: Yesterday evening, a friend of mine from CQ and I looked to catch a drink somewhere nearby. We eventually found one, thank goodness, but not before having to negotiate with doormen, list-bearing aides, and sundry other “boundary mavens” in front of many, many bars, restaurants, and hotel lobbies. Everything was cordoned off, invites and VIPS only, unworthies please move along. Now, I understand the lobbyists gotta do their thing — If only this sort of thing was restricted to private parties. Alas, DC life, I have since been reminded, is basically one big rope-line. Every doorway involves a plethora of multi-colored passes, even those that lead nowhere particularly important. Every event here, even ungodly boring ones they can barely fill, have byzantine rules for crossing the threshold, and strange, unspoken hierarchies which determine who gets in and in what order. Get three people together in the District and one of ’em will start working on setting up the cordon. Frankly, it all gets a bit exhausting. (I’d like to say the special dKos couch I was joking about yesterday is a parody of this impulse, but it’s really just another sad manifestation of it.)
Which brings me to Rule #2 of Washington: You’re only as interesting as your status in The Hive. The District being a company town, the main thrust of virtually every social encounter in DC is “Hi-Hello-Who-do-you-work-for?” (I’ve heard LA operates much the same way, which makes sense, given that politics is basically showbiz for short and/or ugly people.) I can’t tell you the number of times during my Washington days when people I’d recently met would “switch on” once they ascertained I had a moderately important-sounding job. (It wasn’t really, of course, but Carville occupied his own unique tangent in Clinton-era Washington, so the rabid political climbers always assumed I had more pull than I ever in fact did.)
As such, people tend to accord you respect only in direct relation to your perceived clout, and if you don’t have any, you’re just not worth talking to. In DC, the most remorseless practitioners of the political arts — and thus often the most successful — will be endlessly scanning the room around you during your conversation, looking to see if there’s someone more important they should be talking to at that moment. It’s a peculiarly virulent form of douchebaggery that you really can’t escape if you venture into the politics business, and it, sad to say, has been very much in evidence here in Denver.
Like I said, I found this endless reducing of people to their places of employ tremendously irritating even when I occupied a relatively privileged position in “The Game.” Now that I’ve been out of the scene for awhile — having cashed in my chits, so to speak, to pursue the PhD during the Dubya years — and my hive status is lower than even drone, it’s that much worse. Now, here in the blogger tent, everyone — give or take a few e-celebrities, of course — seems very friendly, down-to-earth folk, and journalists, I’ve found, rarely traffick as baldly in this sort of behavior as the politicos (which is a lot of the reason I tended to hang with reporters and non-profit types while in DC.) But, get around the actual honest-to-goodness political people, who are obviously everywhere right now, and hoo boy. After an hour or two of being constantly Sized Up and Found Wanting by weaselly-looking guys in suits, it’s enough to send you screaming into the streets.
Ok, had to get that off my chest. I am having a great time here, honest! Still, it was a bit of a shock on my first day to be resubmerged so quickly and so thoroughly into the DC-politico culture. Oh yeah, it’s like that.
(I’d like to say the special dKos couch I was joking about yesterday is a parody of this impulse, but it’s really just another sad manifestation of it.)
This goes a long ways towards explaining my puzzlement at how the political contingent has always behaved at SXSW. SXSW is generally a very egalitarian event, but when the political track started after the Dean campaign, the people involved didn’t make any effort to either make themselves accessible or to learn from the Zeldmans and Shirkys and Lessigs on the tech track, who definitely do make every effort to make themselves accessible, to the point of being happy to talk to a relative nonentity like myself.
The politicos stuck to their own panel-track, and their own private parties after hours(at least those who didn’t parachute in for their talk and leave right afterwards), and I doubt they either learned much or accomplished much in the way of outreach, Frankly, I wondered why the hell they bothered to be there at all if that was how they were going to approach it. It was a huge missed opportunity on both sides, but that was mostly the fault of the political side. I was one of the few on the tech track who was interested enough in the political side to put up with that crap, and about all I got out of it for my efforts was figuring out very early on that Markos and Jerome Armstrong were bigtime assholes who were already too big for their britches even then. They’ve definitely done some good, but they aren’t exactly a clean break from the DC way of doing things. Few are, of course. I’m willing to bet there is a large amount of self-selective pressure when it comes to the kind of people who succeed in that world, even on the margins.