Slutty Women of Washington...Put Down Your Pens!

So even though I am now far away from 14th Street and all that DC offers, my sensibilities still managed to be assaulted at a distance. And by preface, it goes without saying that DC is still a man's town - we've all been in that meeting in the Pentagon where a general is staring you down like "what could YOU possibly tell me, chickie?" So I'm all in favor of women asserting themselves, using their wiles to outwit and manuver around the white-haired creaky creepys that run the town.

However.

Washingtonienne was bad enough, but we've all been interns and know that skeeviness comes with the territory, and that Jessica what's-her-name actually did us a favor by exposing the system in which so called powerful men with tremendous egos and family values will fork over dollars to get spanked by some pissant intern. Hell, just ask Julia Allison - if Washingtonienne had been just a tad more circumspect in her blogging, she'd probably be a columnist or Chief of Staff by now. However, despite exposing the men as horny scumbags, she also cast a pall on the hard working, serious women still stuck in crappy jobs on the Hill.

Then someone sent me a link to the Pentagon Diva. If you haven't just eaten, PD is someone who clearly has hooks into the upper echelons of the Pentagon, blogging about Cohen's bow-tying prowess as an indicator of his S&M capabilities or which way David Kilcullen is hung. She was recently exposed as Mongomery McFate, which anyone who has spent more than 15 minutes in the parking lot of the Pentagon knows better as the anthro-gal who's major crime thus far has been to sell a grasping-at-straws US Army the concept that "culture is important". As in, you should probably know the hand gestures an Iraqi is making as you shoot him. While I could go on and on about La McFate and what an utter phony she is (I had the pleasure of being forced to a dinner party in her company some years back, during which my first comment was "if her husband was ever legitimately Special Forces, I'll eat my stilettos" and my brother's - a finance geek and uninitatied into the strange tribes of Washington - second comment was "don't ever make me hang out with tools like that again" - but that's another story), the real crime is again, some girly-come-lately to the Washington game screwing it up for the rest of us who were doggedly rising through the ranks by being smarter, tougher, and twice the men that the men were.

By all accounts, McFate was (undeservedly) embraced by the Pentagon "elite", so to speak, given contracts and latitude to peddle her enormous mound of steaming poo in the form of "human terrain", and this is what she has to show for it - not parlaying it into a position where she could affect change, not breaking through the toughest glass ceiling of the E-Ring, not changing one single man's perception of women in this industry, but rather reinforcing it tenfold with her idiotic and calculated-to-shock blog. All of which reads as far too desperate to try to shock and get a gasp! than anything that could be remotely construed as sexual or titillating.

Now of course La McFate would say she never asked to be a role model and well, gosh, she's counterculture, so what did we expect? Bullshit, I say. It's indicative of how little she understands the culture in which she was mucking about to not know the table at which she'd been given a seat, and how much crap women have put up with to sit in the chairs that line the room around that table. Actually, even if she had the ability to see that (being an anthropologist, I highly doubt it) I'm sure she didn't care. Well, the blog's taken down now and I'm sure her contract will not be renewed any time soon, and we can all go back to studying culture rather than "human terrain", and she'll be yet another annoying footnote to this war.

However, I suppose the real issue here though is the fallability of men (and women) for thinking that this snake-oil saleswoman actually was peddling something of value in the first place. You created her, Elliott Cohen et al, by giving this two-bit "human terrain specialist" a platform instead of leaning on the thousands of scholars and practicioners in the intelligence and defense communities to help you fight this war. So strap on your leather and get what's coming to you, because you deserve to be fed Montgomery McFate's steaming special.

RANT + response = funny!

I'll explain in a moment. For those of you who haunt the 14th Street area, you are aware that it epitomizes the term "progress" in that 1950s, can-do, World's Fair kind of way. Construction everywhere, new restaurants replacing burned out buildings, lots of different people on the street, and so on and so on.

However. I am all for progress...on someone else's street that I can walk past and marvel and then still find a parking spot on my way home. Since I never got around to blogging about it, I'll fill both of you in here - about a month or so ago, I was speeding like a banshee on the Beltway (because the opporunity to do so is so rare, you must embrace the moment when it arrives) and my oil pump blew, killed my engine, and almost killed me. The car wasn't completely paid off though, and the costs of paying it off, plus a new car, plus all the tickets and dings and additional costs one assumes when driving in the city made my stomach churn, so I have been attempting to live car-free. Aside from my work commute to Virginia, I'm pretty much good to go.

But I've been borrowing the car of a friend who is on travel 1-2 times per week if I have to run and errand or my carpool partner is not going to work, parking it on my street (only parking available) and cursing the kabuki dance of driving around the block 8 times to find a spot, particularly if all the goths are in from Maryland for a Black Cat show. Now, back to yesterday - they are building a new mega-restaurant on the corner of 14th and T (the proprietors, in a vain effort to convince T St residents that this was not the Worst Thing That Could Happen For Parking and Noise and General Well Being on T Street, pathetically tried to call it "the next Loriol Plaza" - like this wouldn't make everyone run to their real estate agent. Oh goody, crap Mexican food in a warehouse with no soundproofing! No reservations! Watered down frozen pink crap-in-a-glass! Sign me up!)

And here's the rub - first off, the New And Improved Crap Mexican Place construction has taken up a good portion of the street - say, three car's worth of parking, worth its weight in gold - with a giant dumpster enclosed by a fence. There's still room though for one midsize car behind the dumpster, however they have put awfully official-looking cones so no one will park there. I know this because every time I swung round to T St in the Kabuki Parking Dance I thought, gosh, I wish those official-looking cones weren't there, cause this car would fit really well into that spac--

Wait a minute.

Those are just cones. They've been put there by people with no authority to tell me I can't park there. They're building a restaurant, not fixing the streets or fighting crime or aliens or cleaning up a murder or, you know, something cone-worthy.

So, like any red-blooded American, I got out of my car, moved the cones to the sidewalk, and parked the car. And again. And again. And each time I marveled at how this is the perfect way to reserve street parking - just add official-looking cones!

Most mornings of the five times I have done this I saw one or two of the workers as I got into my car, slid out of the spot, put the cones back, and drove away. No one seemed to notice, and once, one guy who was carrying something around my car to put in the dumpster retorted when I apologized for blocking his path, "you so fine, you can park anywhere you want". So, problem solved - and with what sounded like a ringing endorsement!

Except yesterday I got to my car and someone, I wonder who, had tied police barrier tape all over the car. Obviously it was not the police, because it only said "caution" on it, and last time I checked, police usually issue tickets, not ticker tape. And not tied to your windshield wipers.

Now ordinarily I would applaud this type of message - far more effective that a congenial "hey, do ya mind, toots?" But on this morning I was in no mood, so when the three construction guys were standing there staring as I untied the tape, I turned and snarled at them. Literally. And they looked really uncomfortable -- I don't think because a girl in a black dress and red scarf and three inch spike heels was snarling at them, which I grant you is odd, but because they didn't think they'd have to sit there and awkwardly watch the butt of their prank untie the fruits of their morning labors, especially because they probably thought it was some jackass guy they could laugh at and not some pathetic (sniffle) female in tottering heels. One guy came over and apologized, saying "here, let me help you, I don't know who did this but..." and I cut him off and said "I'm fine, thankyouvery much" and got in my car. Okay, first I stuck out a stiletto and kicked over one of the cones as I got into the car. Now I wish I'd just thrown my hands up and laughed and been all "ok, you got me! point taken", because their move was actually the perfect response to my insolence, which was the perfect response to their insolence in placing those cones there in the first place.

Except now they have busted a watermain on T Street and the whole street is flooded and WASA is out there now at 9PM trying to fix it and I have no water. Bastards.

RANT - A phenomenon I have recently noticed

...although I'm loath to put it out there as "hey, have you seen...?" because it usually turns out I have had my head jammed up my rear and haven't noticed something the rest of you have been laughing about for ages. So I'm slow and self-absorbed to boot. You're the idiot reading about it.

But I digress, and let me just apologize in advance because boy am I prickly tonight. I've noticed this strange phenomenon recently and I swear I never saw growing up or even in the past few years. So obviously I live in the big city, and one of its chief charms is the constant police and ambulance activity - it's like urban church bells. You're having dinner outside at St. Ex, or just walking down the street, and--hey, where's that siren coming from? Oh, it's over there, yup, there it goes - probably heading towards Howard or GW. No more than 30 seconds later, it is gone from our sights and our ears, continuing on its all-too-decent mission of serving, protecting, and saving lives. Everyone goes back to their entrees or their stroll down 14th, no harm no foul, right? Right??

Well, that's what's weird. Let's say for the sake of argument I've seen about 5 ambulances in the past 3 weeks - by no means out of the ordinary. What the hell is up with people sticking their fingers in their ears as though the ambulance is trying to dock directly in their external auditory meatus (see photo)?? When did we become a city of sissies who can't stand seconds - not minutes, seconds - of slightly-louder-than-average-city-din? I've started counting; I was just leaving Creme not 20 minutes ago and wouldn't you know, an ambulance rolls by, EMTs probably doing chest compressions on some poor old woman heading to Howard to be brought back to life, or maybe some cute little kid who needs a new liver. And I counted no less than five bratty annoying weenies I wanted to smack sticking their fingers in their ears and looking around like they just realized they stepped on a rat and it exploded in three pieces, like, oh my god the assault on my sensitive eardrums! It's an ambulance, people - do me a favor and grow a pair. And at that moment of looking around at the yuppie, toothless losers who have over-evolved to the point where they couldn't survive the common cold if they were in the medicine aisle at Rite Aid, I turned inward to my own personal Jesus and prayed and prayed that the one time one of these beings-bearing-no-resemblance-to-their-ape-ancestors-with-no-ability-to-cope-against-the-most-mundane-of-challenges needs an ambulance to get to Georgetown so they can get a brain or a pair transplant, the dedicated EMT looks out the window at all the other gutless wonders with fingers applied to ears and goes "wow, this siren appears to be hurting those sensitive souls out there! I'd better turn it off and just go with the traffic." And you get stuck behind a metro bus with 8 bikers needing to load their bikes on the front of the bus so they can get on. And they give the brain meant for you to a drunk homeless guy.