Monetizing Washington

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2013/12/27/496c19d0-6c05-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html?wpisrc=emailtoafriend


Steven Pearlstein has written a piece in the Washington Post which has great resonance for the Phantom. The link is above. Hopefully, it will work. If it doesn't--it's the Washington Post , 12/28/13, "The Insider's Game."

It is simply a depiction of how living in the Washington, DC metro area in the 1950's and 1960's was a much different experience: Washington was still a very Southern town and while it was a very broadly comfortable place to live, there were few mansions and pervasive efforts were made to discourage conspicuous consumption. 

The prevailing notion was: "We are here to serve. We do not want to appear to be getting rich by doing the nation's work. Big houses, expensive cars would suggest corruption. Nobody should be getting rich doing government work."

Pearlstein begins his story with an anecdote about starting work at the Post and being confronted by an editor who had seen notice of Pearlstein's purchase of his home for what struck the editor as an unseemly amount of money.  That story struck the Phantom as a bit over the top, but only because the Phantom, by the time he left Washington, was imbued with the notion that houses in Washington were bought and sold for astonishing amounts. 

But, the major change in the ethos, which Pearlstein documents so well, is the shift from people who were interested in the job, not the money. They were just five or ten years out of the army, and in the army you didn't ask how much an assignment paid, you took a job because it was an important job, a challenging responsibility, but you didn't ask, didn't care, how much it paid. 

Congressmen, doctors, airplane pilots, judges, heads of agencies like the SEC, federal workers, teachers all lived in the same modest development. The houses had been built in the mid 1950's, and they had enough room, but were by no means McMansions, and most importantly, they were close in to downtown, so you could get to the government buildings where you worked by car, or by bus, with great dispatch.

When kids talked about parents, they never said, "Oh, her father made a fortune in real estate." They might say, "Oh, her father is a Congressman."

Pearlstein has written what in college would have been called an "ethnograph," outlining the values by which that town once operated and how those values changed and why.

It's worth reading.