by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
So here’s what I don’t get, he’s [Trump] been sitting on the Epstein Files this whole time and every time someone brings it up there’s suddenly some kind of brand new emergency: Putin gets to keep part of Ukraine, job numbers are “fake,” let’s investigate Letitia James, investigate Jack Smith. It’s like, Dude, just release the files. If your name’s not in there, you’d think you’d want everybody to see them, right? But instead, it’s constant shiny distractions, while the one thing that matters just stays locked up. Look, man, if you still think he’s playing 4D chess, I hate to break it to you, but the guy’s barely playing checkers and he’s eating the pieces. I mean, c’mon, how much horseshit before you realize your Alpha Male is just an 80-year-old dude with early dementia spray-tanning his face at 3 AM while rage tweeting about Rosie.
– Joe Rogan
+ As a naive country kid from the glacier-smoothed farmlands of central Indiana, I arrived in DC in 1977, lived in the District through 1982 and commuted back there to work from Baltimore for another year.
DC was a much rougher place and poorer, though more vibrant, city in the 70s and 80s than it is now that it’s been almost completely gentrified. I didn’t have a car, so I rode the Metro, took the bus, or walked everywhere. I went all over town at all hours, from Tenley Circle to Adams Morgan to Anacostia, often late at night going to clubs to hear bands, going to and from the libraries at Georgetown or Catholic because AU’s was so shitty, working at Blues Alley and a movie theater deep down Connecticut Avenue, and later giving talks and attending organizing meetings for the Freeze Campaign. I never felt threatened, frightened or compelled to look over my shoulder. Never got “mugged,” saw anyone get “mugged” or knew anyone who’d been “mugged”–not in DC. Back home in Indy, yes. In Manhattan, sure. Not in the District. I’m not saying there wasn’t violent crime in DC. Of course, there was. There were hundreds of thousands of people, squeezed together, in a relatively small area, where extremes of wealth and poverty collided every day. There was bound to be friction. Maybe there should have been more of it, given the precarious circumstances many DC residents were compelled to live in. I’m saying I was never haunted by the prospect of being stuck-up, robbed, shot or stabbed. I went wherever I wanted to go, freely.
In all of those hundreds of trips downtown, I had two “violent” encounters. As a freshman at AU, I was aggressively propositioned in the bathroom of the Rayburn Building by a staffer for a Georgia congressman, who then stalked me back on campus and made harassing and obscene calls to the dorm phone at Hughes Hall for a couple of weeks. The second incident occurred six years later, when I was grabbed from behind, thrown to the sidewalk and kicked repeatedly by two Caucasian men in trench coats after giving a talk at GW against the Reagan arms buildup. They didn’t take my wallet, but they did warn me to “keep my fucking mouth shut.”
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