Clarissa's Blog

We just discovered a Black Lives Matter street here in DC. Every other house in it has a BLM sign in the front yard.

I’m waiting for N in front of the Russian Consulate. The women who enter the building look like they never met a bottle of peroxide they didn’t like.

I’m absolutely loving Washington, DC, my friends. I probably like it even more than Chicago and Philadelphia, my favorite US cities.

For one, I love the nature in this region. The city is extraordinarily green and the nature is recognizable to me. (There are beautiful landscapes in California, for instance, but l don’t recognize them and that makes them difficult to enjoy).

I don’t even remember the last time I saw as many beautiful old trees. In the St Louis metro area where I live, there are no trees to speak of (unless you go to the Gardens or hiking trails). Shade is non-existent. Everywhere is the relentless, unmitigated sun. I haven’t been able to go for a walk during the day since April because of the sun and the heat. Does that sound normal to you?

The architecture in DC is beautiful. Private houses and apartment buildings look very attractive and very much unlike the ugly houses back in Connecticut. There are crowds of bikers and great bike trails downtown. I obviously don’t ride bikes but I like cities that accommodate bikers.

The downtown area is vibrant and exciting, unlike the perennially dead St Louis downtown. One thing I hate here in DC, though, is seeing the enormous number of indigent black people begging for money in the streets. Not even in St Louis is there anything like this. The last time I saw this kind of thing was back in New Haven, CT. And it just slaughters me.

The conclusion is that if a job opens up in my field and in my area somewhere around here, I will be applying in a flash.

The Wall Street Journal features a photo of an Israeli border guard searching a Palestinian. The two men look so much alike that, save for the clothes, they could be twins.

The moment I left town, the intolerable endless summer ended and a frost advisory was issued.

Of course, the moment I come back, the summer will return, and I will be greeted by obnoxious heat and hateful sun.

We arrived in DC when it was too late to do anything but eat and try to locate the White House. After jumping on 15 different buildings with excited yelps of, “Is this it?” and making it abundantly clear that we were total country bumpkins, we finally found it.

The White House turned out to be a lot smaller than we’d imagined from seeing it on TV. We didn’t get a chance to take a good, long look, though, because one of the people taking photos of the building had a brilliant idea to leave a weirdly shaped bag lying unattended on the pavement.

“I hope it’s not a bomb!” I told N.

A security guard noticed the bag, too, and started getting nervous.

“Whose bag is this?” he started asking the visitors.

The bag’s owner (who later turned out to be a very rude and vulgar young person) stood there gawking and failing to claim the bag.

The security guards really freaked at that point and began to clear the area. The bag’s owner finally claimed it, looking very put upon and trying to get as obnoxious as possible. After that, the guards obviously didn’t let anybody approach.

The Atlantic has released an ebook titled Race and the American Idea: 155 Years of Writings from The Atlantic. It contains 750 pages full of crucial texts on race in the US. I’m super excited about this book.

I had no idea that this journal had been founded by abolitionists.

President Obama has announced that the US troops are not leaving Afghanistan. And that’s the right thing to do. You can’t mess things up, and then run away at the first sign of trouble, leaving your allies to die because you’ve grown bored with them.

As we discussed earlier today, the US military is a lot less good at fighting* than it is at making important symbolic gestures with its presence or absence. The symbolism of leaving Afghanistan right now would be worse than the symbolism of staying. 

* Not being good at warfare is actually a good sign. It means that life in the country is good and the value of human existence is high. The best fighters are those who prefer death to going back home to their horrible lives or those who still are just beginning to construct their nation-state.

Cultural conditioning, heavy lifting, horrible oppression, women’s work, blah blah, and some more blah.

The truth, however, is that everybody who is able and willing to write a book and publish an article is doing just that. And everybody else goes from one silly excuse of a committee or a suffering student to another, moaning about how much they would be publishing if the horrible oppression didn’t prevent them from doing so.

I hate the weepy, whiny, woman-hating posts like the linked one with a passion of a million suns.

“Remade under Putin, Russia’s Military Forces Show Might not Seen in the Post-Soviet Era” tells us a headline in the New York Times.

This is too funny given that Ukrainians whooped this military’s might all the way to the village of Maryinka, and that’s in the absence of an actual army of its own.

It’s both hilarious and sad that Americans can get so easily scared of an untrained, unmotivated bunch of underfed soldiers armed with weaponry that has a tendency to fall apart in many spectacular ways right in the midst of not only combat situations but of actual military parades witnessed by Putin.

Not that Americans were ever known for having a military that ever won any conflict over any serious contender (the decrepit Spanish Empire of 1898 doesn’t really count, and neither do the wars where others do the work for you before you finally show up after every decisive battle has been fought), but this terror of the grievously unsuccessful Russian army is very misplaced.