City of Magnificent Intentions

For class last Thursday, I read "City of Magnificent Intentions", which was published in High Low Washington anonymously in 1932. I thought it said a lot about the time period simply by being published anonymously. If someone tried to publish anonymously now, they would either be lampooned or ignored.

Anyway, once I got past my personal amusement at the story's anonymous publishing, I was surprised to see that the author was really quite accurate in his depiction of Washington and that much of it still rings true today. I really liked the title, which was taken from Charles Dickens' description of Washington. Graham said in her introduction that she saw nothing wrong with having good intentions, let alone magnificent intentions, but I thought the description could be taken in another way. Instead of thinking of how good it is that we work hard to achieve goals good for the people, as Graham seemed to suggest, I thought it could also be looked at as a city of magnificent intentions - which have stayed as intentions instead of being turned into actions. Both, I feel, would be accurate descriptions of politics and Washington today.

The Congressman who turns away a former constituent so as not to waste his time surely still happens, and it is absolutely still the nature of politicians to be friendly when it suits them and ignore people when they can get away with it.

Mostly, I was struck with the description of the ones who "[arrive] full of enthusiasm at the nation's capital, sit down at the heart of men and things and type and type and type till thirty years of typing brings them a pension" (19) because that's us. We're the next group of eager young future Washingtonians, who have yet to become jaded bureaucrats but still have hope. Personally, I'd rather stay out of Washington politics and still retain the possibility of optimism than have it slowly sucked out day by day in a bureaucratic office job, even if that job was one of the small parts contributing to the country's functioning.