Response to Herb Blocks "The View from E Street"

I read “The View from E Street,” an excerpt from Herb Block’s A Cartoonist’s Life. Block was the editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post for decades. This article, written in 1998, talks about the then and now realities of Washington, D.C. Block’s writing highlights some of the idiosyncrasies of living in Washington that simply couldn’t happen anywhere else. Some of the things Block remembers, such as the policies of Constitution Hall and the National Theater regarding African Americans, have long since changed. Others, such as Washington’s battle against “taxation without representation”, remain ongoing.
The best parts of the excerpt from Block’s book are the details of life in Washington as only an insider could know it. On the surface, then and now, it is a solidly governmental city, a city with a purpose and a mission. But underneath its political exterior, it is still a city lived in by hundreds of thousands of people, all of who discover their own Washington based on their own experiences. Block’s encounters at the strange bank beneath the Post building and his opportunities to meet and interact with the very people his paper would lambast the next morning contributed to his Washington. For us, every day we spend in Washington, every new favorite restaurant, every adventure on the bus, every mistake and subsequent discovery, contribute to our own Washington as well.