People-Watching

In my very limited experience in Washington, there are two major factions. These are not, as Halfzie recently quipped, “Ethiopians and everyone else.” Red state/Blue state starts to get a little closer, but this isn’t how I would choose to posit the dichotomy, either. I see only striped shirts and raving lunatics.

An alarming percentage of my interactions here have been with the latter group -- both my employers and my soon-to-be landlords (yes, my strategy worked like a charm) tend toward the loony left. Meanwhile, the striped shirt set is mainly to be encountered at the city’s many sub-par watering holes, sucking down a few Miller Lites and high-fiving each other raw.

As Halfzie intimated, there are certainly other groups in the Washington equation. There are, for example, a surprising number of overzealous hipsters, displaced New Yorkers, and immigrants of every stripe. But when push comes to shove, when Washington finally succumbs to its deep-seated binary impulses, we will be left only with the stripers and the loonies.

In case it isn’t entirely clear what I intend by these divisions, allow me to flesh out each stereotype a bit. Loonies can be identified by their tendency to avoid bathing, their strict diet of organic and vegan food products, and their compulsive habit of hoarding newspapers (generally WaPo) and piling them up in way that creates fire hazards. They have no qualms about demanding to know your politics, which are always to the right of theirs, but cannot hold a decent conversation on political matters without losing focus and needlessly using the phrase “war for oil.”

Stripers, by contrast, can be identified chiefly by the striped shirts for which they are so well known. Attention to detail is key, however; often times a striper will reemerge from his apartment around nine or ten o’clock wearing a slightly different pattern of shirt, signaling to the female of the species that he is out for a night on the town. Stripers who elect to go out in the same clothes they wore to work, however, are sometimes trying to give the impression that they are quite simply too busy to be bothered with changing into eveningwear. To their credit, stripers rarely talk about politics in polite company, and certainly would never demand to know the voting habits of a recent, casual acquaintance.

This is not to say that conversation with a striper is to be recommended. Interaction with members of either group can, in fact, be excruciating, with loonies talking aimlessly and aggressively and stripers talking about nothing in particular.