This trip went so “well” that I bought myself another one next month, but in the meantime it’s home for the holidays. We are wheels-up out of here in a few minutes.
Thank goodness.
UPDATE: Wheels down Asheville. Now just a ride up to the mountains of home.
Or, you know, a cartoon of Trump planning the insurrection. I can't tell the difference anymore.
There’s actually a nice little Christmas night market going on by the National Portrait Gallery. It’s like the German ones except without mulled wine.
This town is ridiculously expensive. The average salary is $83K, which neatly inverts the average of $38K where I live (in neighboring Swain County, it’s $29K). As a result prices are sky high, and since they all live off tax revenue taxes are too.
They can thereby afford nice stuff. And they inherited a lot from earlier, better generations of American leadership. Here’s DuPont Circle’s memorial:
It honors an admiral from the DuPont family who is credited with making the Union blockade of the South effective during the Civil War. That was a real trick, and a large reason for the Union victory. Most people don’t know how badly the Navy was prepared for the war, or that it lost so many sailors— and fully half the Marines— to the Confederacy. He was aided by some significant missteps by the Confederate government, but it was still a real accomplishment.
The DuPonts were important to North Carolina too; there’s a state forest named after them not too far away from me. They did well for themselves and their government, both of which profited from their work. Not so much the people, who are still poor but paying their taxes.
A community of farmers in Mexico takes on a cartel.
The cartel had body armor and assault rifles; the farmers, shotguns and machetes. The government turned its back on them and left them at the cartel’s mercy.
Because they stood together as men of honor, though outgunned they slaughtered their enemies — and fed their families.
