Welcome to Kushner Island

I was in New York all summer, making a big fuss about DC to all those sophisticated cosmopolitans. They think it’s boring. They assume it’s full of squares and policy nerds and they’re right, but that characterization doesn’t do the capital justice. It’s my job as a Washington ambassador to accurately portray the city to the snobbish coastal elites, even to sex it up a bit (though it really doesn’t need my help in this respect). Regardless, it’s a job I take seriously. The obvious hook is, of course, espionage. Espionage is chock-full of charge and my choice motifs are all borrowed from the weighty catalogs of 007 and Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal – wiretapping, martinis, guns, honeypots.

As a young man, G.K. Chesterton entered a literary contest, the given topic of which was, “What’s wrong with the world?” His entry was exactly two words long: “I am.” I don’t recall whether he won or not. Certainly he wouldn’t do so today, when every educated person appears to believe that he is what’s right with the world, while anyone who disagrees with him is not only wrong, but a bad person as well. There is something grimly comical about the contemporary humorless quest for social and political perfection by people who are not only themselves manifestly imperfect but very often bad in proportion to the intensity of that quest, though almost always without seeming to know it.