OUTSIDE THE BELTWAY

By Michael Kinsley

LAST WEEK I MOVED FROM WASHINGTON, D.C., TO Washington State, and now I have this to say: We folks out here in the real America are sick and tired of you inside-the-Beltway types pushing us around. My message to people in the so-called nation's capital is, Get off our backs! Although I lived and worked for two decades in the District of Columbia and its immediate environs, it took only a few moments of residency elsewhere to make me realize that our capital city is a blight and a leech on the rest of the country. The politicians there--as well as the bureaucrats, the lobbyists and, of course, the media--live in a smug and isolated cocoon of privilege and perks, oblivious to the needs and common-sense wisdom of those of us who do the real work of this great nation: meeting payrolls, raising families, giving to charity and shooting the occasional spotted owl--all activities that were completely unknown to me and my neighbors back in Chevy Chase, Maryland. True, I haven't actually seen a spotted owl yet, even though I've already been living in the Pacific Northwest for more than 72 hours. They clearly don't exist. Which just goes to show how ridiculous it is for Beltway busybodies to interfere in matters they obviously know nothing about.

By the mere act of registering for a driver's license in a new state--a real state, I might note--I feel a justified sense of moral superiority surging through my veins. Just by packing up and moving across the country I have become a better person, a clearer-eyed political visionary, a more patriotic American. And, of course, less smug. What's more, I have been transformed from victimizer to victim. I'm newly empowered to whine and complain about high taxes (though now my taxes are, in fact, lower) and about wasteful government spending of my hard-earned dollars (though, in fact, what with federally subsidized public works, utilities and national parks, I'm getting far more for my federal tax dollars living in the West than I did back East). Yes, as an outside-the-Beltway American, I'm a certified martyr now. It feels swell.

And another thing. We people of the great American West are just a little fed up with you Eastern intellectual snobs putting on airs and thinking that you're smarter than us. For too long, I now realize, this country has allowed the pointy-heads of places like New York City and Boston to dominate and define the cultural and intellectual life of our country. Here in the Seattle area, we have many excellent bookstores. We have a nationally recognized repertory theater company. We have an art museum designed by the noted architect Robert Venturi. I am sure it is stuffed with many excellent objets d'art too, although I haven't actually had the time to visit it just yet.

Also, as the avant-garde cognoscenti are well aware, Seattle in recent years has been in the forefront of many important cultural trends only later taken up by the staid and complacent Brahmins of the Eastern seaboard. Slackers and grunge, to name but two. Whatever they are, exactly.

Furthermore, now that I have put down roots in the Pacific Northwest, I have been forced to rethink some of my long-held beliefs about population flows. It is evident to those of us who have grown to love and cherish this region that it is in danger of becoming much too crowded. Only a few days ago, as a visitor from the East, I would have described the vista I gaze at while writing this as a green landscape pleasantly dappled with humanity. Now that I live here, the same view stands revealed to me as a nightmare vision of teeming masses. Sad to say, it is not possible for everyone who would like to live in this glorious region to do so without destroying the very charms that draw people here to begin with. It may seem unfair, but some of us simply got here first. There just isn't room for late arrivals. In particular, we don't want any more of those awful Californians, who have been pouring into our state by the tens of thousands, fleeing all that oppressive sunshine. To them we say, Go back to your smog and inferior wines. We don't want you here.

Brazen self-reinvention is one of the great themes of American literature. Of course, when James Gatz turned himself into the fabulous Jay Gatsby, he was following the more traditional pattern of the outsider remaking himself as a metropolitan sophisticate. But in these days of rampant reverse snobbery, when "outsiderness" is prized and "insiderness" is shunned, there is no reason the same techniques cannot work the other way around. The fabulous fictional character "Lamar Alexander," for example--Republican presidential candidate, outsider, man of the people, scourge of Washington and everything in it--has been created out of Lamar Alexander, the former establishmentarian and Cabinet official, using little more than a smile and a red flannel shirt. You too can be a New You. All it takes is a change of costume, some prepackaged instant microwavable prejudices and a fresh zip code. Stir in a dollop of self-righteousness, bake for a day or less, and serve promptly.