March 24, 2020 "Information Clearing House" -  As you cross the Fourteenth Street Bridge from Arlington into Washington on a sunny spring day, the vista is magnificent, uplifting. Huge blue sky, brisk wind, the broad brown river flashing in the sunlight. As a portal to the capital of a world empire, it is suitable, even convincing. This new Tiber is at the confluence of the Rio Bravo, Orinoco, and Nile, which has its implications, but never mind. The streams of tourists debouching from the bridge into Georgetown think themselves in the new Rome, a beguiling conurbation of power and glory.

Not everywhere. Amid the blank buildings and empty night somewhere near P Street, a cop finds a blonde woman of maybe forty crawling on the sidewalk. In jeans and sweatshirt, she hugs the rest of a bottle of Jim Beam. She has profusely wet her pants. She sees the cop and says no, no in alarm and begins sprinting for a nearby alley–sprinting to the extent that one can on all fours while clutching a bottle. Blind drunk and nursing a cirrhosis aborning.

The cop walks on. Arresting her would clog the jails, the judge would let her out on recog, and the next night she would be with another bottle. This will not go on forever. She has obvious motor problems and does not crawl well.

In many ways unseen by awed tourists, the city resembles that of Juvenal in corruption, mendacity, and vice. There is the undercity, mostly black, in districts never walked by provincials, angry, hopeless, ready to burn, baby, burn. There is the overcity, discreet behind closed doors, of pols and lobbyists, avaricious, with its Chivas and lines of white powder. The tourists see the middle city of bureaucrats and bartenders and, on the Capitoline, maybe a fleeting glimpse of Newt Gingrich or Mitch McConnnell. “Barb, look, it’s…I think…yes, it’s Newt.”

Occasional fissures appear in the armor of the elite. We now learn of the monied and powerful who thronged to Epstein’s island to frolic in pedophilic lubricity, Bill and Hillary among them. My gracious, the little sweetties would do anything…Is this not purest Caligula?

Ah, the island, shhhh! Here were luscious succulents of sixteen, nymphets fit for the amusement of jaded pols. Yes, nymphettes reconstituted as virgins every morning, their chastity a renewable resource, like the liver of Prometheus. Libido candy, fantasy fodder, worthy to satisfy a British prince. Which they did. Was it Andrew or Charles? I cannot keep them straight, but the Lolitas could. That after all was their job. They were good for a romp on the workbench under hidden cameras, thus fortifying relations between Buckingham Palace and Mossad. There is nothing like video of royalty and underage ginch to clinch a desired treaty with Tel Aviv. Especially so if the princeling has a taste for the more exotic disciplines.

But the yearning public will never know since Epstein, a man of six feet, hanged himself from a bedstead two feet from the floor–or was it three? Presumably by standing on his head.