Why a “floating island?”  The secret is in the 1985 novel by Garrett Epps, The Floating Island: A Tale of Washington, which begins with a quote from Swift:

 

His Majesty ordered that the island should stop over certain towns and villages, from whence he might receive the petitions of his subjects. And to this purpose several pack-threads were let down with small weights at the bottom. On these pack threads the people strung their petitions, which mounted up directly like the scraps of paper fastened by school boys at the end of the string that holds their kite. 

                                    “A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Clubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan”

 

Epps’s amusing yarn is about the Nation’s Capitol, a locus of my professional life for 36 years and, regrettably, the target of derision even by the leaders who work here in recent years.

 

Washington is a market. What is traded is reputation. This market clears daily; it has its booms, its panics, its frauds, its insider trading, its mighty rallies, and its overnight collapses; sometimes trading is slow, sometimes furious. All energy that might be spent in governing the country is absorbed in the frenzy of the pit.

 

A tale of Washington, then, for all that it should contain dancing girls and passionate embraces, vows spoken in darkness and broken by day, explosions and electric bells, ghastly miasmas of dry ice, bold heroes swinging from ropes, and a live chicken, will be at its core a story not of power, destiny, or will but of reputation. Some will be made and others lost. 

 

Is the floating island more exciting than the workaday world, a labyrinthe more mysterious than other cities, and its denizens more obsessed with power and position than the liliputians that.petition them?  Those who live outside the political whirl and instead work in Washington’s countless agencies, departments, firms, and NGOs often resonate to the local political vibe. But the public interest is more often their driver.  Epp’s 1985 is a long time ago.  The machinations have been suplanted by belligerence and ideological  red lines.  The fact that some candidates for President are more admired  because the have no experience in managing organizations, no success in elective office, or no relevant technical capabilties.  It is  unprecedented.   It begs the question as to whether this trend is fundamentally democratic and further removed from the needs and expectations of average Americans.  Such are the challenges that may face the keepers of the public interest a year from now. Let the games begin.

 

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