This 32-year-old clown who lives in his mother’s townhouse in an expensive part of Washington, DC, bought a Hummer too big to fit in his mother’s garage. He then paid extra to have it jacked up and fitted with super-sized tires. It gets 14mpg and he justifies it by saying he needs it to create the right “image” for the “sports marketing” company he wants to start. He parked the 7-foot-tall penis substitute on the street, and within a week somebody vandalized it, slashing all the tires, breaking all the windows, and keying “FOR THE ENVIRON” [sic] into the paint.

Tough break. That’ll probably put a real dent in his startup bobble-head doll business. Along with the $38,000 he paid for the thing (used), replacing all the tires and windows might even delay his moving out of his mother’s house, not that he appears to be in any hurry. I’m all for the environment, but vandalizing ridiculous cars is probably not the best way to deal with the issues. And if whoever did it gets caught, they should be made to pay restitution fully equal to the cost of a set of windows and tires . . . for a Prius.

All that being said, however, why exactly did the Washington Post give this story more than 20 column inches in today’s paper? A rich white loser in NW DC got his car vandalized? That’s the lead story in the B-section of the paper that broke the Watergate case?!

It’s the complicity in this jerkoff’s insular sense of entitlement that bugs me about this. The article notes that he’s aware of the stupidity and wastefulness of such a machine - he just doesn’t care. But apparently the Post doesn’t care either - and by that I mean not only do they think that his financial inconvenience is more important than his indifference to the environment, but they think that he, individually, is more important than everything they didn’t write about that day.

Washington, for those who don’t know, is divided geographically and economically. The Northwest map quadrant is the affluent section; it houses Georgetown and American Universities, the trendy neighborhoods and popular bars and clubs, the legal and lobbying industry clusters, much of the federal government real estate, the foreign embassies, the exclusive residential neighborhoods like this guy’s mother’s street, and almost all the white people. The Southwest is mostly governmental. The Eastern quadrants are heavily residential/commercial, almost entirely black, and largely a wasteland. Everything you hear about upper-class Washington - the Georgtown political parties, the Embassy Row receptions, the catered fundraisers, the insider salons - that’s Northwest. Everything you hear about ghetto Washington - the local-government bungling, the murders, the drugs, the ravaged school system and dilapidated hospitals - that’s Northeast.

The idea of the Washington Post devoting 20 paragraphs and an anguished photo to the story of a single car vandalism in the NE would be gut-splittingly ludicrous. Murders go unreported there, by the dozens. Every lesser crime, every imaginable urban misery, occurs there in handfuls, or scores, or hundreds of repetitions on a daily basis. The political destruction of local government by Congressional Republicans, and that government’s own ineptitude, are an ongoing, deadly story. Almost none of it makes the hometown paper. Certainly anyone who called the Post City desk and said they lived near the University of the District of Columbia (NE), and not American University (NW), and they’d had their tires slashed and wanted the paper to send over a reporter and photographer to run a sympathetic profile about how they’d been victimized by those mean liberals would be laughed off the line; the reporter could dine off the story of that prole’s presumption for months. But one aggrieved white guy on the border of Chevy Chase is news no matter what happens; the fact that he’s unhappy about anything is reason enough to give him all the attention he wants.

I think this reporter should be required to log at least two dozen human-interest bylines from within walking distance of the Brentwood Metro station before she’s allowed to write about white people again. And as for Hummer-boy, here’s something to entertain himself with while he’s waiting for his new paint job to dry.