The Powerless Power Crowd

This liberal columnist in the Washington Post finally wrote something worth reading. The topic is the recent "el derecho" storm that brought the D.C. area to its knees. Many folks are still without power. What's funny is that many of the elite ruling class are sweating it out. From the article:

Suddenly, the nation’s legislators, regulators, litigators and officiators are left helpless, sweating in their underpants, surrounded by their rotting food and blank-screened BlackBerrys.

“Someone must be held accountable for this!” they say.

But how can you drag a historic thunderstorm before a congressional subcommittee? Would it be possible to handcuff 70 mph winds? Indict a jet stream hovering above a hot air mass?

There is no Washington-style redress for the rare and devastating thunderstorm that whomped the region Friday night and has left a good chunk of its ruling class without electricity.

[...]

Meanwhile, the sweaty multitudes couldn’t even tweet their misery. Their iPads and iPhones were dead.

Although plenty of ordinary people were affected by the power outages, the damage was most apparent when I drove through the toniest parts of Northwest Washington late Sunday, past darkened baroque-style embassies, seven-bedroom colonials and humongous Cape Cods with matching air-conditioned dog houses.

Just before midnight, I saw packs of grown-ups — not teens — hanging out at a Connecticut Avenue 7-Eleven. Men in the kind of clothes they’d usually save for St. Barth’s — linen shorts, Tommy Bahama shirts — were taking way too long to select Slurpee flavors, every cell of their pale, sweaty, hot skin sucking off that cold AC as long as possible.

[...]

In fact, it’s almost as though there was some underclass justice being played out when you saw the way power outages and home prices were strangely intertwined. The mighty trees that shade those beautiful homes so well were devastating in the storms. While the chain-link-and-asphalt territory of the poor was less affected.

“We don’t lose power in da hood,” one of my friends in a less wealthy neighborhood bragged online.

And sure enough, our Capitol Hill rowhouse — not the “hood,” but definitely not the place of circular driveways and rolling lawns — didn’t lose power.

The same is true in many parts of the D.C. suburbs too. We got power back, and Mclean, home of the wealthiest in Northern Virginia, was dark and without a single grocery store open.