{ "cells": [ { "cell_type": "markdown", "metadata": {}, "source": [ "(veiled-resentment)=\n", "# Veiled Resentment\n", "\n", "✋ **The Right Hand of the Republic: DMV, Desire, and the Disavowed**\n", "\n", "In every mythology worth its salt, the body becomes a map. The foot walks pilgrimage. The eye beholds God. The tongue speaks nations into being. And the hand—oh the hand—grips, points, wields, resists. It blesses and banishes. In the case of the Washington metropolitan region—what some call the **DMV**—the hand becomes not just metaphor, but *literal compass*. Its fingers trace highways. Its palm centers identity. And its refusal to name, or be named, tells a deeper story than any census or boundary map ever could.\n", "\n", "Let us begin where all gestures begin: the **palm**. The base. The ground of memory. This is **Centreville**, or perhaps more broadly, **Fairfax County**—the muscle from which all fingers spring. It is neither glamorous nor forgotten. It is the infrastructural subconscious of the region: quietly powerful, ambivalent in its loyalties, and desperately well-located. From here, highways branch like tendons: VA-28, US-29, VA-50, I-66. A commuter can choose ambition, escape, tradition, or simply survival. The palm does not point. It receives. It supports. It remembers.\n", "\n", "Now, stretch the hand and look at the **index finger**. It’s the highway **US-50**, darting west through **Chantilly**, **South Riding**, **Aldie**, and ultimately into the historic, wine-drenched hamlets of **Middleburg**. This finger is a gesture—not just of direction, but of *accusation*. It points toward an older Virginia, a genteel Virginia, where the stone walls whisper about Federalist ancestors and the grass seems to bow in respect to bloodlines. The drivers here don’t necessarily say \"DMV.\" They say \"horse country.\" They say \"hunt club.\" Their children attend academies where the American flag is never questioned, only saluted with exquisite posture. And yet, these same fingers text with Beltway friends, stream D.C. radio, and shop at Wegmans. They are in it, but not of it. Their silence is seductive.\n", "\n", "\n", "\n", "```{raw} html\n", "\n", "\n", "
These were the gun, the bible, and the \"anthropologist\"
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