If you happened to be strolling along Pennsylvania Avenue the other day, you might have noticed a man walking his pug not far from the White House. The man was tall and well dressed, and on his back he wore a small paper sign. D.C. RESIDENT, the sign read, POLITICAL ASYLUM NOW! Who could blame the fellow his outrage? Washington, D.C.—the 67-square-mile physical city that cowers behind official Washington's Potemkin village of limestone, boulevards, and highballs at Sally and Ben's—is a mess.

It's as if the capital's moral corruption is starting to manifest itself physically.

As D.C. resident Christopher Hitchens writes in his essay on page 106, "District of Contempt," at a time when tuberculosis cases are declining in the rest of the country, the most recent federal figures indicate that TB incidence in Washington, D.C., increased by more than a third—the rate is now 50 percent higher than that of any state. The drinking water is at times a certifiable health hazard. The morgue has been overrun with cockroaches, and one of the post offices with rats. Almost half the city's police motorcycles and as many as a third of its fire trucks have gone out of service at one time or another. Even the big-ladder truck earmarked for fires at the White House has been briefly out of operation.

As for political Washington, underneath the mascara of blue blazers, backslapping bonhomie, and watercooler chat about the president, it is a city being strangled by legalized corruption in the form of campaign finance. As contributing editor Carl Bernstein notes in this issue, it is the band of $500-an-hour superlobbyists led by Tommy Boggs, whom he profiles this month ("King of the Hill," page 174), that control the flow of funds and the corollary influence. The average senator now adds at least $15,000 a week to his war chest, and considerably more during a campaign. Much of this money comes from corporations via lobbyists like Boggs and Vernon Jordan. When banty Jack Valenti dropped to No. 2 on The National Journal's list of the highest-paid trade-association lobbyists, he didn't sigh with relief—he took issue with the paper's methodology.

Washington is a lot like Atlantic City in a way—well, in a lot of ways, actually. Billions of outside dollars flow into Washington every year, but very little of that money sticks to the part of the city not directly affiliated with the core business. Atlantic City, beyond the casinos' shadows, is a slum. And the real Washington, behind the ceremonial capital, is becoming one, too. Hitchens points out that foreign diplomats mockingly declare Washington to be a hardship post, on a par with the capitals of Egypt and Zaire.