Kyle A. Lohmeier
If the world seemed a bit less jaded and cynical last week it may have been because I’d gone on a bit of a sabbatical; my wife and I took a short vacation to Washington D.C. It was her first time going to the capital, and my first time back since I was a child in the mid-1980s. Back then, the street vendors hawked T-shirts proclaiming Oliver North an American hero; today it’s the typical tourist fare as well as Trump and Hillary shirts – no mention of Johnson and Weld.
The long drive over and through the mountains to reach D.C. from Ohio gave me plenty of time to consider the subtle irony of my choice in vacation destination, given my contention that government is mostly pointless. Here I was driving to the belly of the beast, for some sight-seeing. I remembered the nearly reverential feeling some of the places evoked in me as a kid, and knew my reaction would be different this time around.
And indeed, I ended up flipping off the White House. And the Capital. And the IRS building and most of the FDR memorial.
To be fair, the democrats were throwing a temper tantrum inside the Capital at the time, because House Speaker Paul Ryan adjourned the house without allowing a vote on the suspension of due process rights based on FBI hunches. And FDR’s entirely too-large memorial might as well have been made entirely of whitewash; it would have been cheaper and more appropriate than all that granite. It, as well as the mechanism of its funding earned their birds.
It was when, however, I stood in the temple-like statuary chamber of the Jefferson Memorial, a cool breeze rising off the tidal basin and flowing between the massive columns gleaming in the sunlight that the sense of reverence returned. Gazing up at 10,000 pounds of Thomas Jefferson-shaped bronze, and then upon some of his most memorable quotes etched upon the walls threw the imbecility of modern politics into a sharp relief that couldn’t have more completely contrasted by the words surrounding me, carved into marble.
“I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” reads a massive inscription all the way around the bottom of the memorial’s dome.
It is both reassuring and depressing to know that once upon a time, politicians debated actual ideas; and those ideas were actually important. Today, they’re arguing about who can go into which bathroom. When they get really passionate about something, it’s usually something evil or terrible, like trying to annihilate due process rights and 200+-years of American legal tradition in an effort to appease a voting bloc that is always frightened and demanding more appearance of security.
I’m not so naïve or uneducated to think that politics during the time of the founding fathers of this country was always a matter of polite discourse in the debating of grand ideas. It was, of course, nearly as ugly and messy and fraught with personal infighting as it is today, but even then I can’t imagine a statesman as obnoxious as Trump or as shrill and transparently corrupt as Hillary.
Not to mention the things they were fighting over were big ideas that mattered. I believe a good part of the problem we have in this country is we have a full-time government doing a seasonal job. There just isn’t much government actually needs to do anymore, not that they’ve let that stop them. Quite the opposite, actually. Government is constantly looking for new ways to metastasize and spread into new areas. During Obama’s term, the FCC has grown into something that has decided it is obligated to regulate the Internet and the FDA has determined electronic devices that contain 0% plant material are “tobacco products” that must come under their cripplingly-expensive purview. Both of those intrusions are tiny compared to the monstrous Obamacare boondoggle he will leave as an albatross about the neck of future presidents and taxpayers. The dumbness of the “ideas” we fight over anymore is mirrored by the level of the discourse. A case could be made to bring back dueling by simply pointing out that afterward, chances are good at least one of the idiots won’t be around to give any more soundbites to MSNBC. Even swords-to-first-blood would amount to a more substantive debate than we’re likely to get from Trump and Hillary. Nearly anything would be an improvement over our current government, the people who comprise it and the people who compromise it; a conviction that became more and more unescapable to me as my D.C. trip went on.
In the National Archives building, there sits in a climate-controlled vault one of the four remaining copies of the Magna Carta. Just down the street, people work day and night to undermine its every principle, as well as those of the documents stored on the level above it.
That’s the odd juxtaposition I came away with from my sojourn to D.C.: it is a town that ostentatiously celebrates its history with marble, granite and bronze while simultaneously attempting to destroy it with ink, paper and idiocy.
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