The Gulag Is Upon Us

Posted on by

So a 71-year-old law-abiding citizen is not allowed to hand-deliver letters about campaign finance reform to members of the House. I can understand requiring the letters to go through some kind of security screening –anthrax, you know — but to not allow him to deliver the letters at all seems, um, un-American.

It hasn’t been that long since a mob of rowdy teabaggers got into the Longworth House Office Building and heckled Democratic congresspersons, in particularly black Democratic congresspersons, and I don’t know that any were so much as briefly detained. Funny how that works.

See also this article by Joan Shipps at Raw Story.

Late Thursday night, the House of Representatives voted in favor of “H.J.Res. 43: Disapproving the action of the District of Columbia Council in approving the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Amendment Act of 2014.” If enacted, the legislation would make using employer-based health insurance for in vitro fertilization or birth control pills a fireable offense in Washington, D.C.

That’s bad enough, but in some ways this part is more disturbing:

Thursday’s House floor debate kicked off after 9:00 PM. Before I entered the doors to the House Gallery, I complied with a police request to forfeit all my electronic devices. I inquired if I could get a press pass so I could take pictures. After a few radio calls, officials on the scene told me I could not have a press pass. So I relinquished my phone and proceeded to go in the Gallery anyway.

Before going through my second metal detector since entering the building, a police officer gave my purse a thorough examination. I had already put my purse through an x-ray machine.

When I entered the Gallery, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) was imploring her Republican colleagues not to use the federal authority vested in them by people from other states to overturn local laws in Washington, D.C.

I sat down near D.C. voting rights activists who were attending the hearing and began to take notes on a steno pad. A congressional staffer came over and informed me I was not allowed to take notes.

 Not allowed to take notes? Maybe C-Span was there, I don’t know. But this is just twisted. Whose House is it, anyway?

22 thoughts on “The Gulag Is Upon Us”

  2. A little secret I’ve learned about metaphysics… That 71 year old law abiding citizen has managed to deliver those letters by not delivering those letters. All of the Congress-critters know that “They’ve got mail” and they know what the contents of that mail is even though they never got that mail.

  4. This is why I hated visiting DC. It’s infuriating to have my nose rubbed in the fact that I’m treated with contempt by all the institutions I’m paying for.

  5. Back when I was a kid I it was different in DC, and that was during the McCarthy era, and afterward when things were still not all that loose and liberal. (Lots for conservatives to be frightened of then too: black people getting uppity, hippies running around; but apparently they weren’t such cowards back then). It’s crazy that it’s worse now. Mind you, my grandfather did get escorted out of the Capitol once or twice, but he was a tad mental. Now they don’t need a real reason; irrational fear of everything (didn’t Lucy van Pelt have a name for that?) is the order of the day.

  6. JDM,
    If Lucy didn’t, she should have called that irrational fear of everything, “Conservatism.”

  7. Swami: I never looked at it that way. Probably my anger got in the way. Perhaps this is an example of wu wei. That is the taoism concept of action by inaction, basically letting nature take its course. By the way, nature always wins.

  8. Perhaps a dumb question, but maybe not, given that DC has special “fiefdom” status: can the Prez veto this abomination if it gets through the Senate?

  10. Odd, isn’t it, how scared DC is now, compared to how self-confident it was during the thermonuclear-state-terrorist Cold War. It’s as if the system is essentially parasitical, so it needs fear to justify itself to the taxpayers, so they’re terrified to lack terrors for us to be terrified of.

    Crime’s down, war’s down, terrorism’s down. To the crime-control system, that’s a crime shortage; so to justify their budgets, they have to imagine, invent, or commit crimes themselves. Therefore when society becomes more civil, the police become more barbaric.

    Of course, to the rest of us, that’s really a crime-control surplus. Ditto with the war shortage and the terrorism shortage; really they’re military and spy surpluses.

    The solution: cutbacks.

  11. paradoctor,
    What the hell is “pantophobia?”

    Is it conservatives afraid of Hillary running for President in pantsuits?

  12. grannyeagle. I never heard of Wu Wei but That’s exactly what it is. Well I have heard the sound Wu Wei from an old rock and roll song, something like.. “wu wei baby, wu wei, won’t you let me take you on a sea cruise”. Or was it, ooh wee, ooh wee baby? Anyway, the concept of doing something by doing nothing is the same thing I was trying to convey in my comment above.
    OT..I just heard the Happy Rockefeller has died.. I guess that provides an occasion for one last telling of an old corny joke that circulated in New York back in the day. It’s strange how these things stick with you while viewing the passing parade..Anyway it goes: Now Governor Rockefeller wakes up feeling happy. See, I told you it was corny! Well, maybe some of you old New Yorkers might appreciate the trip down memory lane. Remember the one…I hear that City Hall is falling down, it has a rotten Beame. Lame? OK, how about this one…Who’s the worst cabinet maker in the world?..Christine Keeler, one screw an the whole cabinet fell apart!

  14. Swami, here’s a Canadian political joke from after the election just after Brian Mulroney quit the Progressive Conservative leadership (it was a captain jumping ship just before it hits the iceberg thing). The 1993 election was forecast to be bad for the PCs, with some pundits predicting that the disaster might be so enormous the PCs might only win 55 seats. They ended up winning 2, by Jean Charest and Elsie Wayne.

    So a few weeks later the wags put forth: did you hear the latest scandal for the PCs? Mdm. Charest has been sleeping with half the conservative caucus!

  16. I’m reading some history on the Korean War and its politics, specifically WRT the “loss” of China to Mao.

    I can tell you with a straight face that the Republicans are no worse now. The politicking for the privilege of ruining the country was no cleaner back then, nor more truthful…

    Following in quick sequence there was Nixon, Reagan, Bush, the Contract on America, Bush, Cheney, McPalin, Ryanromney, etc., etc.

    Eisenhower was a total anomaly, and was played by the leaders of the Party to do some obnoxious things, though an overall decent fellow.

  17. Dan,
    Yes, but I suspect that, before (DUMB)FOX “news” and Reich-Wing talk radio, people then were, if not smarter and more sensible, than after having lived through the Great Depression and WWII, they had a better sense of commonality, and that ‘we’re all in this together,’ or else we’ll all lose.

  18. Also too – there was a military draft, so that there was a greater mixing of classes – and, after Truman integrated the military, races.

    I think that made a huge difference.

    Again, that’s just my opinion…

  20. c u n d gulag, in reply to your question as to what fear of everything is called, back in 1950, Theodore Adorno named and described the phenomenon we see at work here in his book The Authoritarian Personality:

    The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.

    Five years later, Richard Hofstadter elaborated on this in his classic essay The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt, excerpted below:

    The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the Orient — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed. He is the most bitter of all our citizens about our involvement in the wars of the past, but seems the least concerned about avoiding the next one. While he naturally does not like Soviet communism, what distinguishes him from the rest of us who also dislike it is that he shows little interest in, is often indeed bitterly hostile to such realistic measures as might actually strengthen the United States vis-à-vis Russia. He would much rather concern himself with the domestic scene, where communism is weak, than with those areas of the world where it is really strong and threatening. He wants to have nothing to do with the democratic nations of Western Europe, which seem to draw more of his ire than the Soviet Communists, and he is opposed to all “give-away programs” designed to aid and strengthen these nations. Indeed, he is likely to be antagonistic to most of the operations of our federal government except Congressional investigations, and to almost all of its expenditures. Not always, however, does he go so far as the speaker at the Freedom Congress who attributed the greater part of our national difficulties to “this nasty, stinking 16th [income tax] Amendment.”

    In other words, as the Preacher said in Ecclesiastes 1:9-10:

    The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

  22. Thank you, Michael. It’s been so long since my friends and I discussed Adorno and Debord over a bottle of jug wine, that I had forgotten how much they had to say.

    I think that we were on to something.

    The thing that the right wing fears the most is that we might be able to think for ourselves. I come from a very working class background. We don’t have society’s imprimatur when it comes to voicing an opinion. The main thing we have on our side is numbers. The Mitt Romneys and the David Brooks of the world can all spout complete nonsense and it will be received as wisdom. At present, we’re at a disadvantage. But worms have been known to turn.

Comments are closed.