Now That We Have Air Conditioning, It’s Time to Relocate the Capitol
From the August 10 edition of Jonah Goldberg’s The Goldberg File:
Washington, D.C., … we all know, is a pestilential swamp where the horseflies and water snakes have been replaced with congressmen and senators. And that’s not a fair trade, because horseflies and water snakes leave your wallet alone when they bite.
That’s where the Seat of Government (SOG — one of the few acronyms which makes sense as a stand-alone word) has long been located. There are lots of possible reasons why the SOG came to be in Washington, D.C., including the proximity to George Washington’s Mount Vernon. However, in recent heretofore secret discussions with Messrs Washington and Jefferson, I have discovered the real answer.
The SOG was put in Washington, D.C., to keep the federal government as small and non-intrusive as possible, and to have only those truly dedicated to public service spend time there, as it was a horrible personal sacrifice.
While a scientific genius in many respects, Mr. Jefferson simply did not anticipate that the evil of modern air conditioning would settle upon the Earth and proliferate like cockroaches. Back in the Pre-Air Conditioning (PAC) days, the SOG was a place to go only when absolutely necessary for only as long as absolutely necessary and otherwise to avoid as one might avoid parts of Haiti. The SOG remains eminently avoidable, but not sufficiently so — hence, the exponential proliferation of government.
There are few ways out of this dilemma, since the political will to make D.C. the totally unpleasant place it was PAC does not exist. Outlaw air conditioning? No way. Move the SOG elsewhere? No matter how currently undesirable a place might be found it would — with one possible exception — eventually change sites again. How about D.C. term limits? People have been kicking that notion around for a long time, but nothing has happened beyond some sore feet; people with terms (other than jail terms) will never want them limited.
Annexation of Haiti and moving the SOG there is the only viable answer.
Well, the Ruling Class will clamp down on the A/C of us peons, sooner or later. But of course not the D/C A/C. They’re “environmentalists”, which means they must force everyone ELSE into lower standards of living.
Humorous cartoon on Washington corruption at http://drawfortruth.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/congress-and-gomorrah/
Mr. Miller:
“Annexation of Haiti and moving the SOG there is the only viable answer.”
For God’s sakes, man haven’t the Haitian people suffered ENOUGH?
No, if you want to move the SOG, move it to the unused Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Long Term Storage Facility in Nevada.
1) It’s been an enormous Federal boondoggle, spending billions on what is essentially a hole in the ground. Let them live and work there.
2) It’s been stopped from being used for its intended purpose by the self-same government that selected the site and dug out the mountain.
3) Nevada has long been used as an atomic test site, so should the Department of Homeland Security’s systems work as well as they worked last Christmas Day over Detroit, no one is really likely to notice another few roentgens of fallout.
4) Legislation is about as harmful to human life as racdioactive waste,(although radioisotopes DO degrade over time to harmlessness).
5) We can always hope that the Feds fudged their seismic assessments, and thus an earthquake and a landslide may make an underground “time capsule” of our public servants.
I don’t see much downside to Yucca Mountain.
Tweeeet! TWEEET!!
This Senior Native Washingtonian hereby endorses Bilgeman’s most excellent and wise suggestion.
Relocating the SOG to Haiti is certainly a novel idea. If it is actually done, it would probably represent the first time that a country had its capital in a DIFFERENT country
Mind you, you could argue that there are historical parallels. For instance, the capitals of the Warsaw Pact countries from 1945 to 1989 were officially Warsaw, Prague, etc. but were effectively Moscow….
Neah.
We just need to remove the A/C from the Capitol, White House, and all the office buildings where Congresscritters and their staffs “work.”
Also an excellent idea. After all, they’re all so insistent on being “green”, so they can do without A/C.
While I like the idea of the benefits to Haiti, I think a better selection would be the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Multi-day snowstorms and an annual snowfall in excess of 200 inches (think about it, that’s over 16 feet – better put a flag pole on top of your garage so you can find it!) would definitely keep any but the most dedicated away.
Hey, wait just one minute! I own property in the Keweenaw and I don’t want that nest of thieves anywhere nearby. An atomic reactor , no problem; a landfill, no problem; a radioactive waste disposal site, no problem; the Denizens of D.C.; BIG PROBLEM!
North to Alaska. Congress should be in session for 4 months or less.Term limits of 2elections.
Anymore questions?
What a great idea! Haiti!
Or bring back yellow fever and malaria to DC?
Did you know that our Constitution, and therefore our nation, was delayed for one year because yellow fever cleared out Philadelphi?
Think of the possibilities!
Hmmmm, I think TubbyHubby has the right Idea in moving the SOG to a Cold Climate. With that in mind I nominate the ANWR region of Alaska. Even Alaskans don’t go there much I’m told, and the Inuit seem to just hunt and transit the area, not acutally live there. So in the Winter it would be wolves, mice, and meese. In the Summer it would be wolves, mice, meese, mosquitoes, and bot flies.
The only thing I would insist on would be a large booze supply so that even when they are there, they’d be to drunk to do anything.
Another advantage of locating the government in a remote region of Alaska is that they’d develop an appreciation for nature as it really is, especially the environmentalists. In those regions, humans are part of the food chain and not necessarily at the top. Sure, we’d have the occassional congresscritter or staffer eaten by a bear but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Let the federal government telecommute. Huge numbers of workers in the private sector have been doing it for some time now. Via videoconferencing, why can’t Congress be able to work from their districts for a major part of the year? Think of how different it might be if members met those who elect them every day at the supermarket and over the back fence, not just at Town Hall meeting during the handful of Congressional recesses. Think also how many more citizen legislators might run for office if it meant not uprooting the whole family to move near DC.
When Pelosi and Reid took over they lengthened the Congressional work week. Republican leadership had seldom held sessions/meeting where official attendence was kept on Monday mornings or Fridays so members could to go back to their districts. (Of course, many only used the time to go to vacation homes.) Pelosi/Reid sold this to the press as making Congress work harder. In fact, Congress was staying in DC on Friday afternoon in order to rename post office buildings after former Congressmen.
What Pelosi/Reid were doing was keeping a lot more Congressman away from constiuents and encouraging them to relocate families to the DC area. Isolation has long been the first step in brainwashing. By making Congress stay in DC except when on recess, Pelosi/Reid hoped members developed the company town mentality in record time.
Move the capital to one of the many places folks like Pelosi, Boxer, DiFi, any of the Kennedy clones, Frank, or Franken would find sheer torture.
I refer, of course, to the American heartland. Put the capital in Omaha. Put it in Minneapolis. Put it in Nashville TN. Put it in Fargo ND. How about Peoria?
If we make them suffer with having to be among what Reid calls the smelly Americans, they will not be in session very long. We can’t expect Boxer to be away from Saks too long, for example. For those with children, they’d have to use actual regular private schools full of the children of the unwashed, rather than with the children from “good” families found at Sidwell Friends.
As a former resident of Minneapolis I can state that the liberals in Congress would feel right at home within the city.
I would suggest Fairbanks AK. Partly for selfish reasons, I don’t want them anywhere near me. Secondly, I don’t think they would complain much about global warming after a winter there. My third reason, is just imagine the look on some of the gun grabbers faces the first time they encounter an Alaskan armed for bear.
I nominate Northern Pakistan. WithOUT any military support.
Anywhere on the AZ-Mexico border!!!!
Crawford, Texas.
And while we are at it, the UN must go as well. This body is after all a great admirer of Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe.
Now the United Nations should be immediately moved to the Maldives or Bangladesh.
Let those kleptobureaucrats “Build World Socialism”…underwater.
I vote we put them on the dark side of the moon,preferably without spacesuits.
I agree with the concept, particularly the bit about no space suits. However, I have mixed emotions. Back in the 1960s, when the U.S. and Russia were trying to attack the moon with spaceships, an Irish folksinger, Brendan Behan, wrote a song begging, “Please Mr. Khrushchev, Please Mr. Eisenhower, grant me this great boon: don’t muck around, don’t muck around, don’t muck around with the moon.”
With all due sentimentality, I have to agree.
Either remove the AC (for the good of the environment) or move the SOG (and the SOB’s) to some place less appealing than DC…I suggest tents at Ft. Irwin (the National Training Center). And make the staff break down their tent-offices and quarters and move them, themselves, every third day.
Oh, and sanitation via porta-potties, set over holes in the ground.
All those suggestions, while good, are far too cumbersome to implement.
Far easier to simply prevent the movement of electrical power and fossil fuels across the Beltway inbound. Exempt charged and single-use batteries from the prohibition against electrical power, so the newsies can run their teevee cameras, but the fossil fuel prohibition (including the contents of vehicle tanks) should be absolute. Food supplies can be delivered by biodiesel-powered trucks, and alcohol and the selfsame biodiesel (=kerosene equivalent) can supply lighting and heat. Does calcium carbide (used to evolve acetylene, for gas lamps) qualify as “fossil fuel”? Decisions, decisions…
Best of all, it could be implemented using a system of checkpoints and patrols, Iraq-style, after a short sharp campaign of demolition. Where’s a mad bomber when we could really use a few?
Regards,
Ric
I vote for somewhere in a corn field in Kansas. The District of Columbia was in the middle of the country, so the capital should be in the middle of the country.
How about that DMZ in Arizona that the Border Patrol has abandoned?
I don’t see any reason that any part of the US should be burdened with this crop of troublemakers. I would recommend picking up a used aircraft carrier inexpensively and installing the SOG on the flight deck….then moving it into international waters, as a gesture towards world peace (or for any other convenient excuse of a reason).
hmmmm, I remember when ACDC used to mean something completely different. Or maybe it doesn’t? How about Nevada? I think Doom Town in Frenchman Flat is still standing. I’m sure the background radiation is down to acceptable limits by now.
After a few hours without air conditioning, the stench would be enough to drive out a retired dump site custodian.
Just like spoiled fish removed from the fridge and thrown in the warm garbage.
Mr. Miller got “moving the SOG” right but the location wrong. There are some of us that have long thought that the SOG should move around the country every few years, competed for just like the Olympics.
Two positive improvements might result. One would constantly require rebuilding the expense account infrastructure now brick and mortar in DC. And the second would be the large amount of graft generated, which could be used to pay off the National Debt in no time.
FWIW … I started talking up the idea — of moving to The Capital North Dakota, or of a Constitutional Amendment banning AC withing 25 miles of the Capital — back in 1980, when I first came to DC to work on some DoD projects, and would stay in a different hotel booked at the last minute every visit. Thus I got to know most of DC and the Beltway, sociological study-wise. It really scared me! I could see it was not a well grounded place, yet that power and money were being sucked into it. In was unstable, just the kind of environment for the rise of the infantile and immature. The ammoral and immoral. But the worst were the self-assured know-better-than-the-hayseeds best-of-the-best who in that environment grew unchecked.
I was not in a good zone myself then, but my intellectual curiosity and respect for the most lowly saved me, in time. And my degraded condition actually allowed to see more of the real infrastructure than otherwise would have been had.
In DC there was no blue collar, it was all brown collar or white collar. And the white collar never even even acknowledged the existence of the brown collar. It wasn’t racial. It was strictly professional versus service class. Only in the military was there any real social mixing between castes.
And in DC Metro there was then and continued to developed a real social stratification based on G level, and when I returned for some extended visits in the 200x era I discovered that the ‘cul-de-sac’ roads that go nowhere but dead-ends development pattern had continued and gotten greater. The very fabric of the roads and housing discouraged mixing and encouraged cultural blinderism day-by-day.
I have pondered for thirty years how to break DC apart and scatter to the reaches the concentration of national life-sucking-away bureaucratic power that exists there, before it became too deadly to the nation. I even considered a modified Jerusalem model based on Jewish Law — where each US citizen and family would be required to come to the Capital DC to personally spent some small but significant percentage of their income on partying and good food every so often. A national picnic pilgrimage sort of. That would inject a sense of America into that G0d-forsaken District, in a good way and maybe make the kleptocratic class less wont to steal from the rest of us, or the class bureaucratic less likely to pursue us into oppression, poverty and our graves with onerous niggardly regulations.
But a mere dust mote can’t make a oak move two feet south.
Move the Capital to Norh Dakota or the border with Yellow Stone in Montana. We would have Geothermal energy and thin down the number of reporters and lawyers who would live there.