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Streetcar Line
Happenings in the Hinterlands
Americans show civic virtue. But you have to get out of Washington to understand that.
It’s decompression time. I sit among unopened boxes and suitcases and mispositioned furniture, having moved back to the Gulf Coast (Mobile, AL) to be closer to family, after a little more than five years in the D.C. area. As also happened (to a slightly lesser degree) when I left D.C. after about five years in early 1987 and again after a separate five years at the end of 1996, even my relatively few excursions outside of our not-yet-organized house already have shown me that now I’m in the “real world” again, surrounded by people who go about their daily lives without all their actions somehow defined by the latest developments in politics.
It’s not so much the pace that’s different as it is the (non-meteorological) atmospheric pressure: It’s a sense that one isn’t surrounded by people whose self-importance is inflated by a second-degree connection with some sub-Cabinet deputy administrator. It’s the sense that some parts of life can be navigated without lawyers. It’s the conviction that “power” and “vacation” don’t belong anywhere in the same sentence (except within quotation marks to make a point).
I had thought (wrongly, as we shall see after a few paragraphs of digression) that this column would be about how these past five years made me feel like a Forrest Gump (albeit, I hope, a more intelligent one), in the sense that I kept feeling as if I were a witness or minor participant in almost everything big that happened — without really having done anything special except be there. I was in the room when Citizens United gave the official go-ahead to its lawyer to file the campaign-finance lawsuit that led to one of the most significant Supreme Court decisions in years. I was the one who drafted the editorials that drew the attention of the brilliant Rush Limbaugh to warn in memorable ways about Obamacare’s end-of-life rationing, which in turn led Sarah Palin to use her sloganeering genius to build a whole movement against “death panels.” I helped break and keep alive the story of how the Obama Justice Department dropped most of the voter-intimidation cases against members of the New Black Panther Party. I reported from Guantanamo Bay and from the vice president’s residence.
I felt, morbidly, like somebody chose me, against my will, as a witness to death: I was in the room for William F. Buckley’s last-ever public speaking appearance; I saw Tony Snow shortly before he took ill for the last time; I saw Robert Novak driving his black convertible Corvette just days before he was stricken with sure evidence of a brain tumor; I was the second-last person ever to speak to anti-David-Duke heroine Beth Rickey and was in contact (having no inkling of his condition) with former Louisiana Gov. Dave Treen the day before he died.
For that matter, far too many important conservatives died in just a few short years: Jack Kemp, Henry Hyde, Milton and Rose Friedman, Paul Weyrich, Mary Lou Forbes, William Safire, and Irving Kristol among them. And my Dad died, too.
The economy also died, with its original panic starting just one day after I warned of a coming panic .
Was it all because of something I did wrong?
WITH LESS THAN A WEEK out of D.C., however, clarity comes. I wasn’t Gump. Nothing was unique about my experience. That’s just how Washington works. You just show up and things start happening and your ego pretty soon starts to tell you that whatever happened was somehow dependent on your being there. In retrospect, though, that’s absurd: Stuff happens because so many big egos are trying to make things happen, and if you just hang around long enough, those things will happen while you’re there. Then you get a big ego too, and when you try to make things happen you’re as likely as not to make the wrong thing happen — in ways that backfire not as much on you as on so many other people outside of the Beltway whose lives are affected by the policy changes or storylines created by your own bull-in-china-shop routine.
Then you start thinking something you did unintentionally created disaster. I was the first out of the box, right here at the Spectator, in blasting Mike Huckabee. Sure, Huck was bad — but did blocking Huck cause us all to be stuck with John McCain, who lost to Barack Obama when Huck might have won? Is the nightmare of this Obama presidency my fault?
To which the re-oriented Hillyer in Mobile says to self: “Stop it, Hillyer; you’re just not that important.”
What is important is something I noticed, and started telling people, in early 2006 within two weeks of arriving back for my third stint in Washington: Already then, it was clear to me that somehow political D.C. had become meaner, more selfish, more demagogic, less likely to inculcate statesmanship, than it had been in either the 1980s or 1990s. This might sound absurd to say, because politics in Washington wasn’t exactly tiddlywinks in those earlier decades either. But it’s true. I found that people who never left D.C. agreed with me as well. In some almost indefinable but palpable way, things had gone downhill.
Despite what the media would say, this wasn’t the fault of the Bush administration. I challenge anybody to show me even a single outlandishly nasty statement or cheap shot said in public by a single member of the Bush high command. It just didn’t happen. But the left, in response to Bush, was vicious. What was frustrating was that the Bush administration became inept on multiple fronts while Republicans on Capitol Hill provided very few profiles in principle (Mike Pence, John Shadegg, Jeff Sessions, and Jim DeMint being among the few exceptions). This meant that the viciousness of the left was met with vacuousness on the vaguely right of the spectrum. And, in seeking little other than to preserve their careers, too many on the vaguely right lost their careers in the process. Lack of principles proved yet again to be bad politics.
Here, though, is where, just in the past two hours, I’ve suddenly realized that the complaints of the previous two paragraphs are so 2008-ish. Now that I’ve escaped Washington, I am becoming aware that official Washington has somewhat, ever-so-slightly, improved. It did so because people here out in the hinterlands forced it to do so. Americans proved they love their country. The Tea Party movement played the largest role in sending four score and seven freshmen Republicans to the House even though the RNC was chaired by a bumbling, solipsistic embarrassment. And, while too many of those 87 freshmen and their Tea Party backers sometimes miss the difference between constructive compromise and craven capitulation, the courage of an entire caucus standing firm for entitlement reform is a glorious thing to behold.
With the people leading, the politicians are following not sheepishly but with verve. In response to popular demand, many congressmen are demanding, or providing, real accountability from government.
Against the people’s determined fiscal rectitude, Debbie Wasserman Schultz at the DNC may still sling demagoguery around like verbal confetti, but it’s confetti that doesn’t glitter: It just looks, from any angle, like trash.
About the Author
Quin Hillyer is a senior editor of The American Spectator and a senior fellow at the Center for Individual Freedom. Follow him on Twitter @QuinHillyer.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (15) | Leave a comment
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Appleby| 6.3.11 @ 6:41AM
And in the American *flyover country*, people are beginning to stop whining *Why doesnt somebody DO something?* and realizing that they themselves are Somebody and looking for something to do. I have had Canadian friends who are now living in America tell me with surprise that they have been invited to dinner and events by people who work with them, and people on the streets and in church speak to them, introduce themselves, and invite them to coffee hour and other events. I lived in Canada 13 years before anybody ever invited me to her home. America is still America -- more Americans need to put down their binkies and look around and realize this. The people in the tornado-hit areas are witness to American generosity and impulse to help; we do not hear the squalling that came from Democrat-riddled New Orleans and that is keeping people in FEMA trailers long after the world has moved on -- in flyover country people are showing up with tools, pickup trucks and muscles and saying, *What can we do to help?* and things are getting done. So we hear little about it from the press, because there is nothing to blame on nobody -- instead the press is fixated on Congressional WeeWeeGate.
Look around you and be thankful that you live in a country where people still control their own destiny. Then get out there and do it.
Ken (Old Texican)| 6.3.11 @ 6:59AM
Welcome home, Quin.
Amen, Appleby!
Quin, perhaps all you need now is a callous remover for your soul and spirit.
Get out and go to a little league game...
oldfart| 6.3.11 @ 7:23AM
“Stuff happens because so many big egos are trying to make things happen, and if you just hang around long enough, those things will happen while you're there. Then you get a big ego too, and when you try to make things happen you're as likely as not to make the wrong thing happen -- in ways that backfire not as much on you as on so many other people outside of the Beltway whose lives are affected by the policy changes or storylines created by your own bull-in-china-shop routine. “
Some people 'inside the beltway' honestly believe that if they are not at the switch 24/7 then the world will stop rotating. You see it on I495/ I270 and I95 every day – on the blackberry, on the laptop, at the kids games, at the theater.
You have left ego-land and are now back to the real world. Congrats.
roadmaster| 6.3.11 @ 8:08AM
Last week I was proud to take off work for a couple hours to sit in the Federal Court House with an Iraqi co-worker who was taking his oath of citizenship. My friend was a senior NCO in Saddam's Republican Guard and after the 1st Gulf War, his life wasn't worth a bucket of warm spit, so he sought asylum in Jordan and eventually immigrated to the US.
Knowing and understanding tyranny, he appreciates liberty and freedom and wanted to become one of us. He doesn't take these precious things for granted, like so many native born citizens do. Hopefully, Obama's criminal, imperial reign of terror will awaken many, before it's too late.
Petronius| 6.3.11 @ 8:52AM
D.C. has become a rats nest of power grubbing despots. The people who go into government are on personal missions to force their ways on us all. And when they get whatever diktat they want enshrined as law, they then try to criminalize our displeasure. Freedom is all but dead for the citizens in this country except for those who have sufficient wealth that they can't be controlled. Ask the poor guy being persecuted and denied due process for selling a few rabbits without a federal license. He's been fined $90,000 by a bureaucrat without any trial. And he cannot win because he has all the risk. Does he get any sympathy? No. And this years' graduates, having no prospects in the private sector view the 6 figure salaries from the feds almost as attractive as the authority to pick up the phone and push people around.
Quin When Alabama is ready to secede, drop me a line.
SamVaughn| 6.3.11 @ 9:55AM
This column reminded me of the saga of a small coastal island community.
http://www.islandinstitute.org/long_island.php
Suffice it to say that after years of enduring the burdens of ever increasing taxes a small island composed of mostly lobsterman and fishermen took matters into their own hands as they are prone to do when confronted with weather or danger. Enduring the slings and arrows of high and mighty "rulers" in Portland who portrayed them as too dumb and lazy to run their own affairs they endured, they seceded. They set an example of courage and perserverance that many "from away" said didn't exist in the proud state of Maine. They've been told by outsiders for so long that they're dumb and lazy they began almost to believe it themselves. Almost, and that goes for the rest of fly-over country. We don't need Washington, when our neighbors are in trouble we help them in our own private ways, with our pick-ups, with our own chain-saws, with money we don't have, because even the neighbor that drives us nuts would be missed. We don't need Washington in our daily lives nor do you.
simon templar| 6.3.11 @ 10:14AM
Quin, I was very moved by your article. You are indeed a good man and a patriot. I apologize for being too hard on you in the past and being too contentious at times. Good luck and best wishes to you.
Quin| 6.3.11 @ 10:38AM
Simon,
Thank you so much. That is very kind of you, good sir. Much appreciated.
Occam's Tool| 6.3.11 @ 1:55PM
Dear Quinn,
G-d Bless and take care---and Ruth's Chris is in Mobile! Have a steak, and enjoy being in a State with fantastic people. My wife will be in Gulf Shores later this month. It is a very small world.
uncle curmudgeon| 6.3.11 @ 12:35PM
Welcome back, oh refugee. Once you get settled in, go on downtown and look at all the petty tyrants, quacks, and hustlers that, in your abscence, have metastisized around "The Square" thanks to fedl gubmint grants. Then use the your considerable skills to help you friends and neighbors run them all out of town. I look forward to reading your futer columns.
chriser| 6.3.11 @ 10:44PM
Quin,
Welcome back to God's country .
War Eagle!
Oldefarte| 6.4.11 @ 11:52AM
Wait a minute now....I've got to counter with ROOOOLLLLLLLLL TIDE! Quin, as long as %%YOU LEFT YOUR HEART IN ALABAMA%%, you no doubt were here all along. DC/yankees just don't GET IT and never will, as they asininely think that they created the political world, and that the rest of us are Gumpish bafoons [it is they who don't understand Gump' genius in proclaiming STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES!]. Welcome home, Quin....we all missed you! Realistically though, as long as technology/computers/radios/television etc exists [and conservative writers, talk show commentators such as Quin, Hannity, Rush & David, Ingram, Beck etc] are able to communicate their intelligent conservative ideas/thoughts to the rest of us, we will all survive [no matter from what distant locale same initiates from]!!!!!!!!!!!
Arch| 6.5.11 @ 9:27AM
Great article
In 2006, I too traded up, swapping Clinton and Schumer for Shelby and Sessions. It's great to be home again where people smile wave at each other. It's great to see that the most popular decals are Auburn and Alabama closely followed by the Browning Buckmark.
Welcome back.
Steve B | 6.5.11 @ 10:52AM
I haven't spent as much time in Washington as you, but my experience (three months as the world's oldest intern via the National Journalism Foundation) tends to confirm what you say.
Nowadays I'm a local government reporter in a three-county area in SW Minnesota. Most of what I cover concerns local officials who have jobs other than their office trying to find ways to keep the roads and infrastructure in good repair, fund law enforcement and a modest degree of social welfare services, and deal with natural calamities such as floods.
It all makes Washington seem somehow unreal, like the memory of a weekend at a Renaissance Fair.
dee see| 6.5.11 @ 11:18AM
--It'd be nice if they showed a little civic virtue
regarding the reality of third generation EUGENISTS directing our entire medical establishment ---while handing our entire
American economy to the most awesomely
genocidal regime history has ever seen.
REALLY --------------it'd be nice.