Political Eye: Rufus T. Firefly Rides Again

There are two separate and distinct entities occupying the little truncated diamond of swampland on the Potomac River between Virginia and Maryland. One is called “Washington, D.C.,” or usually just “Washington.” Washington is the Nation’s Capital, the seat of the national government. It’s where the administration and the federal bureaucracy are. The other entity is called “the District of Columbia,” or usually just “the District.” The District is where people live, do their shopping, and pay taxes. Lots of taxes.

The White House, the Lincoln Memorial, and the restaurant Sans Souci are in Washington. Dupont Circle, Eastern Market, and the restaurant El Caribe are in the District. Living in Washington must be miserable; I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Living in the District, however, has its pleasures and charms, as well as its drawbacks. One of the drawbacks—although it includes a certain element of perverse charm—is the government of the District of Columbia, consisting of a mayor, an 11-member City Council, and a bureaucracy as impenetrable as are the heads of most of the people who staff it. As near as I’ve been able to tell, the District government serves only one useful function: to utterly destroy the myth propounded by conservatives and other connoisseurs of fantasy that levels of government which are “close to the people” are somehow better and more responsive than those which are farther away. To be fair about it, the District government has had some serious obstacles to overcome, placed in its way by the Washington government. Not too long ago, the District didn’t even have a government to call its own; Washington took care of it all. The District, therefore, became the experimental laboratory for all sorts of schemes that Washington wanted to impose on the rest of the country, but wasn’t sure would work. Liquor prohibition, for example, was instituted in the District by Congress years before the Volstead Act was passed in 1919. Not that the people in Congress ever took it seriously for themselves—legends of Capitol Hill bootleg-ging are still making the rounds—but they thought it might be interesting to see if the hoi polloi of the District, many of whom were black, could live with prohibition without getting out of hand. Antiquated liquor laws persist to this day in the District.

When Home Rule finally came to the District about ten years ago, District voters made the least of it, mainly electing a series of officials alternating between power-hungry schemers and posturing airheads, with an occasional lawbreaker thrown in for diversity. One City Council member, while in office, was arrested and convicted of assaulting and biting (yes, biting) a tow truck operator in a parking lot. He finally started serving his jail term five years after the incident; the delay was in part because he was a public servant and in part because he was and is an ordained Methodist minister. An elected member of the School Board has managed to break all records for sustained lunacy by verbally and physically abusing his colleagues and their staffs, and by running up massive bills attending various conferences in a number of foreign countries having nothing to do with education. During the Iranian hostage crisis, he took it upon himself to mediate between the U.S. government and the Iranian captors, calling the embassy in Tehran almost daily from his District office and distributing lengthy single-spaced documents proposing “solutions” to the crisis, including a suggestion that the Iranians release all Spanish-surnamed hostages and keep the rest.

The fact that most elected District officials are walking recreations of Groucho Marx’s Rufus T. Firefly character doesn’t quite make up for the fact that there isn’t a single shred of ideological consistency of any stripe which might explain what they do. It would be comforting, for instance, to be able to say to yourself, “Aha, the reason the City Councilman bit the tow truck driver was his deep commitment to such and-such a philosophical worldview.” Unfortunately, however, most District officials have the ideology of a bivalve, and from a libertarian perspective, their decisions are almost always wrong. On economic issues, their attitude is, “If it moves, regulate and tax it.” On civil liberties issues, they think, “If it moves, repress it.” On foreign policy issues—well, you wouldn’t ordinarily think that the District government would have a foreign policy, but the example of the School Board member and the Iranian hostages proves otherwise. Far more serious was a recent School Board decision to provide a list of high school seniors to the Selective Service System. Just trying to help, I guess.

Several weeks ago, one elected City Council member, David Clarke by name, decided to brave this current of craziness with a set of proposed revisions to the District’s criminal code. Now Clarke is somewhat unusual in that he possesses a discernible ideological framework in which he operates: more or less that of a leftwing social democrat. He has, moreover, a reasonably strong commitment to civil liberties and understands the problems created by attempting to regulate individual personal behavior. This further distinguishes him from his colleagues, most of whom wouldn’t recognize the Bill of Rights if they found it taped to the doors of their refrigerators. Clarke’s proposed revisions to the District criminal code included decriminaliz-ing consensual sex between teenagers; specifically, lowering the “age of consent” to 12 years so long as the partner was no more than four years older, but maintaining penalties for all forced sex, as well as for sex between adults and children. Clarke’s rationale seemed sensible enough: it’s ridiculous to turn a couple of kids into criminals for having sex, so as long as we’re cleaning up the laws in this area, let’s get rid of the ridiculous parts. The Judiciary Committee of the City Council agreed, and passed Clarke’s package of revisions unanimously.

And then the District’s newspapers got ahold of the story, and you would have thought that Clarke had advocated unconditional surrender to the Russians. Headlines varied, but their essential message was “Clarke Calls For Legalizing Kid Sex.” This brought out the Moral Majority-types of all political persuasions and ethnic backgrounds, organized into groups with names sounding like “Concerned Citizens for Decency,” and “Committee to Postpone Puberty Indefinitely,” and Lord knows what else. Clarke’s alleged “kid sex bill” became the Number One news item in the District for a solid week. He held a news conference at which he tried to explain what his bill was really about, which he was able to do lucidly enough, but it was like reciting the Gettysburg Address to a convention of Bulgarian steel-workers. Both The Washington Post and the Washington Star solemnly editorialized against the evils of encouraging teenage sex, with the Star contributing the brilliant observation that since teenagers are never arrested for violating the present law, there’s no sense changing it. Finally, the City Council voted to kill Clarke’s bill—by voice vote, of course.

Clarke’s revision was essentially trivial, little more than a housekeeping measure designed to make District law in this matter give at least a passing nod toward reality. And it was arguably the first sensible thing to come out of the District government since the Councilman who bit the tow truck driver was defeated for reelection. Watching the District government in operation is like watching a Mel Brooks movie. Even though what goes on is offensive and in bad taste, as long as you’re there, you might as well laugh.

Of course, you can walk out of a bad movie, and probably even get your money back. But it’s hard to walk away from the place you live, and it’s impossible to get a refund on the taxes you pay. And the tragic aspect of this tragicomic situation is that virtually no one— not the Post, or the Star, or the business community, or neighborhood leaders—ever really objects to it. After all, a government with the size, power, and visibility of the District’s has a lot of resources to spread around. With the circuses comes the bread.

The issue here isn’t that the District has a “bad” government which with some major alterations could be transformed into a “good” government. There’s no inherent reason why the District’s example of government run amok couldn’t happen in Needles, California or Kokomo, Indiana. So if you find yourself praying for relief from Our Government Which Art in Washington, save a prayer for the government which art in the District. And save a few more for Needles and Kokomo.