Moving the Nation's Capital Out of the District of Columbia. An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

People's Republic, Kurt Schlichter's post-apocalyptic novel, posits a breakdown of the American Republic as the Blue States collapse under the weight of woke politics and break off into a separate country.

 Schlichter labels the new nation-state the People's Republic of North America, which he envisions as being georaphically divided. The western segment is comprised of California, Oregon, and Washington. The eastern portion encompasses the East Coast states stretching from Maine to northern Virginia and the Rust Belt states of the upper Midwest.

Sandwiched between these breakaway regions, the old United States of America is now reduced to the Southern states, the Plains states, and the Rocky Mountains West. The new capital city is Dallas.

I thought about Schlichter's novel as I pondered President Trump's proposal to close the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and move the agents out into the real world, where they could revive the FBI's original mission of arresting the bad guys.

Why the hell not? It makes sense to separate our nation's premier law enforcement agency from the bureaucratic morass in the District of Columbia, where the FBI morphed itself from a crime-fighting agency into stormtroopers for the Democratic Party.

Nevertheless, the FBI will need a new headquarters. I suggest Dallas as the location of the new FBI central office. 

Dallas is a sober, common-sense city where citizens are discouraged from defecating on the sidewalks. Unlike Minneapolis, where disgruntled dwellers are free to burn the town down, or Los Angeles, where shoplifting has become a competitive sport with varsity and JV divisions, most Dallasites obey the law. Doesn't it make sense for the FBI headquarters to be in a law-abiding town?

Indeed, Trump should pursue a broader vision than simply relocating the FBI. Why not move the entire capital from the District of Columbia to a new location as yet unsullied by corruption, incompetence, and venality? 

Let's move all the federal bureaucrats to a new capital in Dallas, Omaha, Pocatello, Bakersfield, or perhaps Fargo, North Dakota. 

Such a move would force our bigoted and provincial coastal elites to stop referring to America's Heartland as Flyover Country. More importantly, it would give the denizens of the Deep State an opportunity to fumigate the pesthole on the Potomac where our nation's capital now resides.

Don't Go To College, Says Kurt Schlichter; And By God, He May Be Right!

Kurt Schlichter wrote a sprightly essay for Townhall last month, arguing vigorously that young people should just skip college. "What passes for 'education' today is nothing of the sort," Schlichter writes, "and what calls itself 'academia' is really just a venal trade guild packed with mediocrities desperately trying to keep fooling people into forking over $60,000 a year--usually obtained via ruinous borrowing that ties a financial anchor around the defrauded grads' necks for the rest of their lives."

Who can disagree? As Schlichter says, "much of academia's product is largely garbage," particularly in the liberal arts. People are now graduating with English degrees without having read Shakespeare, or without knowing how to spell Shakespeare, for that matter.

Of course higher education argues ad nauseam that a degree in liberal arts has some intrinsic worth. As John Kenneth Galbraith put it years ago:

Education is, most of all, for the enlargement and the enjoyment of life. It is education that opens the window for the individual on the pleasures of language, literature, art, music, the diversities and idiosyncrasies of the world scene. The well-educated over the years and centuries have never doubted their superior reward; it is greater educational opportunity that makes general and widespread this reward.

 But who believes that anymore? Administrators at small liberal arts colleges purr seductively about the value of a liberal education while they lay off history professors to beef up their MBA programs-where the real money is. And ever so earnestly, they defend inflated tuition prices even as they discount their tuition rates by half.

Really, why pay good money for a liberal arts degree? Why study American literature if professors cannot identify a canon of great American writers? Why read Faulkner, Hawthorne, Henry James, Melville, or Fitzgerald if the English faculty writes them all off as a bunch of dead, white, misogynistic and racist males?

And in truth, I would not advise a young person to invest much time in reading William Faulkner or Henry James. Or Steinbeck, for that matter, although The Grapes of Wrath speaks to me as a great book, probably because I am a descendant of Okies.  

In fact, American writers are still writing great books, maybe better books than the ones our old professors said we must read. T.C. Boyle's Tortilla Curtain is as searing a book as you will ever read about being a despised refugee in America, every bit as good as The Grapes of Wrath. And although The Great Gatsby may be the great American novel, Tom Wolf's Bonfire of the Vanities, a more contemporary tale, describes the emptiness of wealth just as movingly as Fitzgerald's classic.

Today, American society has become so diverse that it makes no sense to argue that there are great American novels that everyone should read or even an accepted narrative of American history that everyone should learn. I read Marquis James' Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Andrew Jackson and was convinced Jackson was a great American. But we may take Old Hickory off the $20 bill; and if we do, he won't be coming back.

I read Douglas Southall Freeman's multi-volume biography of Robert E. Lee and concluded that General Lee was a decent man. But New Orleans ripped Lee's statue of its pedestal at Lee's Circle, and Lee definitely won't be coming back. 

Maybe we should all construct our own personal canon of great books, our own personal narrative of history.  As a Catholic, for example, I consider the Philadelphia Bible Riots every bit as important as the so-called Boston Massacre, but few people would agree with me. And for me, the great coming-of-age novel is not Catcher in the Rye by that sleazebag J.D. Salinger, but Richard Bradford's Red Sky at Morning, a book about being young in northern New Mexico during World War II.

But if we are all free to construct our own canon of literature and our own narrative of history, which liberal arts professors are basically arguing we should do, then why the hell should we pay sixty grand a year for our kids to attend some moldy liberal arts college in the upper Midwest?

Because the colleges need your money, I suppose. And if you don't have sixty grand, don't worry. The government is quite willing to loan it to you.

References

Kurt Schlichter. Don't Go To College, Townhall, March 22, 2018.