“Those bastards didn’t send back my article! Now I have to re-type the whole piece before I can submit it somewhere else!” I growled standing by the apartment cluster mailbox on a sultry afternoon of July 3, 1979. “Did they just throw away or steal the stamps from the self-addressed stamped envelope I sent along with my piece?!”
The New York Times logo on the front of a postcard in that day’s mail sparked my ire. I had dropped out of Virginia Tech three years before, confident that I didn’t need a college degree to make my way as a writer. But my strikeouts vastly outnumbered my few successes. My ego had been on half rations for longer than I druthered. A few weeks earlier, I’d sent out maybe my last volley of submissions before throwing in the towel on freelancing. One by one, my pieces straggled back, rejected from the New Republic, Playboy, American Spectator, and Washington Post. There was only one very long shot left in play.
And now this dinky little New York Times postcard was all I had to show for my busted publishing blitzkrieg. Scowling, I flipped it over to peruse another form reject: “We have tentatively accepted your manuscript for use on the Op-Ed Page. If and when the article is scheduled for publication an editor will telephone you to discuss any question that may arise in the editing process....”
Okay, that was better than sending back my manuscript.
I was not aware of any place in Blacksburg, Virginia that sold the New York Times, and the Virginia Tech University Library—the only place that I knew received the Times—was closed on the following day, July 4th. It never occurred to me to phone the Times to see if the article had run. On July 5, I tromped to that library to check the paper.
Yikes! The New York Times labeled me “a writer currently in exile in the Appalachian mountains.” Had their editors heard from law enforcement or the CIA before printing the article? What did the Times know that I didn’t know?! And then I remembered that I tossed in a similar quip in my cover letter with my submission. That sounded better than saying I’d been a temporary typist, highway flagman, Santa Claus, construction worker, peach picker, lawn mower, and—the worst indignity of all—wearing a giant rabbit costume for a Beatrix Potter promotion.
“Why Not Draft the Next Congress?” ruled the bottom of the July 4th op-ed page. Six years earlier, the federal government ended the draft and replaced it with the All-Volunteer Military. Members of Congress were invoking one bogus standard after another to unfairly condemn the new system. Plenty of congressmen claimed that reviving military conscription would produce vast moral and military benefits as well as budgetary savings. I viewed such proposals as the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on the freedom of young Americans.
Using the classic format of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal, I recounted the sordid details of the “failure of the All-Volunteer Congress.” I cited the pervasive “doubts about the intelligence of the recent volunteers” who had “not been able to balance [federal] income and expenditures for 10 years straight.”
It is only the ego-starved who volunteer for Congressional duty now. These people are forced into Congress by their psychological or mental poverty, as no real alternative or treatment exists for their condition.
The moral caliber of Congress would be improved by conscription. The personal background of many volunteers appears conducive to fabrication. Randomly picking people off the street would give a much higher level of honesty and responsibility.
Conscripts “would receive a subsistence allowance (an honorable precedent established during the Revolutionary War), as it would not be right to overpay someone for what he owed to society.”
Compulsory congressional service would “restore the sense of honor, duty, service, and patriotism to the middle-aged.”
Getting published in the Times revived my confidence and I continued banging out articles as my talent ripened. I appreciated that Op-Ed Editor Charlotte Curtis would consider a submission from an unknown writer in southwest Virginia. The Times op-ed page was far more widely read back then before the rise of the internet, podcasts, and social media. I sold the Times dozens of pieces in the following 15 years.
Almost exactly one year after my satire was published, President Jimmy Carter issued a presidential proclamation compelling all American males between the ages of 18 and 26 to register with the Selective Service System. His proclamation was spurred by a law, spurred by rising tensions with the Soviet Union, that Congress enacted to assure that millions of young people could potentially be speedily compelled to report for military duty. The same mandate for draft registration remains on the books, tempting presidents to thrust the nation into foreign quagmires that require far more body bags than recent US military debacles.
In the following decades, Capitol Hill’s know-nothing, no-fault legislating was always near the top of my target list for my articles and books. I mocked the harebrained reasoning and brain-dead logic in congressional floor debates in a Wall Street Journal piece, “How to Think Like a Congressman.” In USA Today, I derided the annual year-end omnibus debacles, rushing to enact thousand-page Towers of Babel that transmogrify into law though no member of Congress read the bill.
Plenty of members of Congress have denounced me and my articles but I never lost any sleep over their wailing. I realized long ago that, as Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “the trade of governing has always been monopolized by…the most rascally individuals of mankind.”
Unfortunately, the mental and moral defects of our legislative class have become far more ruinous to America since my first published scoff. In recent times, squandering hundreds of billions of tax dollars has become simply another congressional perk.
In 1979, Congress spent roughly $500 billion; in 2025, federal spending is expected to reach $7 trillion. In 1979, the total federal debt was $827 billion; now, the debt is $37 trillion and Congress just authorized another $5 trillion in deficit spending. Since 1979, reckless spending has helped destroy more than 80 percent of the purchasing power of the dollar. Since 1979, the Federal Register has printed more than two million pages of new regulations, rulings, notices, and other poxes on domestic tranquility. Congress created thousands of new federal crimes since 1979 to maximize the power of federal prosecutors over private citizens.
And Congress is almost always AWOL on defending citizens’ rights and liberties from presidents and rampaging federal bureaucracies. Americans are increasingly in a similar plight to downtrodden commoners during the 1500s reign of Henry VIII. As historian David Hume wrote almost 300 years ago, the English people “had reason to dread each meeting of [Parliament] and were sure of having tyranny converted into law, and aggravated with some circumstance, which the arbitrary prince and his ministers had not hitherto devised.”
Especially since the 9/11 attacks, many congressmen view “converting tyranny into law” as their job description. The Patriot Act is not even the tip of the iceberg of such abominations. Congress rarely even has the courage or competence to investigate how presidents are trampling the Constitution. Congress and presidents teamed up to drop an Iron Curtain of secrecy around federal agencies, confident that what people don’t know won’t hurt the government. Top members of Congress responded to valiant whistleblowers like Edward Snowden like a mob of peasants clamoring to burn heretics at the stake.
My intellectual barrages have caused no stampedes to repent among either members of Congress or voters. But sometimes pummeling scoundrels is its own reward. And I have not seen any pundit who offered better political foresight than comedian Lily Tomlin: “No matter how cynical you get, it is not enough to keep up.”
