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14 February 07: Happy Valentine's Day!
With Love, the National Park Service
Why does it feel -- despite the recent announcement of the retraction of most of the security at Independence National Historic Park -- that the
President
himself is making the day-to-day decision-making at the National Park Service? Last week it was the annual insistence -- a mantra it has become for the
simple-minded on the right -- on upping the daily quota of snowmobiles in Yellowstone. It is some kind of depraved test against the imagined tyranny
of the
regulatory class: you ought to be allowed to do whatever the hell you feel like on public land -- it's yours isn't it, drill for gas why don't you,
turn that
two-stroke engine, the more noise the better.
In what could be termed the opposite maneuver, they shut Washington Square yesterday -- Independence Square too, but I didn't have time to deal with
that. On
this, the 331st anniversary (February 14, 1776, before Hallmark got into the printing business too)of the publication of the third and complete edition
of
Thomas Paine's Common Sense, you need to know that your government, perhaps the President himself, as it could only possibly be, decided that
because of
snow (or was it slush?) you ought not to enjoy your park. Caution tape was strung across all seven entrances to Washington Square (and all those I
could see of
Independence too) after they had taken the trouble to power sweep all the pathways. Swept clean and closed. Why? Is it because a government
this
incompetent can't imagine -- can't imagine! -- keeping the pathways of an historic public square in the center of a bustling city -- that square itself
filled
with the remains of thousands of men who died to secure our freedom from the inveterate enemy of liberty, as Paine called George III -- free of
snow and
ice so that you may walk through it, stop to look at the white flakes gathering against the gray branches of the plane trees, or watch your child play?
Is it
because the NPS, like the rest of the federal government, believes that if it strikes fear inside you you are likely to cower and demand that bombs
fall over
Tehran? Is it because not since Andrew Jackson has there been a president so disdainful of the beauty, emotion, and pleasure of cities and city life?
Is it
because the NPS budget has been whittled away by the war-bill, the expensive contracts handed to Bush-family friends at Wackenhut or Johnson Controls
or the
other republican military firms who so brutally turned INHP into an ugly fortress? Is it because they thought they knew so well that you or I might
slip in
the slush, hurt ourselves, that it wanted to think, decide, protect us on our behalf? (Where the hell are all the libertarians while this is going
on?) Is
NPS really worried that if I fell and hurt myself I might demand to know why we have a national park service if it can't keep the shrines of our
national
heritage accessible to the public in the middle of the afternoon on day that produced rain and no more than a dusting of snow?
What is it, George? For five years you have taken from me my birth-rite as a Philadelphian to amble through, touch, and sit in the arcades of
Independence
Hall, to look upon my nation's heritage as my own, and thus to love my country ever-stronger. You -- selected from the rest of mankind (oh, you
think
you were), [your] mind early poisoned by importance; and the world [you] act in differs so materially from the world at large, that [you] have but
little
opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when [you] are succeeded to the government are . . . the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the
dominions -- have made our nation so pathetic, incompetent, and impotent that upon seeing your grim yellow warnings that I, on my way to pick up my
daughter, a first-grader at Independence Charter School, would yell into the platinum clouds: O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only
the
tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!
I gleefully hurled your bullshit caution tape into the trash cans. Children smiled upon me. I asked them wouldn't they like to play in the park on a
snowy
day? By four Washington Square had already filled with those -- dogwalkers, children, mothers, office workers, and tourists -- who never realized
what had
(briefly, I presume, as the caution tape was taut and felt fresh) been taken from them.
Stand forth, eh? Let's get some answers, because I for one can't put up with this much longer.
–Nathaniel Popkin
nrpopkin@gmail.com
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