In a token of the kind of loose curricular control public schools used to have back in those wonderful days before the Supreme Court ruined everything by taking prayer out of the classrooms, I took a ninth-grade geography class in which the teacher decided to devote an entire term not to “geography,” but to detailed study of J. Edgar Hoover’s McCarthy-era anticommunist tract, Masters of Deceit.
I didn’t learn a whole lot about communism during this instruction (other than that all our parents would be killed as “bourgeois” after the Red Army, abetted by liberal dupes, conquered us), and had to bite my tongue more than once because even at that age I knew a lot more about Marxism than my teacher (and perhaps Jedgar, too). But I do recall one actual geography lesson: Hoover predicted a Soviet America would immediately move Our Nation’s Capital from Washington, DC, to somewhere in the middle of the country–a conclusion presumably based on the Russian precedent of the shift of the central government from Petrograd to Moscow, or perhaps the assumption that the Reds would want to keep Americans away from all those memorials of the past.
I thought of that today when I read this news item:
One of the men seeking the GOP nomination for Nebraska’s open Senate seat is proposing moving the capital from Washington to his home state, saying it would be an effective way to cut out the lobbyists and special interests that have turned Capitol Hill into an ATM dispensing taxpayers’ money.
“That’s it, the way to cure the incredible ineffectiveness and dysfunction of both parties in Washington — we move the Capitol to Nebraska,” Ben Sasse, a university president and former Bush administration official, said in 30-second campaign ad that ran in Nebraska over the weekend during the NFL playoff games.
Damn commies. Jedgar was right: they’re everywhere, even in the Republican Party of Nebraska.
UPDATE: As my Twitter buddy Shawn Peirce (@_silversmith) quickly pointed out, red is a very popular color in Nebraska. You’d think I’d remember that after the Huskers (a.k.a. Big Red) beat my Georgia Bulldogs in the Gator Bowl.
