Martin DyckmanThe delusional Don Quixote, who fancied himself a knight errant and galloped headstrong into battle with windmills he believed to be giants, has become a metaphor and an adjective – quixotic – for people who dare to pursue impossible dreams.
He was, of course, a figure of fiction, not fact.
What shall we say, then, of Doug Hughes, the very real Ruskin postal carrier who risked his neck to fly something resembling a motorized pinwheel through the nation’s most restricted air space to land on the Capitol grounds in order to deliver a message to Congress?
He is best seen, perhaps, in the light cast by the author Anatole France, when he wrote in 1894:
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.”
There you have it. Were Donald Trump, Sheldon Adelson or even one of the megabillion Koch brothers to do the same thing with a company helicopter, he would face criminal charges just as Hughes does.
That’s democracy.
But of course an Adelson or a Trump or a Koch wouldn’t think of staging a dramatic, death-defying stunt to get a message to Congress.
He’d simply pick up the phone and call John Boehner or Mitch McConnell. His call would not go to voice mail or get shortstopped by an aide. It would go straight to the congressman himself.
All, then, that Hughes needed to do to deliver his message legally was to contribute or promise to spend a few million dollars to elect some carefully chosen political puppets.
It would not necessarily have to cost nearly as much as the $889 million that the Kochs’ political machine has budgeted for the 2016 campaigns. Congress has been had for less.
“Well,” you might say, “what about people who don’t have that kind of money? People for whom even a $25 contribution is a big deal?”
You would be missing the point as the U.S. Supreme Court sees it.
To a majority of that court, what matters is not whether you have that kind of money to spend on electing candidates of your choice.
What matters is only your right to spend it, if you have it.
In such a fantasy world, everyone is equal. Doug Hughes is no less equal than David Koch. Charles Koch is no more equal than Doug Hughes. Anatole France would understand.
This distorted version of equality did not originate four years ago in the court’s infamous Citzens United decision, which freed corporations and unions to spend without limit on behalf of or in opposition to political candidates. Citizens grew from the weeds the court had planted in 1976 when it first confused freedom of speech with the freedom to spend money. The result has been to have paid speech drown out free speech.
An ordinary citizen like Hughes could stand on the Capitol steps, bellowing his message through a megaphone, and only the Capitol police would hear him.
But a David Koch needs only to whisper, and the entire Congress will hear him, loud and clear.
We have had nearly two generations to save our country from the corruption encouraged by the court. There was a brief spell of progress represented by the McCain-Feingold act restricting so-called soft money. Its passage owed mightily to Doris Haddock, the 89-year-old lady known as Granny D, who walked – yes, walked – across the entire country in support of campaign finance reform. She too was arrested at the Capitol – for a demonstration that featured a reading of the Declaration of Independence.
Presaging the letter carrier from Ruskin, she told the judge that “some of us do not have much power, except to put our bodies in the way of an injustice…”
McCain-Feingold became law a year later, only to have it eviscerated at first chance by the John Roberts court. To accomplish his subversive purpose, Roberts had stretched the Citizens United case outrageously far beyond the limited issue the two sides had presented to the court.
Granny D died four months later, in March 2010 – of chronic respiratory illness, they said, not from a broken heart.
An article in the Tampa Bay Times, which had the inside story on Hughes’ unconventional mail delivery, noted his success in raising the profile of campaign reform, if only temporarily. It reported that television broadcasts used those two words 3,190 times during the ensuing two days.
But it did not likely make much of an impression at the luxurious Capitol Hill Club, a mere few blocks from Hughes’ landing site, where Republican legislators entertain their benefactors and work the phones for even more money.
If they thought of Hughes at all in that place, it was only to fume over another lapse in security – a security that insulates them as much from public opinion as from physical danger.
To people like that, Hughes is a fool.
To most of the rest of us, he’s a hero.
But who cares what we think?
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives in Western North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
