Racing to Washington

By MICHAEL K. NORRIS

I raced to our nation’s capital last weekend because I thought it would be good for our country.  Though I’m not a House member, I felt my presence in Washington could have an effect on the bailout negotiations.  After I arrived Friday afternoon, I did the following as the House worked throughout the weekend:

• Ate at a nice Indian restaurant my wife picked out. Tried squid.
• Bought a miniature metal bicycle at a Georgetown flea market (now on a shelf in my office).
• Browsed the souvenirs at the International Spy Museum.
• Rode the Metro and Circulator bus and dreamed of public transit miracles that could one day come to Connecticut.

I raced to Washington, did all of these things, and I had the same productive effect on the bailout negotiations that John McCain did while he was there. And I didn’t even get a photo op with the President! But talking about embarrassing political moves isn’t the point of this post.

What I really wanted to tell you was how nice it was to meet up with my oldest friend so we could wait in line (in the rain) outside of the National Archives. We passed through a metal detector and stood patiently in a group and waited. Once we were done waiting, we waited a little more until we were allowed to see several well-preserved documents, including The Constitution and The Declaration of Independence.

The writing on those and the other documents there is very, very old. But if you look closely, you can still make out the words. That’s part of the wonder of the printed word: it shows where the content filtering process ended (Imagine the drafts of the Declaration that were wadded up and tossed into a wastebasket – possibly with a miniature basketball hoop attached – in Independence Hall). 

The documents also can’t be modified or deleted. The originals are on paper, so they can’t be accessed online for editing. That’s a problem we all have today: things that are online, and online only, can disappear with a couple of keystrokes and it’s like they were never even written.

For example, I’ve looked online for Christopher Shay’s remarks favoring bank deregulation which seemed to have vanished recently. I haven’t had any luck. I guess if you are a longtime champion of something that’s suddenly politically unpopular (and about to cost the taxpayers a lot of money) it’s good to have moved on from paper and ink.