My 46 Years of Contempt of Congress
“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 governmen
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
