such great idleness inside Senate house

"Get Clean for Gene"
was a slogan in 1968 of some of Eugene McCarthy's youthful supporters.  He ran in the Democrat primary as an anti-war candidate -- like Bobby Kennedy -- and McCarthy showed so well in New Hampshire, historians include this as one of the factors contributing to Pres. Lyndon Johnson's decision not to seek re-election.

The phrase "get clean" meant clean-shaven -- the idea was kids with long hair and / or beards etc. would shave & get a hair-cut as an expression of support for the McCarthy candidacy.

Eugene McCarthy wrote a book which was published in 1969, titled The Year Of The People.

In it there's a passage about encountering, on the campaign trail, a group of nuns and clerics singing a song they wrote:  "Make the Scene with Gene."

(?)
That, my friend, was 1968. ...

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--[excerpt]--------- The primaries gave the people a chance to pass a judgment on the war, and in Democratic primary after primary they indicated their opposition.  In part because of that opposition, President Nixon is now free to act -- with little practical danger -- to bring the war in Vietnam to an end and also free to adopt much more open policies toward Russia and mainland China if he is willing.  This would also have been true, I believe, of Hubert Humphrey if he had been elected.

The campaign also helped to strengthen the challenge to the militarization of American life and American foreign policy -- the challenge that was being raised especially by the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate before my campaign, which was pursued by it during the campaign, and which is still being pushed with courage and vigor.

-----[excerpt]------------ *Mark Acuff, the writer, who directed our campaign in Nebraska, said..."Assorted Swedes and Frenchmen have been warning us for years that our inherently most difficult problem will be the adaptation of democracy to a technological culture with a population of hundreds of millions.  Today, however, it is not only the Black and the poor and the young who feel powerless to affect the machinations of the system.  In the last half of the 20th century, the smog-bound, tax-hounded, and radar-trapped suburbanite also feels cast adrift in a sea of technocracy where no one cares and, worse, no one listens."

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<<  That -- was written in 1969.
Old Italian saying:  "The more things change, the more they remain the same.">>

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Meanwhile, back at the ranch -- mh, no, meant back at the 21st century -- Daniel Mendelsohn wrote "Waiting For The Barbarians" And The Government Shutdown in The New Yorker:

-- Why is there such great idleness inside Senate house?
Why are the Senators sitting there, not passing any laws?

          Because the barbarians will arrive today.
          Why should the Senators still be making laws?
          The barbarians, when they come, will legislate.

_______We like to think that all great poetry has perennial significance, is "for the ages"; but these lines, written in Greek in 1898 and first published, in Egypt, in 1904, seem particularly prescient this week.

...The government...has ground to a halt -- not least because the most powerful men in the land, starting with the head of state himself, the emperor (who has "taken his position at the greatest of the city's gates / seated on his throne") and including his toga-wearing, jewel-encrusted officials, are also milling around waiting for the barbarians. 

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2 things --
one:  our society is not that messed up -- we aren't waiting passively, even expectantly, like these stumblers in the poem, for barbarians to come in and take us over
and
two:  government does not always have to be making new laws; we know there's no killing; no stealing.  ...

I imagine the Republicans want to hold off health care until they have a Republican in the White House, then pass it, and say it was their idea.

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{excerpts:  The New Yorker, October 1, 2013.  Mendelsohn.
The Year Of The People, by Eugene J. McCarthy.  Copyright, 1969.  Doubleday and Co., Inc., Garden City, New York}

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