Junius to the Mayor of Washington, D.C.

"Junius" was the pseudonym of a writer who penned a series of public letters in the late 1760s and early 1770s criticizing the ministry of the Duke of Grafton for its corruption and encroachment on the historical rights of Englishmen. The letters were little masterpieces of irony and sarcasm, though cloaked in highly formal and polite language. I take quill keyboard in hand to revive the pseudonym and, I hope, something of the author's style, however inferior it inevitably will be to the original, in this, the first of a series of occasional letters to various political notables, both high and low.

Vincent C. Gray
Mayor of Washington, in the District of Columbia

Sir:

I will be pardoned for holding to the belief that the naming of the capital city of these United States after the late President Washington was originally intended as a mark of honor, conferred by a grateful nation upon a man justifiably known to posterity as the Father of his Country. That this very tangible encomium has, based on the evidence of my own eyes, been permitted to lose much of its luster is a shame that has many authors, among whom Your Excellency has played no small role through a display of complacency and inattention to the virtues of good order.

I make reference to McPherson Park, a plot of public land situate two blocks from the presidential palace, and upon which significant funds were expended barely a year ago in a program of beautification, with many improvements being made, such as the laying of flower beds and the reseeding of the lawn. It was recently my misfortune to wander through this park – but stay; “wander” is not the word I want, implying, as it does, a somewhat idle perambulation. No, Sir, it is better said that I picked my way with painstaking care through a rambling aggregation of miserable hovels that at first I took for a leper colony, peopled, as it was, and still is, with the most scrofulous and wretched-looking assemblage of degraded human beings ever seen in such numbers within the close environs of the seat of government.

However, I do an injustice to lepers everywhere, inasmuch as their affliction is an unhappy occurrence of nature concerning which no moral taint should attach to the sufferers. Nay, these base louts, who style themselves as Occupiers, are the products of an overindulgent society that has encouraged a false claim to entitlement, a demand for the necessities, and even the luxuries, of life, in exchange for which they are unwilling and unprepared to offer even a modicum of effort. Their only sacrifice is the abandonment of the most basic habits of personal hygiene, which loss seems to strike them as no sacrifice at all, but has created, rather, a funk whereby these human cattle cheerfully recognize their own. Above their camp flutter, incongruously, the banners of both anarchy and Russian despotism, and the foulest stews of London do not contain a larger concentration of cutpurses, unhorsed highwaymen, beggars, opium eaters, whores and bedlamites.

And yet, Your Excellency, this secular conventicle of radical levelers is suffered to occupy a public square without let or hindrance - or official license - in a perpetual affront to, and on the charge of, the tax-paying citizenry of the city. They prowl about the park, in their habiliments of canting, self-righteous outrage, fouling their own nests and creating a breeding ground for rats and pestilence. The most slatternly hog-drover would not bed his charges down in this sty, nor would the least discriminating of carrion-eaters alight except in the uttermost extremity of hunger.

It is indeed a wonder to see your constabulary – on your orders, Sir! - circumambulate the park, as if they were no more than gawkers at a zoological garden, rather than drive these Visigoths out of the city under the lawful blows of their truncheons. The deficiencies of our country’s educational system are too well advertised to require a lengthy animadversion by the writer on such a painful subject; nonetheless, I profess myself amazed that a man may gain the distinction of the mayoralty of the nation’s capital without ever having learned to secern citizens exercising their Constitutional right to free speech from a mob of parasites for whom the Constitution is but an obstacle to the overthrow of liberty, and an inconvenient cattle guard preventing their trampling of property rights. May it please God that a latent spasm of common sense may supply the want of your schooling before the city succumbs further to mindless violence and epidemic disease.