[Update 10/03/2025: According to social media posts today, Gateway National Recreation Area has not closed yet. Perhaps the National Park Service is more shut down this time. Some good news is yet reported with the abundance of bad. Hopefully the gates will not be erected.]
Long before COVID mania, Western civilization had become absurd. It started with theory, with ur-absurdists like Rousseau and Kant laying the foundation of modern culture (if “foundation” is the proper term for destruction as opposed to a solid base for construction). Kant contradicted centuries of honest if misguided philosophers by stating that contradictions do not just exist in individual human minds but are built into reality and reason. This metastasized into the arts and sciences, including modern art and culture (and its “Theatre of the Absurd”) and quantum mechanics, which theories assert that, to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, a particle has no identity—does not exist—until it is measured by man. (In other words, quantum theorists do not just state that subatomic particles and their movement are not just influenced by human measurement but they do not have identity—there is nothing to measure—until a consciousness perceives them.) One of the most famous quantum physicists is Erwin Schrödinger. His well-known thought experiment posits a cat in a sealed box infused with atomic radiation. As far as the theory is concerned, the cat is considered both alive and dead until he is observed by a human.
These antinomies were once confined to theorists ensconced in prestigious educational and research institutions, but they could not be confined there indefinitely absent better, more rational ideas. Now, they are everywhere, in popular culture, on the streets, and in politics.
Once again, the United States federal government has shut down.
The statist rivals that purportedly control funding of the government could not agree on funding it, so it is shut down.
Is it really shut down?
Yes. I recall during one of the recent shut downs, a friend (and reader) who works in the court system was not getting paid during the shut down—but had to work anyway because she was considered “essential”. (And surely, if a government should do be doing anything, it should be adjudicating court sessions.) “Non-essential” government workers were not working, and certainly not getting paid. They were promised they would be paid in full for every day they didn’t work, and those considered essential would be reimbursed for the days they did work.
But is it really shut down?
No.
Of course not. Not only are those courts still in session, and those police still out in full force, but at least one part of government is even more active than usual.
During recent government shutdowns in 2013 and 2018, the incomparable Mark Steyn reported on the National Park Service and their “rangers” (law enforcement officers) as well as their peculiar efforts to shut down open-air spaces and occlude the scenic view of monuments visible from public roads. More abstract and philosophical than almost anyone else in a myopic, misologist culture, Steyn observed that these absurd shenanigans were representative of a government’s relation to its citizens that was not only absurd but fundamentally unAmerican.
In “Shutdown Simulacrum” on October 4, 2013, Steyn wrote: “The perfect symbol of the shutdown-simulacrum so far has been the World War II Memorial. This is an open-air facility on the National Mall — that’s to say, an area of grass with a monument at the center. By comparison with, say, the IRS, the National Parks Service is not usually one of the more controversial government agencies. But, come ‘shutdown,’ they’re reborn as the shock troops of the punitive bureaucracy. Thus, they decided to close down an unfenced open-air site — which oddly enough requires more personnel to shut than it would to keep it open.
“So the Parks Service dispatched their own vast army to the World War II Memorial to ring it with barricades and yellow ‘Police Line — Do Not Cross’ tape strung out like the world’s longest ‘We Support Our Troops’ ribbon. For good measure, they issued a warning that anybody crossing the yellow line would be liable to arrest — or presumably, in extreme circumstances, the same multi-bullet ventilation that that mentally ill woman from Connecticut wound up getting from the coppers. In a heartening sign that the American spirit is not entirely dead, at least among a small percentage of nonagenarians, a visiting party of veterans pushed through the barricades and went to honor their fallen comrades, mordantly noting for reporters that, after all, when they’d shown up on the beach at Normandy it too had not been officially open. …
“The World War II Memorial exists thanks to some $200 million in private donations — plus $15 million or so from Washington: In other words, the feds paid for the grass. But the thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today’s America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at the government’s pleasure, whether it’s your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades.” Even though it was published at National Review (to which Steyn no longer contributes), I highly recommend reading the entire piece.
In “Weaponizing the Shutdown”, Steyn, a sort of religious conservative H.L. Mencken (a contradiction, but these are contradictory times) continued to fulminate on the latest political absurdities inherent in twenty-first century government shutdowns. (This piece was anthologized in The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, and you can read my review of that book here.) “If a government shuts down in the forest and nobody hears it, that’s the sound of liberty dying. The so-called shutdown is, as noted last week, mostly baloney: Eighty-three percent of the supposedly defunded government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the 800,000 soi-disant ‘non-essential’ workers have been assured that, as soon as the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full for all the days they’ve had at home.
“But the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged ‘National Park Service,’ a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns. The NPS has spent the last two weeks behaving as the paramilitary wing of the DNC, expending more resources in trying to close down open-air, unfenced areas than it would normally do in keeping them open. It began with the war memorials on the National Mall — that’s to say, stone monuments on pieces of grass under blue sky. It’s the equivalent of my New Hampshire town government shutting down and deciding therefore to ring the Civil War statue on the village common with yellow police tape and barricades.
“Still, the NPS could at least argue that these monuments were within their jurisdiction — although they shouldn’t be. Not content with that, the NPS shock troops then moved on to insisting that privately run sites such as the Claude Moore Colonial Farm and privately owned sites such as Mount Vernon were also required to shut. When the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway declined to comply with the government’s order to close (an entirely illegal order, by the way), the ‘shut down’ Park Service sent armed agents and vehicles to blockade the hotel’s driveway.
“Even then, the problem with a lot of America’s scenic wonders is that, although they sit on National Park Service land, they’re visible from some distance. So, in South Dakota, having closed Mount Rushmore the NPS storm troopers additionally attempted to close the view of Mount Rushmore — that’s to say a stretch of the highway, where the shoulder widens and you can pull over and admire the stony visages of America’s presidents. Maybe it’s time to blow up Washington, Jefferson & Co. and replace them with a giant, granite sign rising into the heavens bearing the chiseled inscription ‘DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING DOWN THERE.’”
Steyn goes on to report about hapless foreign visitors to Yellowstone National Park forcibly confined to the Old Faithful Inn by armed National Park Service, forbidden to look at the famous geyser during its periodic eruptions. The “shut down” Park Service even dispatched officers to surround the geyser so that, even if the visitors were to photograph an eruption from inside the hotel, the photographs would be ruined by the functionaries standing in front of it and spoiling the view. “I wonder what those Japanese and Australian tourists prevented from photographing bison or admiring a geyser make of U.S. claims to be ‘the land of the free.’ When a government shutdown falls in the forest, Americans should listen very carefully. The government is telling you something profound and important about how it understands the power relationship between them and you.”
Reportedly, this is happening again. The National Park Service runs Gateway National Recreation Area, a mostly open-air site at the northern end of the New Jersey shore on Sandy Hook near Highlands, New Jersey and Brooklyn that consists mostly of ocean and bay beaches and historic military facilities. Typically, there is no gate at the park “entrance”. From Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day, NPS staff collect parking fees or admit those who have already purchased a parking pass. After Labor Day, there are typically no staffers in sight at the entrance, and anyone can drive through, where they could be generally free—if they managed to avoid the sometimes heavy traffic enforcement—to roam, frolic, and gambol to their heart’s and mind’s desire. (Bruce Springsteen was arrested for “driving under the influence of alcohol” at Gateway National Recreation Area in 2020 even though he had one drink, was not involved in an accident or moving violation, and demonstrated no signs of impairment, but the absurdity of modern “DUI” enforcement is a separate but related topic.) The area had been affected by Trump administration budget cuts, with fewer rangers patrolling beachgoers and motorists (a good thing) and lifeguards absent from most beaches for the entire summer season (a bad thing—the first things to be cut and furloughed—the powerless people who actually serve the public—are the last things that should be). But the beaches and historic military sites were open. Swimming at unguarded beaches was officially prohibited, but the prohibition was unenforced.
I am reading that the NPS, during this latest government “shutdown”, has or will erect a fence at the Gateway National Recreation Area entrance to bar visitors. Enthusiasts are upset as this weekend’s weather forecast predicts perhaps the last weekend of decent beach weather this year. (Nudists are particularly crestfallen as the area includes Gunnison Beach, one of the few clothing-optional beaches on the Eastern seaboard.) Most observers, after a lifetime of statist indoctrination, are convinced this is all about safety. (“One of the top priorities of the rangers is visitor safety.”) Even if that were true, a coddled and cosseted citizenry is not safe—not from the mostly comparatively minor risks of a free lifestyle and certainly not from an overbearing, too often deadly, government. Steyn again, who recognizes that this is not fundamentally about safety: “The government does not own this land; the Park Service are merely the janitorial staff of ‘we the people’ (to revive an obsolescent concept). No harm will befall the rocks and rivers by posting a sign at the entrance saying ‘No park ranger on duty during government shutdown. Proceed beyond this point at your own risk.’ And, at the urban monuments, you don’t even need that: It is disturbing that minor state officials even presume to have the right to prevent the citizenry walking past the Vietnam Wall.”
Access to these parks and monuments, even low-maintenance, open-air parks, even from a distance, is about the only thing that is shut down during these “shutdowns” (other than the wages and salaries of government employees, which is temporary). The absurd degree to which the National Park Service expends more money and effort than usual just to remind a beleaguered citizenry that the “land of the free” is now the land of government guardianship and control should be concerning, even alarming, to more of those beleaguered citizens. Whether or not government should be running parks and monuments, it certainly should not be expending sedulous effort to prohibit ostensibly free people from so much as looking at them from a distance, shutdown or no shutdown.
Like the cat in Schrödinger’s box, the U.S. government is now (mostly) alive and (symbolically) dead, both shut down and, in some of its most enjoyable areas (areas it shouldn’t own or manage), more authoritarian than ever.