Party Crashing A paleo's-eye view at the Star Trek convention of the American Right
By Marcus Epstein
After showing the federal security guards my driver's license, I walked through the metal detector. Beep! Between my suit and overcoat, I must have had over a dozen pockets, and I didn't feel like figuring out which one held my change, so they scanned my jacket and I walked through again. This time I made it without trouble, but there were still old ladies waiting for security guards to pass wands over them to make sure they weren't hiding knives beneath their broaches.
No, I was not getting aboard an airplane but entering the 32nd annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). With the exclusion of the year I was abroad, I have made the three-hour drive from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where I am now a senior, to the conference every year of college. In the past, it was held at a hotel in Crystal City, Virginia, but this year it took place at the Reagan Building in Washington, D.C.
In many ways this is appropriate; a giant federal building next door to the headquarters of the IRS is an ironic comment on conservatives who have made peace with big government. The guards and metal detectors represent the movement's main passion, the national-security state. And the fact that the only reason they decided to move it is because the building is named after Ronald Reagan suggests attendees? primary preoccupation: putting a simulacrum of our 40th president on everything from the $10 bill to Mt. Rushmore. A number of people at the conference were wearing shirts and hats that piously stated, "God, Reagan, Bush."
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