Shortly after the 2024 presidential election, I recounted my fondness for spitting on federal buildings. Well, not all of them. In the summer of 2012, I devoted most of my expectoration while running around the National Mall to the brutalist behemoth that is the Department of Human Services building. “The form of that ugly, blocky, brutalist building perversely unites with the insidious functions of what often goes on inside, at least when Democrats control the federal government,” I wrote.
It was an especially malicious building in 2012. Bureaucrats within, recently invigorated by Obamacare, were bringing the full force of their coercive power down on employers — including religious organizations such as the Little Sisters of the Poor — so that their health plans would cover contraceptives, including abortifacients. Turning it into a spittoon seemed the least I, a protesting (though not Protestant) Catholic, could do.
Some would go further, if they had their druthers. I recently returned from a visit to the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich., one of my favorite places to be at this time of year (or any). Acton does many great things. Later this year, it will be partnering with National Review Institute, the Russell Kirk Center, and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation for a William F. Buckley Jr. centenary event. (Another such event is coming up next week.) One of Acton’s many worthy endeavors is the journal Religion & Liberty (to which I’ve contributed). The spring 2025 issue features, among its many delights, an interview with the poet and playwright J. C. Scharl. The whole interview is worth your time. But one portion of it drew my attention:
Fun question: If you could blow up one public building, a la Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, without endangering life or risking imprisonment, which one would it be?
The Hubert H. Humphrey Federal Building, which houses the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is truly atrocious. It’s speculation, of course, but sitting in that building all day must be devastating to a person’s imagination and ability to think about human beings as complex, irreducible individuals. The building itself insists that all problems are solvable through the exertion of brute force and through eliminating complexities, flourishes, the little chiaroscuros that are both human personality and human history. It’s a totalitarian nightmare come to life. If the diabolic hierarchy is truly a bureaucracy, its office buildings look like this one. The medieval mind, for all its delight in horrors, could not have conceived of something as appalling as this; in fact, the Humphrey Building makes the burning wastes of Bosch’s various Hells seem whimsical as a carnival. Blowing this building up would be too easy; it demands the reparation of being pulled to bits by human hands. If it could be destroyed without harming anyone or resulting in imprisonment, I’d gladly take up a sledgehammer and get cracking!
This is all hypothetical, of course. But if we can’t destroy the building, we should at least try to shrink the department inside of it.