Memo to Kevin Drennan: If you want to make laws… run and get elected.

By Rubashov

Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker was born in 1898, served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the Great War, and afterwards studied medicine, specializing in psychiatry. He practiced in Berlin and was an early, vocal critic of National Socialism. He got out, just in time, and made it to the United States in 1938, where he practiced internal medicine and psychiatry.

Dr. Hutschnecker advised both Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Richard Nixon became his patient. Dr. Hutschnecker was an advocate of modern daycare for preschool children, advising President Nixon of its importance especially to children in lower socio-economic communities.

Dr. Hutschnecker wrote numerous professional articles and several books, many on the subject of power and the attractions of power. In 1974, he wrote The Drive for Power and became, for a time, a national figure for suggesting that politicians be required to take a psychiatric examination before running for office.

Dr. Hutschnecker warned against giving political power to those who are gratified through exercising power over others. He wrote of the almost sexual interplay between power and control on the one hand and fear and submission on the other. The act of breaking someone’s will, forcing someone to do something that runs counter to conscience, has some of the elements of rape in it.

Of course, the democratic process depends on consent. Instead of fear, agreement is reached. Submission is done willingly. More human but perhaps less gratifying for some.

Which brings us to Speaker Craig Coughlin’s behavior at the State House on Thursday. Would you want to turn him down for a date?

Late Friday afternoon, Kevin Drennan published a column in the New Jersey Globe that chastised the objects of Speaker Coughlin's demands. In his column, Drennan argues that he should get to make laws that elected legislators – the elected representatives of the people – must obey. Oh, and we mean obey… at the point of a gun.

Kevin Drennan is one of the eight unelected patronage jobholders on the State Capitol Joint Management Commission. In fact, he’s the Commission’s chairman.

Drennan isn’t a doctor – although he did lobby in Trenton for the health care industry – and neither are any of the other Commission members. Nevertheless, a few weeks back, they decided to restrict who could enter the State House – the nexus of the Legislative branch of what is still, on paper, a representative democracy.

Those restricted included the elected representatives of the people sent there by a vote of the people. Yep, no kidding, a direct challenge to democracy itself.

They claimed they did so in response to a pandemic that most people have come to accept and to live with. How many masks do you see at the supermarket – aside from the employees who are paid to wear them? People shake hands, they hug, they kiss. Perhaps they don’t where Kevin Drennan comes from, but we know that place and we’re pretty sure they do.

Those of us who can remember when the concept of nuclear war seemed real enough to send school children scurrying under their desks on regular exercises know that you cannot use fear to hold power over people forever. People get bored. Hey Kevin, there are more nukes around today than back then. More countries have them. Bigger ones and less secure, but people gave up being afraid, because being afraid is a shit way to go through life. Kevin, it’s time to crawl out from under that desk.

But is this all really a response to a pandemic? Is that the actual reason – or simply the given one.

There’s another, more logical reason, and it’s about power. The power to break the wills of all those suburban women – from Kennedy liberals to Trumpy populists – who showed up and invaded the State House in response to bill S-2173 during the 2018-19 legislative session. This was legislation to end religious exemptions for mandatory immunization. Yes Kevin, we remember. You called them “uncivil” too. Funny, you using that word so much in your column.

We remember the corruption done on behalf of the health care and pharmaceutical industries that want to make their products mandatory and their profits permanent. The attempts to fix the vote to get the bill passed. Playing musical chairs with elected legislators on key committees. Punishing those who refused to submit. And the threat to “go to war” with all those suburban women. It resulted in dozens of formal ethics complaints.

Well, on Thursday Speaker Coughlin took it a step further. He used men with guns. Was this what was meant by “go to war”?

It does seem like some could use the counsel of a Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Unfortunately, he’s been gone twenty years, but you can borrow his book if you like…

"It is safer for a politician to go to a whore house than to see a psychiatrist."
Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker

“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell