When Women Were Dragons(36)
MR. ARENS: But your passport application was denied.
DR. GANTZ: This is true.
[Transcriber’s note: Several moments pass.]
CHAIRMAN: The witness is taking an awfully long time to finish that thought.
DR. GANTZ: Well, there isn’t much more to say, is there? I applied for a passport—which is a normal and reasonable act for a citizen to request travel documents from their own government—and those documents were denied without adequate explanation from said government. My entire career has been focused on the expansion of health and science on behalf of my country, an act of patriotism and love of the American system that I still possess even now, despite having been removed from my position at the National Institutes of Health, for reasons that are apparently classified.
MR. ARENS: Mr. Chairman, the witness is engaging in speeches and not simply answering the question.
CHAIRMAN: Dr. Gantz, you are not a revolutionary on a barricade. You are required to simply answer the question. No more speeches, please.
DR. GANTZ: My apologies, sirs. You must understand that this situation has rattled me to my core. My lab has been ransacked and my students and patients have all been questioned by federal authorities—one poor woman was taken by strange men in an unmarked car, right in front of her children, her children, sirs, and detained for a day and a half. Unacceptable. No one has explained the rationale for any of this. The fact that my passport was denied is simply another tally mark in a long and vexing series of assaults on personal liberties, perpetrated by my own government, which makes me question the value and health of our freedoms in the United States of America.
MR. ARENS: This is the land of the free, sir! You would do well to show some respect!
DR. GANTZ: Is it? Are you sure? Do you not read the news? Not only are American citizens in places like Little Rock and Greensboro organizing as we speak and demanding that their country grant them a modicum of the basic rights guaranteed in the Constitution, but this very committee has tied itself up in knots addressing threats to this nation that simply do not exist while turning a blind eye as law enforcement commits acts that are not only unlawful, but also un-American. This is happening in American cities. It is happening in American laboratories. It is happening in universities and social service agencies and in the tiny offices of groups dedicated to the notion of justice for all.
MR. ARENS: Mr. Chairman, the witness is both hostile and belligerent.
CHAIRMAN: Dr. Gantz, you would do well to remember where you are.
DR. GANTZ: I know exactly where I am. I’m sitting with some of the very same men who commissioned my research into the phenomenon of spontaneous—
CHAIRMAN: Dr. Gantz.
DR. GANTZ: Spontaneous dragoning, and who subsequently destroyed—
CHAIRMAN: DR. GANTZ.
DR. GANTZ: And somehow have declared my work both nonexistent AND classified, which of course is an assault on both reason and facts.
CHAIRMAN: COUNSEL, RESTRAIN YOUR CLIENT. And please explain to him the unpleasant reality of being found in contempt of Congress.
[Transcriber’s note: Several moments pass.]
MR. ARENS: Dr. Gantz, when you applied for your passport, you were asked to sign an affidavit declaring that you were not, nor have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party, moreover that you would not ever be tempted to join. You were also asked to sign an affidavit declaring that you were not, nor have you ever been, a member of the Wyvern Research Collective, moreover that you would not ever be tempted to join. Do you remember receiving those documents?
DR. GANTZ: I do.
MR. ARENS: And yet, those documents were strangely absent from your passport application.
DR. GANTZ: They were not strangely anything. I simply chose not to include them.
MR. ARENS: Do you know what happened to the affidavits?
DR. GANTZ: I threw them in the trash.
MR. ARENS: You admit this.
DR. GANTZ: Freely.
CHAIRMAN: Let the record show that the witness admits to tampering with federal documents.
[Transcriber’s note: Several more moments pass. Witness’s counsel whispers urgently while witness shakes his head.]
DR. GANTZ: I’m not sure why it’s such an astonishment. They were my documents. They said clearly at the top that they were supplemental. I looked up the statute, and learned that I was under no obligation to sign them unless compelled by a U.S. court. I was under no such compulsion, so I knew I was in my rights to ignore them. There is no law against throwing trash into the trash.
MR. ARENS: It may surprise you that we have those very documents here.
DR. GANTZ: It does not. Did you read my note?
CHAIRMAN: Let the record show that atop the affidavit declaring an unequivocal renunciation of Communism, that the witness wrote, “Nice try, assholes,” thereby necessitating an additional indecency charge. Because what you wrote on the other affidavit is considered classified, it will not be in view of this committee, but will instead be forwarded to the Subcommittee on Foreign and Domestic Threats, to determine whether it is an act of war.
DR. GANTZ: This is preposterous and you know it. This committee is a disgrace and a joke.
CHAIRMAN: The witness is belligerent. We hereby hold him in contempt.
18.
Winter settled in, and the world froze.
And then it thawed.
And then it flooded.
And then, once again, everything overran with heat and green and aching buds and swollen flowers and life in abundance. I was in too foul a mood to notice. Summer hit early that year, and even in early May, we sweltered in our classrooms and sweated through our uniforms, ending each day red-faced and reeking, and desperate for our release in June. At last, eighth grade ended, with its litany of indignities and hurt feelings and oppressive boredom. The school doors opened and we filed out of our elementary school lives and our elementary school selves and we awaited something new. High school. Or something. And though it wouldn’t be that much of a change—we were all going to the same place, largely—the transition felt significant. We were leaving a part of ourselves behind.