Capitol Ideas/Mitch Snyder in Hell

...And we will encourage that...

...Mitch Snyder leaned forward intently in his seat, like a hungry virus probing for soft spots in the body politic...

...He was circumspect, judicious, obviously an intelligent man, but one point he wanted us all to know was that he was "sensitive to the needs of the people involved-I hope there isn't any question about that...

...Navy to change the name of a submarine, whieh had been "obscenely" christened Corpus Christi...

...What is interesting about Mitch is that he is a fanatic...

...District Judge Charles Richey stayed the eviction order and now there's a possibility of a full-scale trial...

...A TV reporter asked him where she should station her camera crew...

...Three or four cats were stretched out two-dimensionally on the wooden floors...

...He speaks with rare affection for his time in prison, which he spent reading books, organizing work stoppages, enjoying the inmates' company, and discussing tactics with the Ber-rigans...

...Hearing him discuss the case in terms of "need" and "sensitivity" made me wonder if we were not now a society whose immune system had broken down in the face of assaults mounted on behalf of the poor, the homeless, the deprived, the needy, minorities, the "underprivileged...

...Later Barbara Bush drove over to Euclid Street a couple of times with "donations of clothing," and told Mitch she would like to get more involved, but, you know, what with the Secret Service and all...

...If we have a model shelter in the nation's capital, they know they will have to provide them in all fifty states," Snyder candidly admitted...

...In July, U.S...

...The Euclid Street building was rented by the community, he said...

...The fashionable congregation, perhaps surprisingly, grew tired of being confronted by this gaunt, accusatory presence looming over the pews, and in the end Mitch Snyder, switching from ideology to pragmatism, gave up his fast...

...He added that CCNV had at one time or another been represented by all the major Washington law firms, including Wilmer Cutler & Pickering and Arnold & Porter...

...The willingness of CCNV members to look after them without financial remuneration is surely commendable...

...These were "vicious, cruel people," and "perjurers" to boot...

...They had offered only a "ridiculous patch job," when earlier they had promised a "model shelter...

...Some of the men and most of the women are mentally abnormal and they are in the shelter as a result of the great emptying out of mental hospitals in recent years-"deinstitutionaliza-tion" as it has been called...

...We can be sure that they won't get rid of him so easily...

...But of course he goes too far...

...Most of the men in the shelter are normal and able-bodied (although some are old), but a good many of these are indirect victims of a welfare system which works perniciously to dissolve families by depriving men of an unavoidable provider role...

...He is 41 years old, divorced with two teenage sons (whom he has not seen for years), and the veteran of more nights spent in vagrant-solidarity on steamy grates, and more well-publicized fasts, than he can offhand recall...

...The result is demoralized males who take to the bottle and the street...

...It's not a relationship we wish to reinforce...

...Nonetheless, he was given a three-year sentence, serving two-and-a-half years...

...We're always on the cutting edge of things, including the law...

...District Court...

...is The American Spectator 's Washington correspondent...

...Over the horizon, of course, is the possibility of a massive increase in federal welfare programs...

...A black youth in a white T-shirt was stretched out on the sofa...

...She's been touched by homelessness and feels need," Snyder told me...

...Mitch means business...

...Tom Bethel...

...N-o-o-o-ooo, I'm not a Communist," said Snyder, as though responding for the hundredth time to the same obtuse question (which I hadn't asked...

...His voice was low and monotonous, his eyes weary and baleful...

...It's not that bad, and certainly better than the open air on a freezing night...

...But he failed to persuade Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown to spend its money on the poor rather than tapestries and organ repairs...

...Mitch said Mrs...

...The Washington Post accused him of throwing "suicide tantrums...

...Snyder told me that "getting your face on television or yourself written about usually is painful," and I believe him...

...By concentrating the homeless in one spot Snyder has succeeded in dramatizing a state of affairs hitherto decentralized and dispersed...

...his docudrama offers from Hollywood (a $50,000 advance to date...

...They want to do socially relevant work," he said, explaining the ease with which he can attract normally high-priced legal help...

...When he died he was the president of a corporation somewhere," said Mitch in a tone indicating that he had pretty much exhausted that topic of conversation...

...Currently about 500 people a night stay there-about four-fifths of them men and the great majority black...

...It turned out that Susan Baker, the wife of Reagan's then chief of staff, had been holding Snyder's hand during the fast and she exerted influence with the Administration...

...Mitch told me it had been not so much a "tea" as a "workshop...

...His heroes are Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Berrigan Brothers, having befriended the last at the Federal Penitentiary in Danbury in the early 1970s...

...All no doubt true, but somehow beside the point...

...his pro bono legal assistance from Cov-ington & Burling...

...By fasting he did persuade the U.S...

...His mother was Jewish and his father a nominal Catholic who "despised organized religion...

...Everything seemed to be run-down, except for the plants in the window...

...The jury box was reserved for media, appropriately enough, and seated therein was Mary McGrory, the left-wing columnist...

...CCNV rejected the offer, the General Services Administration said the building would have to be vacated (the Hyatt Regency Hotel was offering $11 million for the site), and at that point Snyder got on the phone to Covington & Burling...

...He had been in the entertainment business, at one point working as a singer with Eddie Cantor...

...The man from Covington & Burling looked like Seymour Hersh with a haircut...

...He gets his media attention from Mike Wallace and "60 Minutes...

...Snyder is correct in saying that most of these people have simply been discarded and left to die on the streets...

...More recently Mitch and his assistant Carol Fennelly had "tea" with Mrs...

...and now he has this huge, dilapidated federal building a few blocks from the Capitol full of social outcasts to use as his Diggers, his Manichees, his gnostic army (his "constituents," as a Washington Post reporter put it without irony) in his relentless crusade against Western Civilization...

...I can't tell you how much I admire you," Roisman vouchsafed in return...

...presenting arguments to the judge...

...I went to the Federal Courthouse for one of the hearings...

...He added: "Remember, this is Washington, D.C., and there are 3,000 journalists in this town...

...He conveyed a sense of patient resignation, as though enduring the weighty burdens of time and existence...

...He said he was a Christian and by way of corroboration he pointed to a quotation from Pope Paul VI on a wall banner: "Private property does not constitute for anyone an absolute and unconditional right...

...Mitch told me in the corridor that he had grown up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and that his parents had been "devout agnostics...

...By contrast the team from the Justice Department seemed, well, lacking in compassion...

...Mike Wallace notwithstanding, Snyder's press often tends to be critical-surprisingly so considering how attuned he is to the Zeitgeist...

...Mitch Snyder came sauntering down the hall with a small contingent of his homeless "constituents...

...He ended his most recent (fifty-one day) fast when the Reagan Administration agreed to repair the federal building that CCNV has been permitted to run as a shelter for the homeless since January 1984...

...After the hearing she interviewed the assistant counsel Florence Roisman outside the courtroom, telling her at one point how thrilling it had been to see her (a woman, no less...

...We don't believe in owning property...

...He has, as it were, put a lens on the homeless, bringing them into focus (a boon for the media...

...Now he has the homeless as his all-absorbing cause, and he is suing the federal government in U.S...

...They just don't want to be bothered with them because they are difficult and intractable...

...Mitch Snyder, whose goal is the transformation of society as we know it, came sleepily down the stairs...

...Thus, in a society in which Judeo-Christian values are weak, the (ubiquitous) forces of familial dissolution are liable to prevail over the (occasional, optional) ties of matrimony...

...He is called arrogant, self-indulgent, a publicity hound...

...The problem is severe with blacks because welfare "benefits" have been aimed particularly at them, and blacks have not yet found the leadership necessary to escape this destructive bombardment in the guise of compassion...

...The decor was Volunteers of America, with Salvation Army recycling...

...Judge Richey (a Nixon appointee) looked a bit like Earl Warren...

...continued on page 57...

...What we used to call the Watergate entrance," he replied...

...How many people feel strongly enough about anything to stop eating for fifty-one days in the hope of bringing it about...

...Mitch Snyder gives a grudging assent to this anti-welfare analysis, but he is not happy with it because it singles out the welfare state for criticism when in his opinion "nothing works" and therefore the entire society has to be transformed...

...As one writer put it, when CCNV's "tactics became more sophisticated and their demands more concrete, the administration tried a different response: appeasement...

...Entropy was on the increase...

...Nonetheless, Mitch is correct in perceiving that the welfare bureaucrats have no interest in doing anything about these demoralized males who prowl the streets...

...Mitch was charged with transporting a stolen vehicle across state lines, but he maintains that he was merely an innocent passenger in the car...

...We're exciting people to work with and we don't bring irrelevant cases...

...Bush and various Cabinet wives at the Vice President's residence...

...On two nights I went to the 185,000 square-foot four-floor shelter, which has been described as "a model of anarchism in action," "more like a turn-of-the-century insane asylum," and a "hell hole" in which its "800 or so residents raise hell...

...A couple of days before the' 1984 election President Reagan surrendered...

...Welfare employees in Washington in their tens of thousands have things so arranged that, like university faculty without students, they really only have to deal with filing cabinets, charts, meeting-boredom, and budget numbers-not actual people at all...

...With a generous package of welfare benefits available, women with children know they don't absolutely need men, and in turn the men know they are dispensable...

...A lady lawyer was assisting him and hanging around them were interns and activists spending a fashionable summer...

...Characteristically, he brought along an urn containing the ashes of a man who had died of exposure, setting it down amidst the tea cups...

...Bush is a nice lady, but by now he was hopping mad at the Reagan Administration because they had failed to deliver on their promise to renovate the shelter...