(American Conservative) — “To be a rebel is to court extinction,” slurred the dipso silent-screen siren Louise Brooks late in her life, when she lived in a shabby Rochester apartment writing astringent recollections of the coarse and ignorant moguls she had known and loathed.
Louise was a contender for the title of the most arrogant, erratic, dissipated beauty in the history of Hollywood. She was also a self-dramatizer par excellence, according to my late friend and hers, the Rochester novelist Henry W. Clune. But she wasn’t wrong about where the rebel road led.
In the waning days of the unlamented 115th Congress, I returned to Capitol Hill for the first time in years to chat with two exemplary rebels in the cause of peace and liberty: Republican Congressmen Jimmy Duncan of Tennessee and Thomas Massie of Kentucky, the two-man Upper South Peace Caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives.
