Next time a liberal gets all poetryish with you, give ’em a few blades from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

To the States

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

(That’s the whole poem)

.

. . . or a later poem, in the same book:

.

To The States [To Identify the 16th, 17th, or 18th Presidentiad]

Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing?
What deepening twilight-scum floating atop of the waters,
Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?
What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your arctic freezings!)
Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that the President?
Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep, for reasons;
(With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots we all duly awake,
South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake.)

Doesn’t sound to me like ol’ Walt was a big fan of Washington, D.C.

[He was a conscientious objector in the first Civil War, but volunteered as a male nurse to wounded soldiers, and this shaped his opinion of war.]