Waiting for Citizen Godel

Short story revolving around Godel’s application for US citizenship. There is a well-known episode from Godel’s life, where Einstein and Oscar Morgenstern took Godel for his citizenship oath. Godel, as a fastidious stickler for logic, started telling the judge about a loophole in the constitution which could allow the formation of a dictatorship in the US. Thankfully, the judge was not interested and Godel obtained his citizenship. The current story revolves around this incident, along with some political commentary about the perceived lack of respect for the Constitution in recent times (the author, writing in 2005, may have had the “War on Terror” in mind). There isn’t any math here but it does involve a couple of great mathematicians and references to Veblen and von Neumann, to boot, not to mention Einstein himself.