5.  WHAT, ME RADICAL?
    by L. Neil Smith 
    Exclusive to TLE

I recently gave a copy of my new book _Lever Action_ to one of my
daughter's skating friends, a pretty, fascinatingly bright 16-year-old
being raised as a genuine Algore-voting, wine-and-cheese-gobbling,
Volvo-driving, heartbleeding, bedwetting socialist ... er, liberal.

We've had a couple of political knockdown-dragouts in the time I've known
her. (Her mother's amiably combative, too.) She can be out-argued. I'm
three times her age, twice her size, and have been butting heads this way
since the Kennedy Administration. But she will not be intimidated out of
the position she defends so nobly (having been indoctrinated into it by her
parents and the public school system they adore). Her poise and courage are
admirable. The only time I ever threw her off is when I told her (unfairly
but incontrovertibly) that she'll find herself agreeing with me in another
10 years.

_Lever Action_ is my only nonfiction book, so far, a collection of articles
and speeches I've written over the past 20 years when I was supposed to be
writing novels. My daughter's friend was delighted with the gift. The next
time I saw her, she reported that she'd taken it to school where one of her
teachers read part of one essay to the class -- and immediately proclaimed
me to be ... a "radical".

A "radical"?

Me?

Of course I've been proud to wear the label since I was about my little
friend's age, follower of Rand that I was, one of Heinlein's children. But
it got me thinking about what I mean by "radical" and what other
people seem to mean. No doubt to the teacher, I'm what my grandmother used
to mean whenever she called me a "communist".

I was a full-fledged Randite at that point in my life, highly annoying to
others, writing a highly annoying column for the highly annoying campus
paper during the highly annoying Goldwater-Johnson campaign. My grandmother
had all the political acumen of a tub of Mazola oil. What she meant by
"radical" was someone who is not only unorthodox (and highly
annoying), but ill-mannered enough to be that way in public, embarrassing
her in front of her bridge club.

Since then, I've been accused of being "radical", in that same
way, by those who claim to be what I've been all along: libertarian. What
they mean, I think, is that I'm inconveniently principled. I insist on
stepping forward for what I believe (and what they claim to believe, as
well, when it isn't costing them anything) no matter how hard it gets, no
matter what I stand to lose by refusing to fudge just a little, no matter
how silly I make myself (or them) look.

I've lost plenty, and I've written about it, so I'm not going to repeat
myself here. Needless to say, I don't have a huge gaggle of right-wing,
anti-abortion, Lincoln-worshipping sugar daddies I have to mollify by
trimming the edges of my convictions. I'm accustomed to looking silly. I
must have looked silly to my Soviet affairs expert editor at Random House
when I predicted, based on what investment guys call
"fundamentals", the collapse of the USSR a decade before it
happened. I know I looked silly when I predicted that Y2K would amount to
nothing. I'm accustomed to looking silly -- and being proven right.

Let me tell you what my "radicalism" looks like to me, from the
inside. But instead of using it (as I've been trying for the last 40 years,
to fix a broken civilization), let's limit ourselves to dealing with a flat
tire.

"Flat?" is the first thing you'll hear moderates, gradualists,
crybabies, and general-purpose nitpickers (MGGNs) whimper. "How can
you say it's flat? Isn't that unduly harsh? Won't you just turn people off,
talking like that? Isn't it really only flat on the bottom?"

Obviously you can't begin to fix a problem until you identify it correctly.
Is that "radical"? Or is it simply the minimum performance
acceptable under the circumstances, regardless of how others see it?

Next, you must open up the trunk and get out the jack, the jack-handle, and
a tire-iron.

"But wait!" scream the MGGNs again. "Don't you see what
you're committing yourself to, opening that trunk? What will people think
about the cold, unbending tools you're threatening that poor, innocent tire
with? Where's the love in that tire iron? Where's the warmth in that jack?
Can't we use kinder, gentler tools? You're going to get your hands dirty --
and make us look bad doing it!"

All of this is noise, of course, and irrelevant. Either you change the tire
and get rolling again, or you sit on the shoulder bandying words with
Nerf-brained droolers until the county repaves the road over you. Guess
which choice most of the libertarian movement has made for 30 years.

"Be realistic -- we have to compromise!"

By jacking the car only halfway up? By removing only three of the lug nuts?
To switch metaphors for a moment, by having the surgeon only remove half
the cancer? Otherwise, you might look arrogant, mightn't you? You might
look intransigent. You might get well.

"Can't we leave the old wheel on, for the sake of tradition?"

If at this point, you don't utter the magic words, "Blow me," or
something like them, you're a better man than I am. But you're still a
"radical" if you insist on looking past all the hot air and free
advice and understand that the tire has to be changed. It's a simple,
mechanical necessity.

Likewise, to me, what others call "radical" is simple, mechanical
necessity. If our country is a police state, there's no future in
euphemizing it. If a law is unconstitutional, the baboons who passed and
enforce it are criminals who belong in jail. If Republicans and Democrats
spout crap, it's crap. If our own leaders are cheap crooks, they've got to
be pitched out on their ears. If that's impossible, somebody has to get in
their way.

Simple, mechanical necessity. If you can't be a howitzer, be a hemorrhoid.

Simple, mechanical necessity. If some MGGN denounces you as an
"extremist", rest assured it's because he doesn't believe in
anything himself. If an MGGN dismisses your ideas as
"simplistic", it's because he hasn't any of his own. (My wife
points out that if you make a problem complicated enough, you can't be
blamed for not solving it, or even trying.) The world is full of MGGNs who
have ideological gangrene and lack the guts to tell the doctor, "Go
ahead and amputate."

Simple mechanical necessity declares that if you have principles you want
others to follow, then you'd damn well better express them unambiguously
and follow them yourself. That's all I've ever done. It's all I'll ever do.
And I guess that's what makes me a "radical".

How about you?
- - -
Right-wing myth to one side, "republic" and "democracy"
mean the same thing, one in Latin, the other in Greek. The thing to
remember is that they're both just another form of collectivism, of
socialism, under which your neighbors may vote you into the poorhouse -- or
the grave -- if they want what you have. Those who profess to care about
their nation and its place in history must expend every effort to limit
this possibility or to eliminate it altogether.
-- Alexander Hope, _Looking Forward_
 From _Hope_, by Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith  Mazel Freedom Press (forthcoming)

(RJT: Me?  Yup!  :-)

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