2.  JULY FORTH!
    by L. Neil Smith 
    Exclusive to TLE

I don't know whether you've noticed it or not, but everybody who was
pretending to be in charge of America the day before September 11, 2001, is
still pretending to be in charge. The difference is that they have more
money to play with, and a hell of a lot more power over our lives.

If this were a decent civilization, of course, the President, the Vice
President, the entire Cabinet, and every military officer above the rank of
lieutenant colonel (or its bureaucratic equivalent) would have cut their
bellies, hanged themselves, or taken a single cartridge and their Webley
revolvers into an adjacent room and done the decent thing. We Americans
would have had an entirely new government to kick around.

This is not a decent society, however. Bill Clinton showed us just how far
gone it is. The multitrillion dollar enterprise that has, over the last
century and a half, systematically deprived Americans of their lives, their
fortunes, and their sacred honor -- in the name of protecting their lives,
their fortunes, and their sacred honor -- and has now been exposed, beyond
the ability of anyone to doubt it, as an utterly empty farce, is being
rewarded exactly as if it had prevented September 11.

What's more, the 280 million survivors of September 11, the men, women, and
children of the United States -- insanely rendered helpless by their
government on the fraudulent excuse that it's protecting them -- those who,
but for the merest fortune, could have been the targets of the airline
terrorists from whom their government failed to protect 3000 innocent
individuals, are now being punished by their government, through explosive
spending being done by a political party that always (falsely) claims to be
against high taxes, and by further restrictions on their already severely
damaged rights, as if they were terrorists, themselves.

This is not entirely a Republican thing. And it would be a tragic mistake
(a mistake Americans are almost certain to make as they begin to chafe at
what's done to them by the despicable Bush administration) to rush into the
waiting arms of the Democrats. Most of the fatal errors that made September
11 not only possible but inevitable -- the brain-dead foreign policy, the
illegal restrictions on an individual's means of self-defense -- were
committed in the first place by the Democrats.

Further, the Democrats and their GOP partners in crime -- together they
constitute the monolithic "Boot On Your Neck" party -- depend on
this political ping-pong game they con voters into playing, year after
election year, in order to steal more and more from us. Both parties -- and
any government they run -- are evil and unspeakably corrupt. If the Clinton
and Bush administrations have shown us nothing else, it is that liberty and
the rule of law have no friends among Democrats or Republicans.

So why do we keep electing this scum, these enemies of everything that's
right or decent? Every couple of years, we punch a hole, fill in a blank,
or flip a lever beside their names. We choose judges, congressmen,
senators, legislators, governors, presidents, and then spend the next
couple of years hoping, praying -- even begging -- that they won't
impoverish us or damage our rights further. The parties do the nominating,
so there's never anything like a free election, and we respond exactly like
halfwitted cattle who think they get to choose which farmer milks and
butcher them, and that this somehow makes it acceptable.

We have been sheeple, yearning for the warmth and illusory safety of the
barn, even at the ultimate price we know will be exacted in the
slaughterhouse.

At this point in the affairs of humanity, a great many educated and
intelligent individuals are in a state of abject despair for our republic
under limited government, conceived by the Founding Fathers. America is an
empire now, they say, an evil one like all empires, and past historical
experience clearly demonstrates that there's no going back.

That's what some individuals believe. In my darkest moments, I confess that
I sometimes believe it, too. But history, although it can repeat itself in
some details, is neither mystically nor mechanically cyclic. Things can
stop happening forever (we don't use too many stone axes any more), and
other things can happen (the landings on the Moon, for example) that never
happened before. It took a long time, it cost a great deal, it was often
very hard, and many people still hate us for it, but some of us stopped a
war we saw no reason for, back in the 1960s.

We can stop this war, too, Bush's Bipartisan War on Americans and their
Bill of Rights. We can stop him and his billionaire cronies from using the
unprecedented criminal act of September 11 as an excuse to enrich
themselves further. We used to say, "What if they gave a war and
nobody came?" Today, I ask you, what if they gave an election, and
everybody came -- but nobody voted for anybody who was
already in office?

That's right. Those in office now, in Washington, across the land, are
responsible for denying us the means of self-defense. They're why a handful
of bullies with box-knives could control a plane full of passengers.

Likewise, they share culpability for an insanely vicious foreign policy
that makes everyone in the world want to kill us. Not because we're rich --
the economic truth is that Americans toil in a stagnant market, being
sucked dry by political vampires. Not because we're free -- the average
Rumanian has more rights at this moment in history than the average
American. But because this government, controlled by the Boot On Your Neck
Party, kills people and breaks things anywhere and anytime it feels like it
-- and the rest of the world is getting fed up.

This government, the BOYN party, and the whorish mass media that service
them have blathered so loudly and so long about democracy that individuals
in other countries believe that all Americans somehow
shared in the decision-making, and therefore the blame, for bombed-out
aspirin factories, starving children in Iraq, and Bush's infantile outrages
in Afghanistan. That's why they feel morally justified in acting against a
civilian population the way they did in New York on September 11.

Well there's a way out, and also a way to get the FBI out of our libraries
and the NSA out of our e-mail. All we have to do is 
stop electing this scum, these enemies of everything that's right
or decent. If you've stopped voting already, I can hardly blame you, but
you've given up a tool, a weapon, which just might liberate you, after all.

I haven't stopped voting, myself, although I've thought long and hard about
it. But this November, when I go to the polls, I'll vote for nobody who's
already in office. Georg Busch's fascist excesses have shown me the way.
Things are just the same in 2002 as if we'd elected Algore in 2000. It may
even be that they're worse. To anyone concerned with the Bill of Rights,
there's no reason that makes sense to choose between Wayne Allard (BOYN,
CO) and Charles Schumer (BOYN, NY).

I don't care anymore if the scum that I do vote for
happen to be Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Prohibitionists, or Flat
Earthers, as long as they're new scum. It would be nice
if they were Libertarians -- if they really knew what that means, and they
really meant it, but it isn't absolutely necessary. If we turn each and
every one of the bastards out, every time they come up for election -- and
they know that's what will happen, every time -- they might eventually take
a hint.

Because I want to make an exception.

I want to see Congressman Ron Paul return to office, because he believes in
limited government and has struggled for that ideal as long as I've been
aware of him. He believes in enforcing the Bill of Rights, and if Congress
were filled with individuals like him, we'd have a free country. It's true,
I have a major political disagreement with him, because he thinks the Bill
of Rights applies to a particular class of entities -- fetuses -- that I
don't. But it's a disagreement that we'll have to settle later, after the
present horror is dealt with.

Meanwhile, we feel, see, and hear the world in which we live, in terms of
contrasts. We feel the raised dot of Braille against the flat surface it
rises from. We see the orange marmalade cat against the green bedspread. We
hear the high, clear clarinet against the strings and brasses. The greater
the contrast, the more effectively it seizes our attention. Ron Paul's
return to Congress, by an electorate who are grimly determined to reelect
nobody else, would provide political contrast and teach the most valuable
lesson ever taught in American history.

So it's time to organize. It's time to start collecting pledges from
political addicts swearing off the BOYN party system forever: "I
solemnly swear that I will never again vote for anyone who's already in
office -- in fact I may not even vote for anyone who
ever held office!"

How do they get out of it? How do they redeem themselves? They probably
don't. But their successors will learn, sooner or later, that all their
ambitions, agendas, and schemes come after Bill of
Rights enforcement.

It's time for making buttons and bumper stickers: "VOTE FOR
NO INCUMBENTS".

Be patient, It will take a little time for the idea to spread. But this is
a campaign that can go on, day and night, rain or shine, for exactly as
long as we need it to. Because the Libertarian Party 
has no incumbents to speak of, it doesn't conflict with LP
efforts. Best of all, there's no real candidate to betray, embarrass, or
disillusion you.

More than anything, here's the heart and soul, the very core of the
program, and it won't have the desired effect unless we do this part and do
it right: it's time for letters to congressmen and other such parasites --
maybe the first such letters you've ever written to them; almost certainly
the last -- telling them you're through begging them to obey the law and
respect your rights. They took an oath and then they broke it, now they
have to go. They screwed up, now they're fired.

You're going to vote for someone else, anyone else. Let them sell used
cars. Let them stand on street corners selling pencils from a tin cup.

For the rest of us, every day will be Independence Day.
- - -
Three-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith is the author of 23 books,
including _The American Zone_, _Forge of the Elders_, _Pallas_, _The
Probability Broach_, _Hope_ (with Aaron Zelman), and his collection of
articles and speeches, _Lever Action_, all of which may be purchased
through his website "The Webley Page" at
http://www.lneilsmith.com. Autographed copies may be had from the author at
lneil{at}lneilsmith.com.

L. Neil Smith writes regular columns for _The Libertarian Enterprise_
, _Sierra Times_ RoadHouse
, and for _Rational Review_
.

---