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I saw on television recently that they're planning to close
down the street in front of the White House -- and call it a
"pedestrian mall" -- for fear that something like the Oklahoma
City bombing might happen on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Fine. Most Americans don't know how tightly-controlled
Washington has already become, with sheaves of guided missiles
poised to destroy a straying passenger airliner (or even good old
Klaatu and Gort as they try to land their saucer on the White
House lawn for a friendly interplanetary chat). This is a city
where you're forced to obtain a police permit, not for a
gun -- guns are strictly forbidden and therefore in abundant
supply -- but for a camera tripod.
One of the basic truths everyone seems to be avoiding these
days is that when our national leaders begin hiding behind guided
missiles, body armor, "pedestrian malls", bulletproof glass, and
tripod control, it's probably for a reason. If you make a career
of stealing people's money and screwing with their lives, you're
an idiot if you don't expect some of the more frangible among
them -- oops, did I let a Buckleyism slip, there? Just pretend I
made a reference to those pots in our society most liable to
crack under stress. Now where was I? Oh, yes ... the more
frangible among them to begin screwing back.
Equally, you're a lunatic yourself if you believe, as Bill
Clinton has repeatedly claimed since the disaster in Oklahoma
City, that you can dismiss it with the petulant accusation that
anyone who rejects your "benevolence" is crazy.
At one time in the history of our technology, miners used to
carry cages with canaries in them, deep into the mines, as a
precaution against anoxia or poison gases. When the canaries,
with their faster metabolisms, passed out, the miners knew it was
time to get back topside in a hurry. Individuals like the
Oklahoma City bomber are a civilization's canaries, indicating to
everyone with half an eye to see (except, of course, for
politicians and bureaucrats, society's chief generators of
metaphorical gases), that something has gone dreadfully wrong.
Unlike politicians and bureaucrats, most Americans have a
fair idea of what it is. They know that events like the Waco
massacre and the Ruby Ridge murders are just the visible tip of
an iceberg. Despite the most strenuous efforts at truth-
suppression on the part of the mass media (who have sold out
contemptibly to a government they were intended to continuously
oppose) we've reached a kind of saturation level where everybody
knows personally of some blatant violation of individual rights
that somehow didn't make the evening news.
It may be "ancient history": the Hutterite boy in the first
World War who, as a pacifist, submitted to conscription but would
not wear the uniform. Chained up by the wrists from an overhead
pipe in a flooded basement at Leavenworth, he died of pneumonia
during a freezing Kansas winter. When his mother arrived to
claim his body, she was informed that it had already been
buried -- in an Army uniform.
It may be something more recent: Mormons peacefully
practicing plural marriage, according to their religious beliefs,
whose homes were raided, whose families were herded together,
sorted out, and photographed holding numbered cards, and who were
illegally locked up by the government until they signed documents
renouncing polygamy -- instantly converting their children into
bastards. This travesty happened in the 1950s. Yes, I said the
NINETEEN fifties.
Clinton's protestations are, of course, ridiculous. It
should be perfectly apparent, even to someone with only half a
brain to think, that he and his wife are hell-bent on doing to
the Bill of Rights what the Oklahoma City bomber did to the
Murrah Building, or their Attorney General did to the Branch
Davidians. They and their party have engaged in a relentless war
against the very concept of individual rights for more than 60
years, and the only response ever heard above the level of a
craven whisper from Republicans is that they, too, can strip
Americans of their liberties -- only they can do it cheaper than
the Democrats.
Nothing since the election last November indicates any real
change in that symbiotic relationship. Today the only free press
in the world, the internet, thunders with horror stories of house
invasions, property seizures, kidnapings of children by witch
doctors pretending to be protectors, false imprisonments and
beatings, framings and murders of innocent civilians, none of
them occurring in South Africa, Bosnia, or Haiti, but right here
in America.
And one by one, as we see in Oklahoma City, canaries are beginning to keel over.
It's time for all of us "miners" to get topside in a hurry.
"Topside" means a return to the basic operating principles that
made this the most peaceful, prosperous, and progressive nation a
sorry, bloodsoaked world had ever seen. "Topside" means
beginning to hold sacred once again 481 words that let each and
every one of us know exactly where he or she stands, and that we
may sleep peacefully at night without worrying that black-shirted
goons may smash our doors in, tie us up, wreck our homes, steal
our children, seize our savings and possessions, stomp our pets
to death, and get away with all of it, Scot free.
Those 481 words are the first ten amendments to the
Constitution. The Bill of Rights. The highest law of the land.
One or two of them may put you off a trifle, but you can bet your
last dime that somebody else would love to repeal whichever one
you happen to rely on most. So far, most of us have refrained
from that kind of "mutual assured destruction" because, deep
down, each of us understands that those 481 words are all that
ever made America different from any monarchy or dictatorship,
powerful or petty, on the planet. They are what must be
enforced -- stringently -- if we are to be different once again.
Americans need to see the Bill of Rights enforced. They
need to see commitment, a massive national undertaking comparable
to that involved in sending astronauts to the moon or fighting
World War II. They need to see several thousand politicians and
bureaucrats hauled out of their offices in manacles and
leg-irons, preferably by federal marshals exactly the way "inside
traders" were treated in the 80s, before this country can be
entirely sane again.
One benefit to such an undertaking -- that of rebuilding a
free America -- is that it would deprive the canaries of any
legitimacy they might otherwise claim. Ironically, it would
create conditions under which Clinton would be correct in
observing that there is no justification or need to resort to
violence out of a fear that the government is scheming to take
your rights away. But it would deprive him and his own "Dark
Forces" of their legitimacy, as well.
The alternative? Well, that would be going on the way we
have, wouldn't it? With the politicians and bureaucrats doing
whatever the hell they want to us -- and more and more of the
canaries among us popping off -- until all of America's streets
are turned, first into sidewalks, and then into prison walls.
My home on the web, The Webley Page: www.webleyweb.com/lneil/
My e-zine The Libertarian Enterprise: www.webleyweb.com/tle/
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