Accompanied by a Large Male Clown at All Times

By Vin Suprynowicz
[email protected]

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

         When I ran out of time, cobbling together my recent write-up of the Ian Slater paperback "Showdown: USA Vs. Militia," to track down the title of the "obscure" novel which predicted (long before 1941) a Japanese attack on Hawaii, I remember thinking "One of the Secret Legion is going to write in on that one."
         Sure enough, correspondent R.G., who doesn't give his city, quickly ran the pesky lead to earth:
         "Hector Bywater was an Englishman considered by many the greatest naval historian/tactician since Alfred Thayer Mahan," R.G. writes. "His fiction The Great Pacific War was fastidiously studied by (Admiral Isoroku) Yamamoto, and was the basis for his speech to the Naval War College several years before Pearl Harbor.
         "Yamamoto was given responsibility for the Pacific fleet and for developing a plan of attack on the United States. When the U.S. moved its fleet to Pearl from Long Beach, Calif. in 1939 he formalized his plan of attack based on Bywater's book.
         "He became obsessed with secrecy regarding the attack plans. On Aug. 13, 1940, Bywater's chief informant in Japan, an Englishman named Cox, fell to his death from the third floor window of a police station. Three days later, Bywater was found dead in his bed, perhaps from a lethal does of strychnine, injected by a Japanese agent who could have slipped through the ground floor window on a hot August night.
         "But the Nazi bombing of Richmond cut short the autopsy which might have confirmed what is still a conspiracy theory, or (else) established for the record that Bywater had succumbed to an overindulgence in his good friend, John Barleycorn.
         "More on this can be found in Visions of Infamy, by William Honan."
         Thanks, Legionnaire.

# # #

         Las Vegas. Where else could we generate a case like Kelbi Folkerson vs. Circus Circus, in which a summary judgment in favor of the circus-themed gambling joint was recently upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit?
         Ms. Folkerson, a mime, was retained by the casino to "perform in the guise of a life-size children's wind-up toy," according to court documents.
         Whether it was the quality of her performance, or some other factor to which this lesser court is not privy, curious customers at Circus Circus were apparently in the habit of attempting to touch Ms. Folkerson, which steamed her, but good.
         Finally one day, after one of these rubes "touched her shoulder," Ms. Folkerson hauled off and "hit the patron in the mouth" (I'm adopting the precise technical language of the court, here) for which action she was promptly fired.
         Mime Folkerson sued. Of course. She argued she was terminated in violation of the "retaliation" provisions of Title VII of the United States Civil Rights Act, for engaging in the "protected activity" of opposing the customer's sexual harassment ... by belting him in the mouth.
         Finding for the employer, the Ninth Circuit ruled the casino/hotel had taken "reasonable steps to ensure (employee's) safety" by giving her a sign to wear on her back reading "Stop. Do Not Touch," and by "providing for a large male clown to accompany her at all times."
         On behalf of everyone else whose womenfolk sometimes suspect they are "accompanied by a large male clown at all times," I'm darned glad that defense now passes into the official legal doctrine of these United States. Aren't you?

# # #

         I subscribe to a few publications, and receive a whole bunch more that I don't remember asking for. (The ones from Singapore, for instance. Just give it up, won't you, guys? A country where kissing scenes are routinely blacked out at the movies, and visitors are hanged for possessing Tylenol with codeine, Singapore is, to all appearances, where young Japanese children are told they'll be sent if they don't behave. I'm not coming, OK?)
         But -- with the exception of "Shotgun News" -- there's only one periodical that regularly leads me to risk bumping into phone polls and puzzled pedestrians as I eagerly scan it while walking back from my post office box at "Panhandler Station," and that would be the slim, no-nonsense newsletter of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, "The Free Market."
         I thought the February edition was great, with William Diehl's expose of "retirement" as a totally artificial "slough of despondency" manufactured by the welfare-statists under their tragic misunderstanding that "jobs" are a commodity in fixed supply.
         But then came the April edition, with Ralph Raico's cover essay on John Maynard Keynes (father of our modern, deficit-spending welfare state), sold to us for all these years as a "model classical liberal," but here revealed not only as a fan of German National Socialism, but as a fellow full of enthusiasm (as late as 1936) for the "readiness to experiment" of the economic central planners of Stalin's gulag archipelago.
         "The Free Market" is available at $25 per year from the LVMI in Auburn, Ala., 36849-5301.

Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The web site for the Suprynowicz column is at http://www.nguworld.com/vindex/. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.

"Every young American should be taught the joy and the duty of serving..." -- President Clinton

The Liberty Round Table announces its first essay contest for students. The first prizes are $750 for college students and $500 for High School students, for the best essays on the topic: "Fighting Involuntary Servitude for Students." A $250 second prize will also be awarded in each category. The deadline for entries is July 4, 1997, and the winners will be announced on September 1, 1997. See http://home.lrt.org for more details.

Next to advance to the next article, or Index to return to The Libertarian Enterprise, Number 27, May 1, 1997.