What Do You Mean "We", Kemo Sabe?

by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Special to TLE

           The heart of the Leviathan beats ponderously, every ten years.
           I wonder if you've heard the radio commercial recently -- "public service announcements" they call them when they aren't being broadcast to earn an honest profit -- reminding Indians throughout the Golden West exactly how dependent they are on the United States Census "for all the programs they need". These "PSAs" are in pretty high rotation on Denver's answer to Radio Moscow, 850 KOA, and you can bet they're being carried by every Indian radio station between here and Carlsbad Caverns.
           As most individuals are aware by now, the Census was ordained by the Constitution as a means of enumerating -- simply counting -- the people of this country, to make damn sure they all get get the hell represented out of them by members of Congress whether they want to or not. Just why the government should choose to assiduously observe this single provision of a document they otherwise treat with less respect than toilet paper -- well, that's whole object of this essay, isn't it?
           This naive exercise is strongly reminiscent (I suppose "reeks" would be an unsympathetic expression to use in this context) of the early Democratic Societies that sprang up following the Amrican Revolution, possibly deriving from local militias or committees of correspondence.
           Accustomed to 6,000 years of taking orders from some King and his buttboys, post-Revolutionary Americans felt they needed practice at running their own lives. They used these societies, which usually met at local churches or bars, to elect presidents, vice presidents, and secretary-treasurers, to create organizational charters, to propose and pass (or reject) all the little things stamp clubs, officers wives associations, and homeowners groups propose and pass (or reject) every day.
           I can't think of anything more quintessentially American. Trouble was -- and this is the tragic flaw at the heart of democracy -- they weren't running their own lives, they were running everybody else's. And exactly as Alexis de Tocqueville predicted, pretty soon Americans got to thinking that there wasn't anything at all they couldn't vote on.
           That being the case, it's less amazing that we all wound up in a lockstep Dictatorship of the Pantywaists -- where a baseball player can be crucified for voicing his rude opinion of the specimens who ride the New York subway (how come John Rocker gets barbecued, while Weird Al Yankovic can write "Another One Rides the Bus" and get away with it?) and little kids get kicked out of school for displaying a magazine page with a picture of a gun -- than that it took so long to happen.
           I guess Mankind is more disposed not to suffer, as well.
           One of the places America eventually went where it wasn't supposed to go was bayonet-point charity, the forcible redistribution of wealth from those who earn it to those who are unable or unwilling to do so. Americans now pay five times the taxes medieval serfs did, and what this mass confiscation accomplishes is that our civilization won't collapse with barbarians at the gate, the barbarians will already be inside.
           How very efficient.
           We've seen what that does, both to the recipient of stolen goods and people the goods are stolen from. Enterprise wanes, inventiveness atrophies, Atlas slowly shrugs. What Democrats and (to their eternal shame) Republicans perceive as a healthy economy is floundering and flat compared to what it would be in a condition of real economic liberty. There should be a cure for cancer, limb regeneration, and resort hotels on the Moon by now, but the resources were used instead, cynically and cruelly, to keep blacks and other people helpless and dependent.
           And voting.
           Which brings us back, if somewhat circuitously, to the Census. Because I am not and never will be Secretary of the Interior I can say what Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James Watt (funny name for somebody who was otherwise a pretty dim bulb) got fired for saying.
           The worst thing European civilization ever did to the people it found in North America was not to steal their land (it never occurred to them to claim it anyway), force them onto other, less desirable land, or even massacre them at places like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. It was to impose on them -- almost exactly a century before it started trying to do it to everybody else -- a socialist welfare state.
           They have been utterly demolished as a people, blacks have been demolished -- both by the disease of welfare -- and everybody else is next.
           Maybe somebody on the other side understands that.
           In the background of that radio commercial I mentioned, there's some music that may reveal a lot about about the depth of cynicism and cruelty behind the welfare apparatus destroying Western Civilization. As if it were appropriated as a trophy of battle from the Little Big Horn, a chorus of Indian women is chanting the tune of "Garryowen" -- the official riding and drinking song of George A. Custer's Seventh Cavalry.
           Think they're trying to tell us something?

L. Neil Smith is publisher of The Libertarian Enterprise and author of 24 books including The Probability Broach, The Lando Calrissian Adventures, Forge of the Elders (forthcoming in April, 2000) and The Mitzvah, with JPFO founder and executive director Aaron Zelman. Order these books at: http://www.lneilsmith.org//lnsbooks.html

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