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The Dominant Culture
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

I remember George.

It doesn't come as much of a surprise to me that for the past eight years, we've had a President whose effective IQ is a smaller number than his age. It's far from the first time—you all remember Gerry Ford—and, judging by current events, it will be far from the last.

However I confess I never expected to have a President whose IQ is smaller than his shoe size. To call George Bush a dickhead is an insult to dicks, since the average little head is smarter than his big head.

Here, after all, is a guy who gave up being an honest drunken coke snargler, just to get laid by the dullest woman to occupy the White House since, well, his mother. Like Teddy Kennedy, he seems incapable of uttering a single coherent sentence, and he appears to have only a passing acquaintance with English, which is like a second language to him.

Whatever else you may think that you know about George W. Bush, however, understand one thing with perfect clarity: he would never have been elected President—nobody would ever have heard of him—if it weren't for the stupidity, incompetence, and arrogance of the Left.

George W. Bush is their creature entirely.

I'm referring here, not simply to the members, activists, and operatives of the Democratic Party, or to their Quisling allies, the various and sundry RINOS and LINOS infesting the so-called opposition parties. They're only the tip of the iceberg, the point of the spear, or some other metaphor plenty sharper in literal reality than they are.

I'm also talking about their ideological scouts and outriders, the politically-correct gatekeepers at the communications "chokepoints" in this culture whose job is to muzzle meaningful dissent, by commission or omission, aided by the network nickel-a-dance news floozies and hairsprayed gentlemen of the evening. They got us into this mess, and there is nothing in their behavioral repertoire that can ever get us out.

If it weren't for them, Ron Paul would almost certainly be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party by now, Barack Obama would be exposed (at best) as just another George McGovern, Walter Mondale, or Michael Dukakis in blackface, a lasting peace with the whole world would be just over the horizon, and Americans would be both prosperous and free, with a glowing future ahead to look forward to.

Gasoline would be a dollar a gallon.

Instead, our would-be keepers in both "major" parties want you to accept a lower standard of living, and begin a long slide back into the Dark Ages (more and more often using "environmentalism" as a justification), because they've damaged the economy worse than it's ever been damaged before, and they haven't got a clue how it can be fixed.

My greatest worry—informed, I freely confess, by little more than the same intuition that motivated me, the first time I ever saw Hillary Clinton on TV, to say, "That woman has the stink of the deathcamp about her"—is that Barack Obama is going to teach the suicidally naive Productive Class of America what everybody else around the world already knows about governments: that they are killing machines, pure and simple, that they exist to serve no other purpose.

That "little more", by the way, is Obama's plan to create a civilian domestic security force larger than the present U.S. military. Can you say "Brownshirts" or "Red Guard"? I thought you could.

Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party, the one organization that might have done something about this mess, crawls through the slime instead, dragged down by the sleazoid opportunist Bob Barr and his socialist ilk.

To my friends on the left: don't bother protesting what I've said here, or what I'm about to say. The world we live in is the world you made. You own the television networks, newspapers, magazines, and the movies.

Every time some Democrat got himself or herself elected over the past half century, everybody in the general freedom movement came to know that we would be in yet another bloody fight to save the basic liberties on which this country was supposedly founded. All you ever want is to take something away from us, our money, our homes, our land, our cars, our guns. Our children. All we want is to be left the hell alone. It's been soul-sapping, wearying right down to the marrow; it has used up our entire lives—and yours—to absolutely no purpose. Your nagging, controlling, thieving, busybody pathology has turned our America into a dung heap of lost rights and squandered opportunities.

There was a time when the concepts that comprise libertarianism—conceivably conveyed by more competent carriers than turned out to be the case—might have saved this country from the fascism under which it presently begins to labor. But it was "liberal" gatekeepers who kept libertarians out of the national discourse, and it is these same "progressives" who are inavoidably responsible for the present ugly mess.

And you wonder why you are so thoroughly despised.

The lamest Republican assertion that Moslem fundamentalists attacked us because "they hate our freedom" is fully matched by Elton John's ridiculous mealy-mouthing when Hillary Clinton's political fortunes began to wane: "I never cease to be amazed," he whimpered and pouted, "at the misogynist attitude of some of the people in this country."

People don't hate Hillary because she's a woman. If they did, they wouldn't have made Oprah Winfrey one of the richest women in the world, or stood with Martha Stewart when she was railroaded by the feds and sent to prison. They hate Hillary, as an individual, because she's a shrill, insatiably power-hungry, fascist bitch, who wants them arrested and locked up if they make their own arrangement with a doctor.

And so is her husband.

For the record, I never cared about how many women Bill Clinton rogered, or where or when he did it—except, of course, for the one or two he might have raped. I care that he raped the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, that he did his best to marginalize anyone who spoke up for them, that he left a string of dead bodies behind him of inconvenient individuals who got in his way, and most of all that he set the stage, prepared the ground, turned back the covers and put a chocolate mint on the pillow for an administration that has destroyed the economy, turned the world against us, and converted this country into a police state—with options on making it into a concentration camp.

It was for all of that, and nothing to do with Monica Lewinski, that he should have been impeached. Fred Thompson should be tarred and feathered for turning those desperately necessary proceedings into a Puritanical morality play, and we must never, ever forget that he was fully aided and abetted in this shockingly terminal ineptitude by Bob Barr.

Today's politicians mistakenly believe that promises the Founding Fathers made—especially in the Bill of Rights—are like the promises they make, themselves: never to be taken seriously by any real adult, eternally renegotiable, revocable one nanosecond after the election.

That is the very heart of what we have to change if we wish to survive.

In some ways, this essay was inspired by a documentary I saw recently on public TV, about folksinger, composer, and political activist Pete Seeger. Despite his politics—which are as bad, from the standpoint of the general freedom movement, as they can possibly get—I always respected and admired Seeger, and learned almost all of what I know about playing music and singing from his books and recordings.

The PBS documentary concerned itself with Seeger's politics, with considerable emphasis on his pioneering environmentalism. All through the damned thing, I ached to ask him, "You wanted a big government, Pete, powerful enough to accomplish your political and environmental agenda.

"Well, Pete, given all the wars, the massacres, the torture, and the lies that seem to get easier and easier to inflict on innocent people the larger your dream-government becomes, how do you like it now?"

Allow me a final thought. In our civilization, an individual spends the first 25 years of his life learning everything he knows from various authorities: his parents, the schools, the media, the government.

He then spends most of the next 25 years in what becomes a desperate struggle to unlearn what he was taught by authorities, simply to survive in the real world that they failed to tell him about.

Only if he makes it through that process (and not everybody does) will he be free to enjoy some measure of intellectual independence and maybe even a quality resembling wisdom. Unfortunately, toward the end of his third 25 years, the average person gets too sick one way or another to enjoy whatever benefit they might have brought him—or he is dead.

Now if somebody wanted to work on something really important—as opposed to fighting pointless wars or messing with people's lives and rights—this would be the place to start. It would advance the human condition immeasurably. An individual with, say, a thousand-year life expectancy might actually anticipate getting something significant done.

To those with the religious sickness called environmentalism, who will complain that this would be bad, somehow, for lovely Mother Gaia, I say go right ahead and die, then. Certainly nobody I know will stop you.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo" May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was published by BigHead Press www.bigheadpress.com has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, at www.Amazon.com, or at BillOfRightsPress.com.

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