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Another Message From The Publisher
by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

I apologize to my readers that I don't have an article in this edition of L.Neil Smith's THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE. I'm hours away from finishing another novel, and I'd like to get it done in order to enjoy a splendiferous, politically incorrect holiday with my family. Heinlein said that a real writer ought to be willing to work on his birthday or Christmas, and accordingly, I usually try to get in a few hundred words, but I always wondered what Mrs. Heinlein said about that.

However I didn't want to let a different occasion pass without an observation or two. You see, I'm getting fed up with fascists and fools.

I don't have cable or broadcast television. I rely exclusively on radio and the Internet. So I don't know anything about the whole Duck Dynasty thing except for what I've seen or heard that way, although the mountains of Duck Dynasty merchandise at Wal-Mart do give me a clue.

I greatly prefer Donald, Daffy, Darkwing, Howard, and Uncle Scrooge, but if a bunch of guys grow beards like ZZ Top and make duck calls for a living, and if it somehow ends them up on the A&E network, then I guess stranger things have happened—not much stranger, but some.

And if one of those guys decides to use a portion of his Warholian fifteen minutes to pontificate about his personal disapproval of a social phenomenon that would have had the entire population out in the streets with pitchforks and torches a hundred years ago, then the only thing civilized people who disagree with him should do is change the channel.

You may not think that the fundamental right to be a drooling moron has been enshrined in our nation's Bill of Rights, but it has, right there in black and white—or make that iron gall and parchment -- under the heading "First Amendment". You and I and the guy with the beard have an absolute right to say any damn thing we want, even if it's so dumb that you can throw it in a pond and skim stupid for a week.

Mr. Robertson, the bearded guy, says he believes romantic and sexual love between two men is against the will of God. A great many people agree with him but have been made increasingly afraid to say so. I don't believe in gods; nor do I need them to prop up what I stand for as a result of my own experience of history and human nature.

What I understand is this: it's a hard, cold, dark, cruel universe out there, where bucketheads in jackboots can kill millions of people simply because they don't like the cut of their jib, and nature itself will wipe you off the map with a casual asteroid impact or a volcanic eruption. In such a universe, love of any kind is a rare and beautiful thing.

On a practical note, the local courthouse and all its wonders cost a lot of money to erect, if you'll pardon the expression, not one thin dime of which was extracted voluntarily from whoever first earned and owned it. We are all threatened constantly, by the cousins of those jackbooted bucketheads, to chip in or lose everything, and there isn't an ounce less pressure of that kind put on gays than on everybody else.

If straights have a right to services the courthouse provides, and black people, as we established firmly in the 1950s and 1960s, so do homosexuals.

At this point, if my little treatise on gay love and marriage wasn't enough, I ask you to recall that I'm a lifelong libertarian, not any kind of conservative. At best, the opinions I disagree with on talk radio represent a different half from those I disagree with on television. They are both like broken analog clocks, correct twice a day.

About a decade ago, I guess, we had a man I regarded as the most interesting individual on radio, a black conservative talk show host named Ken Hamblin (he called himself "The Black Avenger") whose very existence, let alone his unliberal opinions, were not to be suffered by the reverse racists and poverty pimps of the Denver progressive set. One way or another, they managed to drive Mr. Hamblin off the air -- that's what they do because they still can't argue with the truths he had tell—and the Colorado front range is still the poorer for it.

We all saw what they did to Don Imus.

They'd love to do the same to Rush Limbaugh, but so far they have failed, not for any lack of trying. The only way I've ever heard them argue with his positions—some of which are wonderfully absurd—is simply to lie about them. Like the hyenas they are, they lurk in the underbrush for him to say something that can be twisted to suit their purposes. And while they can't get to Limbaugh, and they likely never will, they can easily get to that poor, hapless quacker with the beard.

Fish in a ... well, not a Cracker Barrel, apparently. That's the name of a low, craven, cowardly corporation that has bent the knee to progressive fascism and made the next such assassination all the more likely.

I've heard it argued that A&E is a private company and fully entitled to hire and fire as they wish. But this is not the case. A&E is not private property at all, but a corporation, a mere appendage of the government, and obliged thereby to respect the Constitutional niceties.

So there I've had my say, and I apologize again for not writing an actual article. I'll try hard to finish that novel and be back next week.

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