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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 858, February 7, 2016 A violent revolution is certainly a difficult thing to control, a limited strategy for change, and is unlikely to bring about overall good results.
A Frolic in Fort Collins
Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise Not sharing the late Isaac Asimov's basically Progressive-era statistical beliefs concerning human behavior in the aggregate—multiplying variables does not make them easier to sort out—I draw absolutely no conclusions whatever from yesterday's events in Iowa. Except those that everybody else with half a little gray-cell does: any one of the five principal Republicans (not the militantly moderate poseurs, like Christie or Kasich) would be a hugely welcome improvement over Barack the Bloody-handed, indescribably better than his fellow murderer, the unspeakable disease Hillaritis or Bernie the Red. I sincerely hope (and would pray if I happened to believe in it) that Saint Ted the Overly Holy, the Donald, pouty little Marco, Dr. Ben, and Carly have somebody hard-minded and eagle-eyed, like Mark Harmon, say, or Scott Bakula, to watch their sixes for them and shoot back. Blame my journalistical dereliction, if you will, on a selfish, purely personal preoccupation. Last week, the 66-year-old gravity furnace in our otherwise cozy little 1949 tract home failed us and apparently can't be repaired for lack of parts. It was like a relative dying. We found some nice folks to eject the old warp-core and install a new, technologically superior model without destroying us financially, and piggyback central air-conditioning on it so I don't have to take my usual summer "sabbatical" any more (I can't think when it gets much above 85 degrees). A humidifier will save my wonderful collection of musical instruments (mostly guitars) until I've recovered from my 2014 stroke (I get microscopically better every day) and I can play them again. I will play them again. I'm stuck here in this wheelchair, and I don't even want to think about using my hemiwalker on the stairs. My poor wife @Cathy Smith (she is smart—she can make things go) had to do a lot of spelunking down in the cold, dank basement and wrestle her way through three decades' accumulation of ancient mathoms, post-1997-flood detritus, and at least half a ton of dust-covered cobwebs to make room for the workbeings. The problem, of course, is that it's the worst possible time for this to happen. There's a foot of global warming on the ground (the fact that the Earth is covered in white—does that make it racist?) and it's working its way down to six nasty degrees tonight. Our noble furnace-replacers loaned us a couple of almost science-fiction space heaters, lunchbox-sized devices that will warm a small room, or keep a larger one from frosting up. But the little monsters eat lots of power. At that, I'm considerably more concerned about blowing a breaker than consuming mass quantities of "electrical", as Eva Gabor used to put it on Green Acres in the age of only one TV channel. We're kind of economizing on light now. When this is over, I'm going to take a four hour hot shower in a bathroom so brightly lit it fries your eyeballs. My daughter @Giovanni Martelli, is the truly smart one; she's out of state at the moment, in New York City, ogling Bruce Willis. We shall, as the old Indian said in The Outlaw Josey Wales (my favorite Clint Eastwood movie), endeavor to persevere. I spent most of today deep in suspended animation, listening to I-Heart-Radio, and sleeping the sleep of an estivating mammal or astronauts on their way to Proxima Centauri. Tonight it will be Cathy and me, watching Netflix and a stack of Wal-mart bin DVDs on her giant laptop, in our electrically-heated cave, under forty-two comforters and blankets, huddling with the cats, Strider and Paulo, who seem to feel closer to us these days, for some reason. Strider hops up and sits on my lap a lot. If it weren't for them, we'd probably get a room at a local motel. But they're our family, too. Call it L. Neil and Cathy Smith: the Adventure Continues.
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