Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I don't know whether you've noticed it or not, but everybody who was pretending to be in charge of America the day before September 11, 2001, is still pretending to be in charge. The difference is that they have more money to play with, and a hell of a lot more power over our lives.

If this were a decent civilization, of course, the President, the Vice President, the entire Cabinet, and every military officer above the rank of lieutenant colonel (or its bureaucratic equivalent) would have cut their bellies, hanged themselves, or taken a single cartridge and their Webley revolvers into an adjacent room and done the decent thing. We Americans would have had an entirely new government to kick around.

This is not a decent society, however. Bill Clinton showed us just how far gone it is. The multitrillion dollar enterprise that has, over the last century and a half, systematically deprived Americans of their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor -- in the name of protecting their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor -- and has now been exposed, beyond the ability of anyone to doubt it, as an utterly empty farce, is being rewarded exactly as if it had prevented September 11.

What's more, the 280 million survivors of September 11, the men, women, and children of the United States -- insanely rendered helpless by their government on the fraudulent excuse that it's protecting them -- those who, but for the merest fortune, could have been the targets of the airline terrorists from whom their government failed to protect 3000 innocent individuals, are now being punished by their government, through explosive spending being done by a political party that always (falsely) claims to be against high taxes, and by further restrictions on their already severely damaged rights, as if they were terrorists, themselves.

This is not entirely a Republican thing. And it would be a tragic mistake (a mistake Americans are almost certain to make as they begin to chafe at what's done to them by the despicable Bush administration) to rush into the waiting arms of the Democrats. Most of the fatal errors that made September 11 not only possible but inevitable -- the brain-dead foreign policy, the illegal restrictions on an individual's means of self-defense -- were committed in the first place by the Democrats.

Further, the Democrats and their GOP partners in crime -- together they constitute the monolithic "Boot On Your Neck" party -- depend on this political ping-pong game they con voters into playing, year after election year, in order to steal more and more from us. Both parties -- and any government they run -- are evil and unspeakably corrupt. If the Clinton and Bush administrations have shown us nothing else, it is that liberty and the rule of law have no friends among Democrats or Republicans.

So why do we keep electing this scum, these enemies of everything that's right or decent? Every couple of years, we punch a hole, fill in a blank, or flip a lever beside their names. We choose judges, congressmen, senators, legislators, governors, presidents, and then spend the next couple of years hoping, praying -- even begging -- that they won't impoverish us or damage our rights further. The parties do the nominating, so there's never anything like a free election, and we respond exactly like halfwitted cattle who think they get to choose which farmer milks and butcher them, and that this somehow makes it acceptable.

We have been sheeple, yearning for the warmth and illusory safety of the barn, even at the ultimate price we know will be exacted in the slaughterhouse.

At this point in the affairs of humanity, a great many educated and intelligent individuals are in a state of abject despair for our republic under limited government, conceived by the Founding Fathers. America is an empire now, they say, an evil one like all empires, and past historical experience clearly demonstrates that there's no going back.

That's what some individuals believe. In my darkest moments, I confess that I sometimes believe it, too. But history, although it can repeat itself in some details, is neither mystically nor mechanically cyclic. Things can stop happening forever (we don't use too many stone axes any more), and other things can happen (the landings on the Moon, for example) that never happened before. It took a long time, it cost a great deal, it was often very hard, and many people still hate us for it, but some of us stopped a war we saw no reason for, back in the 1960s.

We can stop this war, too, Bush's Bipartisan War on Americans and their Bill of Rights. We can stop him and his billionaire cronies from using the unprecedented criminal act of September 11 as an excuse to enrich themselves further. We used to say, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" Today, I ask you, what if they gave an election, and everybody came -- but nobody voted for anybody who was already in office?

That's right. Those in office now, in Washington, across the land, are responsible for denying us the means of self-defense. They're why a handful of bullies with box-knives could control a plane full of passengers.

Likewise, they share culpability for an insanely vicious foreign policy that makes everyone in the world want to kill us. Not because we're rich -- the economic truth is that Americans toil in a stagnant market, being sucked dry by political vampires. Not because we're free -- the average Romanian has more rights at this moment in history than the average American. But because this government, controlled by the Boot On Your Neck Party, kills people and breaks things anywhere and anytime it feels like it -- and the rest of the world is getting fed up.

This government, the BOYN party, and the whorish mass media that service them have blathered so loudly and so long about democracy that individuals in other countries believe that all Americans somehow shared in the decision-making, and therefore the blame, for bombed-out aspirin factories, starving children in Iraq, and Bush's infantile outrages in Afghanistan. That's why they feel morally justified in acting against a civilian population the way they did in New York on September 11.

Well there's a way out, and also a way to get the FBI out of our libraries and the NSA out of our e-mail. All we have to do is stop electing this scum, these enemies of everything that's right or decent. If you've stopped voting already, I can hardly blame you, but you've given up a tool, a weapon, which just might liberate you, after all.

I haven't stopped voting, myself, although I've thought long and hard about it. But this November, when I go to the polls, I'll vote for nobody who's already in office. Georg Busch's fascist excesses have shown me the way. Things are just the same in 2002 as if we'd elected Algore in 2000. It may even be that they're worse. To anyone concerned with the Bill of Rights, there's no reason that makes sense to choose between Wayne Allard (BOYN, CO) and Charles Schumer (BOYN, NY).

I don't care anymore if the scum that I do vote for happen to be Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Prohibitionists, or Flat Earthers, as long as they're new scum. It would be nice if they were Libertarians -- if they really knew what that means, and they really meant it, but it isn't absolutely necessary. If we turn each and every one of the bastards out, every time they come up for election -- and they know that's what will happen, every time -- they might eventually take a hint.

Because I want to make an exception.

I want to see Congressman Ron Paul return to office, because he believes in limited government and has struggled for that ideal as long as I've been aware of him. He believes in enforcing the Bill of Rights, and if Congress were filled with individuals like him, we'd have a free country. It's true, I have a major political disagreement with him, because he thinks the Bill of Rights applies to a particular class of entities -- fetuses -- that I don't. But it's a disagreement that we'll have to settle later, after the present horror is dealt with.

Meanwhile, we feel, see, and hear the world in which we live, in terms of contrasts. We feel the raised dot of Braille against the flat surface it rises from. We see the orange marmalade cat against the green bedspread. We hear the high, clear clarinet against the strings and brasses. The greater the contrast, the more effectively it seizes our attention. Ron Paul's return to Congress, by an electorate who are grimly determined to reelect nobody else, would provide political contrast and teach the most valuable lesson ever taught in American history.

So it's time to organize. It's time to start collecting pledges from political addicts swearing off the BOYN party system forever: "I solemnly swear that I will never again vote for anyone who's already in office -- in fact I may not even vote for anyone who ever held office!"

How do they get out of it? How do they redeem themselves? They probably don't. But their successors will learn, sooner or later, that all their ambitions, agendas, and schemes come after Bill of Rights enforcement.

It's time for making buttons and bumper stickers: "VOTE FOR NO INCUMBENTS".

Be patient, It will take a little time for the idea to spread. But this is a campaign that can go on, day and night, rain or shine, for exactly as long as we need it to. Because the Libertarian Party has no incumbents to speak of, it doesn't conflict with LP efforts. Best of all, there's no real candidate to betray, embarrass, or disillusion you.

More than anything, here's the heart and soul, the very core of the program, and it won't have the desired effect unless we do this part and do it right: it's time for letters to congressmen and other such parasites -- maybe the first such letters you've ever written to them; almost certainly the last -- telling them you're through begging them to obey the law and respect your rights. They took an oath and then they broke it, now they have to go. They screwed up, now they're fired.

You're going to vote for someone else, anyone else. Let them sell used cars. Let them stand on street corners selling pencils from a tin cup.

For the rest of us, every day will be Independence Day.

 

Reprinted from The Libertarian Enterprise for July 1, 2002