Month: September 2004

Off to See the Wizard! du Toits!

Well, I’m not going to be posting for a few days. I’ve got another piece on the civil war topic stewing, but I don’t have time to do it justice, and I think I’ll need something to keep me occupied while I’m driving to Texas over the next couple of days.

NOTE TO GOBLINS: My wife has both the Mossberg 590 (mix of #4 buck and slugs) and a .357 at hand. Stay away.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to meeting everybody. I’ll check in again probably Tuesday.

Dept. of Socialized Medicine, or “So THAT’S Why They Want to Register All Firearms!”



This one comes from two different sources, plus I heard about it on the radio today, so I have to assume that it’s not an urban legend. I’ll let you read both versions for yourself:

Woman died at B.C. hospital as relative told to call 911

By ROBERT MATAS

Monday, September 6, 2004 – Page A4 Globe And Mail

VANCOUVER — The family of a 22-year old woman who died at a British Columbia hospital threatened legal action yesterday in an attempt to show that emergency-room staff failed to properly respond when an uncle rushed in, frantically asking for help.

Single mother Jessica Peace was in the back seat of the car when Jim Roberts pulled into the emergency driveway of Peace Arch Hospital in White Rock, outside Vancouver, two weeks ago. She had stopped breathing moments before.

Mr. Roberts asked for help. Hospital staff called 911 for paramedics to bring Ms. Peace into the hospital. “I believe if I had gotten help immediately when I pulled up, she would still be alive,” he said yesterday.

The hospital’s response has reignited a fierce debate over the institution’s reaction to people who go to the emergency department requiring assistance to get out of a car and into the hospital.

Ms. Peace’s death came 16 months after an 88-year-old man died of cardiac arrest outside a residence care facility next to the hospital, fuelling suspicion the institution has a policy of calling 911, rather than responding immediately to those in need.

Hospital representatives adamantly denied having a policy to call for an ambulance to bring people from the driveway or parking lot to the emergency ward.

However, Mr. Roberts said yesterday hospital officials were not giving an accurate portrayal of what happened when he pulled up. He may go to court, if necessary, to put on the record exactly what took place, he said.

“What is really bothering me is the blatant lies.”

Mr. Roberts recalled driving to the hospital with his niece about 4 p.m. on Aug 25. Ms. Peace was a drug addict who was trying to break her habit. They were talking in the car, but then at a red light close to the hospital she stopped talking. It looked like she was not breathing.

He rushed into the emergency room, saying his niece had stopped breathing and that he needed help immediately. He said he was told to phone an ambulance. When he suggested that was not appropriate, ER staff dialled the number and gave him the phone.



A paramedic from the hospital came out to assist only after he returned to the car and stood there, shouting: “Help, she’s not breathing,” Mr. Roberts said. They rushed Ms. Peace into the hospital but were unsuccessful in reviving her.

David Plug, a spokesman for the Fraser Health Authority, which runs the hospital, said hospital staff would normally help if they were not busy with emergency patients.

“There is no policy that bars them from going out,” he said. “It happens all the time at hospitals. People come and say, ‘I have someone in the parking lot’ and the hospital responds if it can.”

Hospital staff said they did not hear Mr. Roberts say his niece was having breathing problems, Mr. Plug said. They only heard him ask for assistance to bring someone inside.

When they overheard Mr. Roberts tell 911 about the breathing problems, a nurse went to check out the problem. The nurse then called for a paramedic to come with a stretcher to bring Ms. Peace into the hospital, Mr. Plug said.

“Emergency did not know the situation outside when they asked him to call 911,” Mr. Plug said. “When they found out, they reacted in a timely fashion.”

Apparently not.

Mr. Roberts insisted that no one came out until he started shouting in the parking lot. He did not see a nurse outside.

The hospital did whatever could be done once his niece was taken indoors, he added. He was not upset with the hospital until staff starting offering a different version of events.

Unless they acknowledge what they did, he will look into court action to bring the truth out, Mr. Roberts said.

That’s the first version, all emphasis is mine. Here’s the second:

Hospital didn’t help ill people enter facility



CTV.ca News Staff



A B.C. family believes their daughter died because of hospital bureaucracy.

Two weeks ago, Jessica Peace — a mother of one — had a drug reaction, stopped breathing and died in hospital.

Her uncle, Jim Roberts, took her to the Peace Arch hospital in White Rock — but not into the hospital. And he thinks she’d still be alive if not for the delay in getting her emergency care.

“I honestly don’t know why I didn’t carry her in, but I thought when you went to a hospital they helped you,” he said.

Don’t be silly! You’re just a number to them!

When he arrived at the hospital, he left her in the car, ran inside and begged for help.

“‘My niece is in the car. She’s not breathing. I need help,'” was his recollection. “She says, ‘I’m sorry sir, you’ll have to call an ambulance.'”

Roberts was handed a phone and the desk clerk dialed 9-1-1. “I said, ‘that’s crazy.’ She said, ‘that’s our policy, sir.'”



The Peace Arch hospital insists it’s not a policy, but that having paramedics to assist is necessary sometimes. “Removing somebody from an automobile and putting them on a stretcher, you need at least two people to do that,” said Don Bower of the Fraser Health Authority.

And the hospital employs… How many?

The hospital said a nurse eventually did go out and give Jessica CPR while she was still in the car.

Well Whoop-de-fucking-doo!

It agrees Roberts shouldn’t have had to call for an ambulance himself and it is investigating the matter — the second such investigation in just over a year.

In May 2003, an 88-year-old man died of cardiac arrest just outside the hospital’s doors. Even the RCMP complained it took to long to get the victim help.

“It can’t go on like this. More people are going to die,” Roberts said, adding, “it’s not the first time something like this has happened.”

Lisa Trewern can vouch for that, saying, “the same thing happened to me when I took my mom to the hospital on April 3.”

She said her mother had severe abdominal pains. While her mother survived, Trewern said she now regrets not having formally reported the matter: “They weren’t willing to help me until I got through the doors.”

It’s apparently not part of their labor contract?

Jessica Peace’s family is considering legal action while they take care of her son.

I would certainly hope so.

Were it my daughter, I believe I’d be considering redecorating that emergency room.

Oh, yeah. Public health care. Just as good as public toilets.

Anybody Else Seen this? “80 Seconds of Hell”

Iran’s promise: ’80 seconds of hell’

Sunday, September 5, 2004

Let’s begin by looking at some facts.

On Saturday, June 26, only a few weeks ago, two security guards at the Iranian U.N. Mission were expelled from the United States, and allowed to sneak back to Tehran. The State Department says that they were “engaged in activities inconsistent with their duties.” Sure. They were spies.

The pair had been observed by the FBI for months moving around Manhattan videotaping landmark buildings and other infrastructure. It took an alert transit police officer to arrest them when he saw them taking video images on the subway tracks. They claimed diplomatic immunity and were not charged with any crime.

In Tehran, as August began, the Islamic Republic’s supreme guide Ali Khamenei, was answering questions from a hundred or so Islamic guidance officials, home from foreign postings for retraining. Most of his answers were trite slogans, but when he was asked, “Is our Islamic Republic at war against the United States,” he paused before replying. “It is the United States that is at war against our Islamic Revolution.”



However, Khamenei’s own newspaper was even more direct. Writing this July, it said, “the White House’s 80 years of exclusive rule are likely to become 80 seconds of hell that will burn to ashes. Those who resist Iran will be struck from directions they never expected.”



To these facts add that an Arab newspaper published in London and Beirut reported that an Iranian intelligence unit has established a center called “The Brigades of the Shahids of the Global Islamic Awakening,” controlled by a Revolutionary Guards intelligence officer, Hassan Abbasi. The newspaper has a tape recording of Abbasi when he spoke of Iran’s secret plans, which include “a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization.”

Missile strikes



To bring this about, Abbasi said, “There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack them.” This Revolutionary Guard officer continued by saying, “Iran’s missiles are now ready to strike at Western targets, and as soon as the instructions arrive from Ali Khamenei, we will launch our missiles at their cities and installations.”

These are facts. Now let’s consider the information coming in from Iraq where, day after day, our troops are being killed.

Most of the killing is now being done by Muslim militia — Shi’ite Muslims — in the cities of Fallujah, Mosul and Najaf. This militia appears to have some loyalty — but not much — to the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, but he is equally obviously not their paymaster.

The militias need weapons, ammunition, gas for their vehicles, food, water and everything else to fight the Iraqi police and our military. Just remember that these are Shi’ites. The Iranians, just over the border are also Shi’ites. So we needn’t be surprised to learn that the word on the streets of Baghdad and Tehran is that they are providing millions of dollars every month for the “hot” war against the Americans.

The Iranian Shi’ites have during the past few weeks established relations with the Kurds in the north of Iraq and with the main Arab Sunni rebel group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And, every alliance is cemented with dollars.

25-year war

Iran has been at war with the United States since the mullahs ousted the shah’s forces in 1979.

Iran’s war against the United States has gone on for 25 years. It is past time that the ayatollahs, mullahs and imams begin to understand that there are limits to our tolerance and that our military might is by no means exhausted?

That February in 1979, the Revolutionary Guards invaded 27 U.S. listening posts in Iran that had been set up to monitor Soviet rocket tests. The posts were closed and our guys expelled.

That was enough for Democrat Jimmy Carter. He sent a wonderful letter to the Ayatollah Khomeini, praising him as “a man of God.” And, in a show of goodwill, Carter lifted the ban he had imposed on arms exports to Iran.

A few days later, the Revolutionary Guards raided our embassy in Tehran and seized our diplomats as hostages for a year and a half. In April 1980, Carter tried a military rescue attempt, which ended in disaster with more Americans being killed.

Since then Iran has created one disaster after another. The Marine barracks in Beirut with 241 U.S. Marines killed, some 30 U.S. hostages taken in Lebanon, the torture-killing of the CIA’s Middle Eastern chief and the generalized support of all America’s enemies.

On July 27, Iranian Member of Parliament Hamid-Reza Katoziyan told a television audience “Muslims living in the U.S. are currently, in my opinion, in a special situation. Perhaps they do not walk the streets with weapons or attach bombs to themselves to carry out a suicide operation, but the thought is there.”

And, one last fact: The 9/11 commission in its report poses a question, “September 11 was a day of unprecedented shock. The nation was unprepared. How can we avoid such a tragedy again?”

The answer has to be obvious. Ensure that Iran does not have the opportunity to make a first-strike against the U.S. and that Iran stops attempting to make Iraq a colony.

Dateline D.C. is written by a Washington-based British journalist and political observer.

I am unfamiliar with PittsburgLIVE.com, and I’ve never read Dateline D.C., but I find this a bit alarming, don’t you?

Tuesday’s Entry on the Vast Divide



(I think this might become a daily!)



From Tim Blair (read his piece first) and then this AWESOME comment left on Tim’s post (which I preserve here for my future re-reading pleasure):

That is so deeply offensive that I can scarce think of a comment capable of expressing my revulsion. But let’s try. Please excuse the rant.

It’s amazing to me that the “left” (how outmoded and meaningless these distinctions are) have evolved into the most uptight, anti-rational, superstitious and piously moralistic bunch since the Puritans walked the wild forests of America (though I hesitate to make the comparison, since the Puritans accomplished great things). The “left” may joke and titter and wheeze about “fundy Christian wingnuts” but find someone lecturing you about your immorality, your materialism, your sinful pride, your lack of spiritual value and, most likely, they will be driving an old Volvo with the radio tuned to “Pacifica” and a GEORGE BUSH IS A LIAR bumper-sticker on the fender. Your average lefty is quicker to take offense than a blue-haired old presbyterian; they are constantly monitoring everyone for signs of racism, sexism, colonialism, anti-animal hate speech. They will criticize your car, your house, your synthetic fiber sweater, your swear words, your cigarettes, your sandwich, your choice of grocery bag, your skin color (if it is in the dusky pink range). Life to them is a laundry list of strictures, taboos and lamentations. They hate science, they fear Christianity, they think heterosexual porn is rape, they believe in magic, aromatherapy, tribalism; they scream about Bush killing children but fail to bat an eyelash at the consequences of “pro-choice”. They cringe in disgust and embarrassment at the “black and white” moral distinctions of Bush (and Reagan in his time) when he speaks of the “axis of evil”, yet no one uses the word evil more than leftists when describing the Bush Administration, capitalism, America, Israel. They mock and scoff at the president’s religiosity, yet speak in reverential tones of Gaia, Buddha, Wicca, Yoga. And on and on.

In other words, they are as wrought out, blinkered and dangerously conflicted and superstitious as your average Puritan (or probably closer to your average medieval peasant), yet they call themselves progressives and call everyone else fundamentalists, warmongers, fascists. Freedom is slavery.

The end result of stewing in this murky broth of half-truth, projection, fear, and mis-education? A man sitting in Manhattan at the dawn of the 21st century, writing on a weblog about poorly-understood prehistoric deities taking delight in the destruction of sinful man’s hubris-saturated civilizations. Vive Memor Lethi Fugit Hora. Pride goeth before the Fall. It almost makes you want to laugh, if you weren’t crying.

Posted by: goldsmith

Oh yeah, that divide is bridgeable! (Not!)

Hat tip, Instapundit (who else?)

Before the SHTF,



I want one of these:

And about a dozen magazines and a couple of cases of ammo. DSArms, baby. American made.

I just have to hit the lottery.

Remember This?

Well, these words go with that face:

Lies move Democrats to dig up dirt

SUSAN ESTRICH



My Democratic friends are mad as hell, and they aren’t going to take it any more.

They are worried, having watched as another August smear campaign, full of lies and half-truths, takes its toll in the polls.

They are frustrated, mostly at the Kerry campaign, for naively believing that just because all the newspapers and news organizations that investigated the charges of the Swift Boat assassins found them to be full of lies and half-truths, they wouldn’t take their toll. The word on the street is that Kerry was ready to fire back the day the story broke, but that his campaign, believing the charges would blow over if they ignored them, counseled restraint.

But most of all, activist Democrats are angry. As one who lived through an August like this, 16 years ago – replete with rumors that were lies, which the Bush campaign claimed they had nothing to do with and later admitted they had planted – I’m angry, too. I’ve been to this movie. Lies move numbers.

Remember the one about Dukakis suffering from depression after he lost the governorship? We lost six points over that lie, planted by George W.’s close friend and colleague in the 1988 campaign, Lee Atwater. Or how about the one about Kitty Dukakis burning a flag at an anti-war demonstration, another out-and-out lie, which the Bush campaign denied having anything to do with, except that it turned out to have come from a United States senator via the Republican National Committee? Atwater later apologized to me for that, too, on his deathbed. Did I mention that Lee’s wife is connected to the woman running the Swift Boat campaign?

What do you do, Democrats keep asking each other.

The answer is not pretty, but everyone knows what it is.

The trouble with Democrats, traditionally, is that we’re not mean enough. Too much is at stake to play by Dukakis’ rules and lose again. That is the conclusion Democrats have reached. So watch out. Millions of dollars will be on the table. And there are plenty of choices for what to spend it on.

Will it be the three, or is it four or five, drunken driving arrests that Bush and Cheney, the two most powerful men in the world, managed to rack up?

After Vietnam, nothing is ancient history, and Cheney is still drinking. What their records suggest is not only a serious problem with alcoholism, which Bush but not Cheney has acknowledged, but also an even more serious problem of judgment.

What if Bush were to fall off the wagon? Then what? Has America really faced the fact that we have an alcoholic as our president?

Or how about Dead Texans for Truth, highlighting those who served in Vietnam instead of the privileged draft-dodging president, and ended up as names on the wall instead of members of the Air National Guard.

Or maybe it will be Texas National Guardsmen for Truth, who can explain exactly what George W. Bush was doing while John Kerry was putting his life on the line. Perhaps with money on the table, or investigators on their trail, we will learn just what kind of wild and crazy things the president was doing while Kerry was saving a man’s life, facing enemy fire and serving his country.

Or could it be George Bush’s Former Female Friends for Truth. A forthcoming book by Kitty Kelley raises questions about whether the president has practiced what he preaches on abortion. As Larry Flynt discovered, a million dollars loosens lips. Are there others to be loosened?

Are you shocked? Remember Dukakis? Now he teaches at Northeastern University. John Kerry has been very fair in dealing with the Swift Boat charges. That’s why so many of my Democrat friends have decided to stop talking to the campaign, and start putting money together independently.

The arrogant little Republican boys who strutted around New York this week, claiming that they have this one won, would do well to take a step back. It could be a long and ugly road to November.

Not so damned funny anymore.

And Just One More Example…

Seems Ted Rall has a new book out. SignOnSanDiego has an interview, but here’s the money-shot:

“After one of my cartoons, someone wrote me and said, ‘Hate’s been getting you down.’ I’m like, ‘Hitler is the president! If you’re not full of hate, you’re not paying attention!’

Ah, yes. Hitler is the President. And Rall is, even now, crisping nicely in the crematorium ovens at an undisclosed death camp while his flayed skin is being made into a lampshade.

What’s that, you say? He’s signing autographs at a comic convention?

&ltEmilyLitella>Never mind.&lt/EmilyLitella>

And Even MORE!



Reader Oscar sends a link to this screed. Here’s a sample:

Y’know, I can’t emphasize this enough. But it’s time, and I’m not the only one–Mark Kleiman thinks so, Susan Estrich thinks so, damn near the entire liberal blogosphere thinks so. Heck, even John Kerry thinks so.



—



I don’t just want to beat the GOP–I want to end them. I don’t care how many decades it takes–I want to end them.



—



America can’t afford the GOP–a party of madmen and zealots, a party of liars and cheats, champion of all that which is divisive and hateful in our hearts. A party that appeals to the darker demons, not the better angels of our nature.

See what I mean about delusional? Oh, and do read the comments.



Yep. Definitely need more ammo. And a bigger gun.

More on that “Divide” Thingy

Read today’s Bleat by James Lileks.

I think I’d better start stocking up on ammo & supplies. 2008 isn’t that far away.

This is why I love the internet. I wrote in Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them that individual freedom rests on a tripod. The legs of that tripod are:

The ability to reason, the free exchange of ideas, and the ability to defend one’s person and property.

The internet provides the mechanism of a free exchange of ideas unparalleled in history.

On Wednesday, I wrote in Democrat Meltdown about the probable outcome of George Bush being successfully re-elected:

So, here’s my prediction: When Bush wins the election with enough margin to prevent cheating on the part of the Dems, there are going to be riots. There will also be domestic terrorism by the moonbats.

The “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party” has no place to go? They’ve been stirred up past the point of no return. They’re going to go completely nuts.

Ironbear of Who Tends the Fires wrote a piece yesterday that referenced mine entitled So, is it a Spade, or is it an “Earth Removal Device”? that discusses what he believes is an upcoming civil war. More distant, he believes, than November, but coming nonetheless. Jed, author of FreedomSight.com read both our pieces and decided that he could add to the discussion, and he certainly did in his piece I Wish I Could Be More Optimistic. Jed opens his piece with a quote from an excellent Joseph Sobran essay I don’t think I’d seen before, How Tyranny Came to America.

Please do read all of these interconnected pieces. This is “the free exchange of ideas” at its best, I think – people all over the country able to sit at a keyboard and put up what they think for others to consider and critique.

Jed’s essay quotes a critical piece of Sobran’s:

The modern American educational system no longer teaches us the political language of our ancestors. In fact our schooling helps widen the gulf of time between our ancestors and ourselves, because much of what we are taught in the name of civics, political science, or American history is really modern liberal propaganda. Sometimes this is deliberate. Worse yet, sometimes it isn’t. Our ancestral voices have come to sound alien to us, and therefore our own moral and political language is impoverished.

To emphasize this, let me quote Connie du Toit from quite a while back (can’t find the link, but I saved the quote):

The other day our Carpenter’s helper heard me say something along the lines of, “it is difficult to conclude that incompetence is the reason why our public schools have deteriorated. There comes a point where you have to suspect sabotage, or a conspiracy.”

He asked me if I really meant that. I gave him the five minute explanation of John Dewey’s known affiliation with communists, his frequent essays and articles about the wonders of the Soviet education system, and his quote, “You can’t make Socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.”

I then went on to tell him about how public schools changed at the turn of the last century. That there were others involved in turning Americans from free-thinking individualists to factory drones. I also added that many people probably went along with it because it seemed like a good idea, but there were certainly enough people behind the scenes, who knew that the goal posts had been moved. THAT is a conspiracy.

Yes. There does come that time when you are forced to don the tinfoil hat.

The incompetence excuse only works once. Incompetence this great is impossible to attribute to accident.

I concluded long ago that the teaching of “modern liberal propaganda” met the definition of a conspiracy. The fact that it’s no longer deliberate merely shows how successful that conspiracy was.

Sobran believes that we can restore the Constitution:

Can we restore the Constitution and recover our freedom? I have no doubt that we can. Like all great reforms, it will take an intelligent, determined effort by many people. I don’t want to sow false optimism.

But the time is ripe for a constitutional counterrevolution. Discontent with the ruling system, as the 1992 Perot vote showed, is deep and widespread among several classes of people: Christians, conservatives, gun owners, taxpayers, and simple believers in honest government all have their reasons. The rulers lack legitimacy and don’t believe in their own power strongly enough to defend it.

The beauty of it is that the people don’t have to invent a new system of government in order to get rid of this one. They only have to restore the one described in the Constitution — the system our government already professes to be upholding. Taken seriously, the Constitution would pose a serious threat to our form of government.

And for just that reason, the ruling parties will be finished as soon as the American people rediscover and awaken their dormant Constitution.

Jed is, as the title of his essay states, not so optimistic:

I’d like to think it’s possible to return to genuine federalism in the United States. But I honestly don’t believe there are sufficient numbers of citizens who would support it. Indeed, I fear it’s just the opposite. Far too many of us are at least content with, and many support, the sort of activist government which is described by Ironbear thusly:

Neither Democrats/Leftists or Republicans shy away from statism… the arguments there are merely over degree of statism, uses to which statism will be put – and over who’ll hold the reins.

With an argument such as that, I find it hard to agree with Ironbear about where he thinks the divide between the left/right (or Democrat/Republican, or Liberal/Conservative) philosophies is taking us, i.e. to irreconcilable conflict.

It’s a good point. I’ve long said that the choice between the Democrats and the Republicans is the choice between castration and a wedgie. They’re statists, and statists-lite.

Sobran thinks that when the American people “rediscover and awaken their dormant Constitution” then they’ll restore it. Jed thinks that too many people are too heavily invested in the statist status quo for that to happen, or for there to be another civil war. Ironbear thinks that “(t)he heart of the conflict is between those to whom personal liberty is important, and those to whom liberty is not only inconsequential, but to whom personal liberty is a deadly threat.”

So who, if anyone, is right?

First, they’re entirely separate questions. We can certainly have another civil war and not restore the Constitution. In fact, that would be the least likely outcome anyway. We preserved the Union with the last one, but the Constitution sure as hell wasn’t “restored.” I, too, disagree with Sobran’s optimism. Which Constitution would we restore? The one that the Founders signed that allowed slavery? The one Lincoln violated in order to save the Union? How far back do you go? Jed calls for “genuine federalism,” but how do you define that? Federalism was one of the things greatly opposed by a large number of the Founders, and not really implemented until after the Civil War. “States Rights” have largely disappeared in the destruction of the Constitution that Sobran decries.

I’ve quoted Antonin Scalia more than once in this blog, but this reminds me of this one attributed to him:

To some degree, a constitutional guarantee is like a commercial loan, you can only get it if, at the time, you don’t really need it. The most important, enduring, and stable portions of the Constitution represent such a deep social consensus that one suspects if they were entirely eliminated, very little would change. And the converse is also true. A guarantee may appear in the words of the Constitution, but when the society ceases to possess an abiding belief in it, it has no living effect.

Consider the fate of the principle expressed in the Tenth Amendment that the federal government is a government of limited powers. I do not suggest that constitutionalization has no effect in helping the society to preserve allegiance to its fundamental principles. That is the whole purpose of a constitution.
But the allegiance comes first and the preservation afterwards.

How do we achieve a “deep social consensus” again? Did we ever, really, have one? What I and Ironbear and others have been illustrating is that there is a deep and widening schism in the American social consensus that certainly gives the appearance that we are headed for civil war. That schism is nominally what Ironbear described:

Like the first (Civil War), the dividing lines are drawn across views of the ownership of men…. of whether we are owned by ourselves or by The State.

One needn’t be a strict Constitutionalist to pick a side in that one.

Let me say, however, that I’m not a wholehearted opponent of some level of statism. I’ve had long and protracted arguments discussions with anarchists who believe that no government is better than any government, and that a state of no government is achievable (though they admit they don’t know how to get there.) I’m comfortable with the fact that government is a necessary evil, best kept small and watched closely. And I understand that it is the nature of government to grow, cancer-like, to subsume the body politic and kill it.

The only answer to that knowledge is education, and here is an excellent place to put a piece once sent to me by Francis Porretto. It’s a piece of original fiction written by Francis (and used with his permission) that illustrates the Spoonerist-anarchist belief system from his yet-unpublished novel Which Art In Hope:

As the bell rang, Professor Arne Stromberg bounded in through a side door. The gaunt, gray-haired sociologist dangled a battered old briefcase from his right hand and a large canvas bag from his left. He tossed both at the side of the lectern, switched on the microphone and bathed the class in his relentlessly sunny smile. Armand straightened up and uncapped his pen.

“Good morning. Last Randsday I promised you that we’d have a special demonstration today, something you’ve heard about many times but have never seen in operation. Did everyone bring ten one-deka bills?”

There was a rustling among the seated students, but no one spoke.

Stromberg nodded. “All right. We’ll need a small clear area, and up here by me is as good as any.” He pulled an index card from his breast pocket and peered at it. “Will the following students please come join me at the front of the room: Albermayer, Claire; Diederick, Fred; Farquharson, Jules; Ianotti, Ottavio; Morelon, Armand; Pierce, Aurelyn; Reinach, Denise; Thorkild, Lars; Untermeyer, Klaus; and Wolzman, David.”

Armand started at the sound of his name. He rose and ambled down the center aisle to join the other students whose names had been called. When all were present, Stromberg picked up his canvas bag and spread it open before them. It was empty.

“Put any weapons you’re carrying in here. You’ll get them back when the demonstration is over.”

A prickle of unease danced along Armand’s neck, but he pulled his needlegun from his pocket and flipped it into the bag. Presently the bag bulged with an impressive amount of hardware. Stromberg deposited it by the side of the lectern with a clank.

“Very good. Now, arrange yourselves in a circle about ten feet in diameter and sit on the dais.”

Armand formed a rough circle with the other nine, then sat cross-legged on the wooden surface. The expressions on the other faces in the circle were wary. Stromberg slipped through the circle, moved to its center and turned to face the lecture hall. An impressively perfect silence prevailed.

“You are about to see a demonstration of the State. For the purposes of the demonstration, I will play the role of the State. Please don’t become alarmed. Above all, remain in your seats.”

The professor swept his eyes around the circle. “Take your ten one-deka notes and fan them out before you.” A student across the circle from Armand asked, “Why?” Stromberg smiled down at her. “Just do it.” They did.

The professor stooped and with practiced rapidity plucked a note from each student’s hands. It took about fifteen seconds. When he’d rounded the circle, he returned to its center, divided the notes into two sheaves of five each, and stuck one in his pocket. A student in the circle cried, “Hey!” He started to rise from the floor.

Stromberg turned a stony face toward the objector. “Be quiet.” The young man subsided.

As if at random, the professor selected the student next to Armand and handed her the other five bills. The young woman accepted them with an incredulous stare. Stromberg smiled. “Add these to your fan.” Armand looked sideways at the girl. If she had been prepared for Stromberg’s act, she gave no sign.

Stromberg stood at the center of the circle looking at his watch for a few seconds, then began to pluck bills from the students’ hands once again, quickly and wordlessly. As the professor approached, Armand shoved his nine remaining notes into his pants pocket. Stromberg cocked an eyebrow.

“Where are your dekas?”

“Safe in my pocket.” Armand smiled formally.

“Well, bring them out.”

“I prefer not to.”

A grin spread slowly across Arne Stromberg’s face and became a wide, vicious smile. “Ah, but you will.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a Bronson coagulator and leveled it at Armand’s head. A gasp raced across the hall. Armand’s breath went short. He’d never before faced the business end of a weapon in another man’s hand.

“You see, Mr. Morelon, I am the State.” Stromberg’s smile did not waver. “I can do as I please to you. If you refuse my demands, I can take your life, and no one can call me to account. That’s what it means to be the State. And that’s what it means to be a subject of the State. Now produce your bills.”

Armand’s blood rose. He started to clamber to his feet. Before he could do so, Stromberg’s foot lashed out and struck him on the breastbone. He toppled backward, roared in anger and made to rise again, but stopped. The professor’s thumb was visibly caressing the coagulator’s firing stud.

“You don’t have the idea yet, Mr. Morelon. Your family is the oldest and most honored on Hope. You’re used to gentle treatment, maybe even a little deference. But I am the State, and I concede nothing to you. You have no rights I am bound to respect. Your preferences are unimportant to me. You are only fodder for my plans. Produce your money or be prepared to die.”

The room buzzed with surprise and anger. Armand glared up in outrage. The gun did not swerve from his face. Abruptly Stromberg’s thumb bore down on the stud. The coagulator’s tracer beam struck Armand full in the eyes.

Every student in the hall screamed, Armand loudest of all. The brilliance of the beam dazzled him. He heaved himself backward, one arm thrown across his eyes. From around him came a thunder of feet as his classmates stormed toward the dais, toward Arne Stromberg.

“Wait!” Armand shouted. “I’m all right!”

The thunder died. Armand lowered his arm from his face and opened his eyes. His vision was a sea of colored blurs. It took several seconds to clear and reveal the surrounding tableau. His classmates were clustered around him, staring at him in shock. A group of four held Stromberg by the arms. A wild panic was evident in their expressions. Apparently unfazed by the tumult he’d caused, the professor was shaking his head and clucking in disapproval. “I told you to stay in your seats. Mr. Morelon.” Stromberg pulled himself free of restraint, then squatted before Armand. “You have the makings of a revolutionary martyr. Or did you guess that my gun was disabled?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. No decent person would do such a thing, right?”

The professor nodded slowly. “That’s the problem I face year after year. No decent person would use force to get something he wanted from someone else. Force is for the defense of life and property, never anything else. You all drank that in with your mothers’ milk, and it’s been reinforced by two decades of life in a decent society.” He retrieved the dud gun from where it had fallen and returned it to his pocket. “Please, ladies and gentlemen, return to your seats. Yes, you in the circle as well. Oh, get your weapons from the bag first.”

When the class had settled into its seats again, Stromberg went to the lectern and leaned against it. Droplets of sweat glistened on his forehead. The demonstration had taken as much from the sociologist as from anyone else, Armand included. “This is a hard job,” Stromberg grimaced. “None of you knows of the State, except for Sacrifice Day stories. After twelve hundred years of perfect freedom, none of you can even entertain the notion that someone could claim the power of life and death over you, and not be held answerable for his actions. And so I have to make it real for you with a little play like the one you just saw. But even that isn’t enough, as witness Mr. Morelon’s inability to believe that I would really kill him for his defiance.”

A murmur stirred the room.

Stromberg chuckled. “And of course I didn’t. What would have happened to me if I had? Would you others have permitted me to shelter under the privilege I had claimed, the State’s privilege of ‘sovereign immunity’?” He shook his head. “Not for a minute. If I had really hurt that young man, you would have torn me limb from limb, and you would have been right to do so. That’s what a decent society does with those that claim the privilege of coercing others. We eliminate them.”

The professor’s face grew tight. “And that’s why the Spooner Federation abandoned the Earth.”

Armand’s thoughts churned. He raised his hand.

Stromberg acknowledged him. “Yes, Mr. Morelon?”

“Sir…I know Earth had States, and I know they hated our ancestors, but weren’t there any decent people left?”

The professor looked at him in silence for a long time. “This is truly a hard job, Mr. Morelon. The answer to your question is: No, there weren’t. Not after the Spoonerites left. I know you don’t want to believe it. But the people of Earth had all accepted force and terror as legitimate means to an end. They had accepted the State, and the State had swallowed them whole. There were no free men anywhere. There were only rulers and subjects. As a result, there was no peace and no security anywhere. Have you ever read about war, Mr. Morelon?” Stromberg looked around the room. “Have any of you?”

There was no answer.

“It was the greatest of the obscenities of the States.” Stromberg’s voice dropped near to a whisper. “Now and again, for any reasons or none, they would hurl their populations at one another. Millions of men would clash in combat, striking and being struck, killing and being killed in numbers beyond imagination. Why? So that one State could enforce its will upon another.

“During a war, the economy of a warring State would be channeled to warlike priorities. No longer did the skills of producers determine what would be made and who would make it. No longer did the desires of consumers determine how much of it would be purchased and at what price. The State ruled all. The engines of production became merely another weapon in its hands, to be wielded against its enemy as it saw fit. To disobey the State in peacetime would cost you your liberty or your property. To deviate from the State’s decrees in wartime was called treason, and would cost you your life.”

The old lecturer straightened, looking for a moment very like Armand’s grandfather. His eyes became piercing beacons of anger.

“And I am charged with teaching you about this. I, who have no more direct knowledge of it than you. Every year I spend hundreds of hours reading histories of old Earth. I steep myself in them until I can smell the greed of the States on the air and feel the chill sweat of their subjects’ fear on my own skin. But why? We’ve left the State behind forever, haven’t we? Would any of you care to guess why I put myself through that torture year after year, and why I’ve put you through this briefer one today?”

A student raised a tentative hand. “Because it’s necessary, sir?”

Stromberg shook his head slowly. “Necessary to whom, Mr. Untermeyer? Necessary by whose judgment?” He grinned ruefully. “Necessity is the creed of tyrants. A great man named William Pitt said that. He proved it by going on to become a great tyrant. A man of Hope determines his own necessities. He doesn’t have them determined for him by others.”

Klaus Untermeyer stood, and the class turned toward him. “But if it isn’t necessary, what other reason could there be?”

Stromberg pursed his lips and looked down at his lectern. “I noticed that you carry a needlegun, Mr. Untermeyer. May I ask why?”

The student shrugged. “I’ve always carried one.”

“Are you good with it?”

The young man’s eyes narrowed. “Fair.”

“Have you ever used it to defend yourself?”

“Uh, no.”

“But I’d wager a year’s salary that you never leave your room without it. Why?”

Untermeyer shrugged. “My parents taught me to keep it with me. You never know what might turn up.”

The sociologist nodded. “Indeed you don’t. Not now, and not in the future. If there’s a soul among you who doesn’t go armed whenever he’s beyond the walls of his home, he’s a benighted fool. Because you don’t know what might turn up. And after twelve hundred years of peace and freedom, neither do we of Hope.”

Stromberg brought forth his disabled coagulator. “I removed the leads to the maser at my breakfast table, and I’ve felt naked ever since. If you’ll allow me, I’m going to reconnect them now.” He pulled a small screwdriver from his pocket, opened the weapon’s case, and swiftly reconnected the severed leads. “You can never know what might turn up, ladies and gentlemen. The justifications for creating and submitting to a State have piled up thickly over the eight millennia of recorded human history. Each has been cleverer and more complex than the last. We of Hope have not succumbed…yet. And if we keep green our memories of what the State really was, how it operated, and what it meant to be unfree, perhaps we never will.”

Armand raised his hand again. “Sir?”

“Yes, Mr. Morelon?”

“During the demonstration? Why did you give Claire five of the dekas you, uh, stole?”

Stromberg smirked. “Thank you for asking, Mr. Morelon. That’s how States create loyalists.”

The bell rang.

Short of colonies off-planet, establishing an idealistically homogeneous society like the one Francis envisions is unlikely in the extreme, and even then unlikely to endure. The Puritans came across the ocean to escape the corruption they saw around them, but the corruption followed and eventually swallowed them. I, personally don’t see any way to escape some level of coercive statism, but I think it can and should be minimized.

The only way to do that, however, is through education, and that’s what Fran’s piece illustrates – the power of education. I’ve another illuminating excerpt in this blog, one from Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, if you’re interested. It’s the lecture on History and Moral Philosophy that I think everyone should read, on much the same lines as the one above.

As Connie du Toit and Joseph Sobran (among many others) have noted, “modern liberal propaganda” – full-blown statism – has become the curriculum of our public school systems. You won’t see anyone teaching around the philosophy of individual freedom and responsibility. The State was made responsible for education, and in the manner that the State always does, it has seen fit to encourage the growth of Statism.

If individual freedom rests on the tripod of the ability to reason, the free exchange of ideas, and the ability to protect ones person and property, then the State must break one or more of those legs in order to maintain its grip on power. Otherwise the result will be civil war when the State becomes too oppressive, and the people will no longer bear it.

This does not, however, mean that the result of a civil war will be better than its cause. The Founders had a strong, largely homogeneous philosophy on which to base their new nation. I don’t believe the same can be said for their modern descendants.

The education of ourselves and our children is our most critical mission. Learn that which we need to know to be free. Teach it to others. Possess the ability to defend yourself, your family, and your property.

Or may your chains rest lightly upon you and your descendants.