CCTelander
07-04-2010, 04:10 PM
Here's an interesting take on Independence Day:
Born on the What of Who?
by L. Neil Smith
Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise
[Author's Note: the following essay ran in The Libertarian Enterprise Number 374, July 2, 2006 and seems even more applicable now than it did then.]
Another Fourth of July is upon us, the 230th. By rights, and to paraphrase an inscription on the sideplate of one of my Ruger sixguns, manufactured in 1976, it should have been "the 230th year of American liberty".
Sad to say, it is far from that.
Instead, the television screen is full of warnings and threats, lest you celebrate July Fourth in the traditional way (Ben Franklin would have loved pop-bottle rockets) by setting off fireworks. If the media mouthpieces ever heard about "shooting the anvil" they'd pee themselves.
The American Revolution—and the spirit of independence that it evokes—has always been an embarrassment to the shriveled sociopaths whose existence centers upon an eternal struggle to gain and retain control over the lives of others. They have spared no effort to crush that spirit—it has always occupied the top spot on their agenda—and turn the Fourth into just another excuse for idiots to guzzle beer until they vomit, or get themselves mangled to death on the interstate highway.
We have now reached a point (I suspect the Brits reached it in the 19th century, and the Romans well before the birth of Christ) where the political process selects only the most crooked, dullwitted, and demented among us, a point where decent, intelligent, and rational individuals have no place in public life and are winnowed out by the system. A point where commemorating a Revolution is seen as a dire threat.
In a moral sense, America has reverted to the Stone Age. It has become a dark cave where the light of the Bill of Rights never shines. The White House is occupied by a stumbing cretin with the ethical outlook of a piranha, carefully isolated by handlers and flacks—as he has been for most of his life, long before he became a politician—so that he doesn't have the merest clue what's going on in the real world.
The stumbling cretin will be replaced, in due course, with another twisted subcreature just like him, chosen by one or the other of two political parties whose members—long gone in the most putrescent corruption imaginable—regard the horrible death by starvation of half a million children as "worth it", in order to demonstrate the power of a nation-state most of us were brought up to believe was conceived to defend the life, the freedom, and the dignity of the individual.
Perhaps America never quite measured up to the ideals on which it was built. At least it once regarded those ideals as a standard to strive for.
No more.
The rest can be read here:
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle577-20100704-08.html
Enjoy!
Born on the What of Who?
by L. Neil Smith
Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise
[Author's Note: the following essay ran in The Libertarian Enterprise Number 374, July 2, 2006 and seems even more applicable now than it did then.]
Another Fourth of July is upon us, the 230th. By rights, and to paraphrase an inscription on the sideplate of one of my Ruger sixguns, manufactured in 1976, it should have been "the 230th year of American liberty".
Sad to say, it is far from that.
Instead, the television screen is full of warnings and threats, lest you celebrate July Fourth in the traditional way (Ben Franklin would have loved pop-bottle rockets) by setting off fireworks. If the media mouthpieces ever heard about "shooting the anvil" they'd pee themselves.
The American Revolution—and the spirit of independence that it evokes—has always been an embarrassment to the shriveled sociopaths whose existence centers upon an eternal struggle to gain and retain control over the lives of others. They have spared no effort to crush that spirit—it has always occupied the top spot on their agenda—and turn the Fourth into just another excuse for idiots to guzzle beer until they vomit, or get themselves mangled to death on the interstate highway.
We have now reached a point (I suspect the Brits reached it in the 19th century, and the Romans well before the birth of Christ) where the political process selects only the most crooked, dullwitted, and demented among us, a point where decent, intelligent, and rational individuals have no place in public life and are winnowed out by the system. A point where commemorating a Revolution is seen as a dire threat.
In a moral sense, America has reverted to the Stone Age. It has become a dark cave where the light of the Bill of Rights never shines. The White House is occupied by a stumbing cretin with the ethical outlook of a piranha, carefully isolated by handlers and flacks—as he has been for most of his life, long before he became a politician—so that he doesn't have the merest clue what's going on in the real world.
The stumbling cretin will be replaced, in due course, with another twisted subcreature just like him, chosen by one or the other of two political parties whose members—long gone in the most putrescent corruption imaginable—regard the horrible death by starvation of half a million children as "worth it", in order to demonstrate the power of a nation-state most of us were brought up to believe was conceived to defend the life, the freedom, and the dignity of the individual.
Perhaps America never quite measured up to the ideals on which it was built. At least it once regarded those ideals as a standard to strive for.
No more.
The rest can be read here:
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle577-20100704-08.html
Enjoy!