Are You Good Enough for Freedom?
by L.Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I saw a bumper sticker being advertised the other day, meant for the time when Barack Obama finally leaves office, that simply said “The End Of An Error”. Although I fully appreciate and heartily sympathize with the sentiment, I fundamentally disagree with it. One only needs a glance at the platter of evil, stupid, and insane choices that the Republican Party plans to offer the American public in the next general election, to realize that they are the political equivalent of Michelle Obama’s school lunches, boring. insipid, and unsavory.

In my despair, a thought struck me that I have resisted all of my life. I do not believe in elites. I am a social egalitarian, and always have been, the offspring of a secretary and an airplane mechanic who has more than thirty books to his credit, a son of the High Plains, who arrogated himself, without anybody’s permission, to argue ethics and political philosophy against the hired minds of billionaires.

In all of that time, some fifty-three years, political affairs in America have done nothing but get worse. The thought I had—and have often had, but vehemently avoided—was that, perhaps, the majority of the human species, or at least of the people of America, is unworthy of the ideas of the transcedent geniuses like John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and James Madison who created this country.

What hope can there be, in the long term, for those who worship mediocre mentalities like those of Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or the overly-starched pseudo-intellectual racist Woodrow Wilson, when anyone with two gray cells to rub together can see at once that they were nothing more than crooked politicians, ward- heelers operating at the highest level, shrouded in platitudes and lies?

What future can we realistically expect, when the only segment of the American population that has somehow managed to remember what it was all about, who agrees with and champions the ideas of the Founders of this country, is the reviled and ridiculed Tea Party, the wearers of bib overalls and baseball caps, the sons and daughters of Flyover Country?

If that horrible thought, to be rejected at all costs, that the Founding Fathers were writing and speaking far above the heads of average Americans is correct, then it dictates a whole new political strategy. If we think of politics as our survival strategy, what does survival require, in a land ruled exclusively by stupid, evil, and insane politicians—put in office by products of the public schools—pretending to be our superiors, when they are actually pathetic and subhuman?

Hey, I’m not laying anything down, here, I’m asking questions. But I admit that I have Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, John Boehner, Mitch McConnel, and John McCain on my mind. And if the other side is stuck with dismal failures of evolution like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama, doesn’t that mean that we are doomed to be owned and operated by default by the likes of Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Bill Gates, as Al Sharpton and Michael Moore pose and caper on the sidelines?

We do have some advantages the other side is lacking, among them, a working sense of humor. Al Franken was never funny and he isn’t funny now. Henry Kissinger was never intentionally funny. The best left wing comedians start to get tedious when they begin to talk politics. The exceptions were Will Rogers and a guy you may have heard of named Mort Sahl, who influenced Lenny Bruce,George Carlin, and Woody Allen by doing topoical standup about political structure, and was hilarious. But Mort, who is remarkably still alive, is fading away now.

Republicans haven’t had a sense of humor for a century. They no longer cherish any beliefs, and they’re sensitive about it. However, whenever I picture Tea Party people in my mind, members of the real movement, without leaders, without a center, I reflexively see them laughing.

Take Walton and Johnson.

Please.

These two are old-time radio comedians with the best feel for political humor I’ve heard in a long time. Like so many friends of mine, they’re from Texas and are openly libertarian. They lean slightly (but not fatally) to the right, and feature voice characters like the redneck who proudly lives in a double-wide with his wife Praline, an extremely convincing black man named Mr. Eau, and a gay fellow named Mr. Kenneth who owns a hair salon in New Orleans and is the most libertarian of the lot. Given these few essentail points of view, Walton and Johnson comment on everything, including the utter folly of political correctness. A favorite target of theirs is Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, a woman too stupid to realize how stupid she is. I listen in the morning via I Heart Radio, on 950 KPRC, Houston.

Thinking back, I realize that my most successful works have been those that painted a libertarian future in the brightest colors in my literary paintbox, They have also often been funny. If that’s what it takes to change this mess, then I’m amenable. I love to make opeople laugh.

On purpose, that is.

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