THE FIFTH OF JULY

By L. Neil Smith [email protected]

Special to _The Libertarian Enterprise_


   Independence Day is over for another year, and once again, I've
failed to write the definitive essay about it, far enough in advance,
to have it appear online upon the Very Day itself. I chose to write
instead, this time, about the importance of getting rid of driver and
automobile licenses, concealed carry permits, and Social Security
numbers.

   So I guess it wasn't a total loss.

   The Fifth of July deserves attention, too, in its way. The smell
of nitrates lingers in the cool morning air, and the sidewalks and
streets are littered festively with the cardboard carcasses of dead
whizbangs.

   It appears to be fully as traditional, in 20th and 21st century
America, for the round-heeled socialist mass media to be all agog on
the Day After -- with bloody and grotesque tales of seven-year-old
fireworks victims sporting ruptured eardrums, exploded eyeballs, and
blown-off fingers, with teary operatics featuring housefires, forest
fires, and river fires, and with a plethora of veritable Icelandic
sagas filled to brimming with pyrotechnic crime and punishment -- as
it is for the same low, crawling, parasitic scum to moisten their
vile, mildewed crotches in perverted sexual ecstacy the Day Before,
passing along the usual ration of government admonitions against the
peasantry enjoying, in the time-honored chemical manner, what pitiful
rags have been left to us of our individual freedom and national
independence.

   The problem -- for government and media alike -- is that what's
being celebrated here is the stunning and spectacular success, a
couple of centuries ago, of open, violent rebellion against ... oops,
_government_!

   Every year, the sorry suckups on radio and TV inform us that this
year (as opposed to last year and possibly next year, once the facts
have been officially made up and released) X number of miscreants were
arrested for illegal possession and deployment of 14th century Asian
technology. Sometimes the number of arrests is higher than last year,
and we receive a collective tongue-lashing. Other times, the number
they've been ordered to use is smaller, and they condescendingly
praise us for humbly kneeling to gratefully accept the Clintonian
insertion.

   What I've noticed, however, is that the number of arrests for the
largest settlement in my immediate locality -- the reeking, pustulent,
collectivist abcess on the backside of the pristine Great American
Desert known as the City and County of Denver -- is usually in the
hundreds.

   To get the real picture, you must multiply that totally amazing
and happy number of free souls who have intransigently defied the
Lords of Altruism for the sheer joy of making pretty colored sparks,
smelling the good smoke patriots smelled at Lexington and Concord, and
hearing things go _bang!_ -- and passing that joy to their innocently
delighted (or pantswettingly terrified) offspring -- you must multiply
the number of arrests by somewhere between a thousand and infinity to
account for the times the Blue Gang simply steal some little kid's
sparklers and Roman candles without writing a citation, so they can
sneak away and shoot their ill-gotten loot in some deserted alleyway,
themselves.

(continued)

Altogether it makes a perfect, heartwarming portrait of today's
America worthy of Norman Rockwell. Or would that be George Lincoln
Rockwell?

   Whichever it may be, I've now reached that detestable stage where
I can tell all of you whippersnappers, with a straight face, that I
recall a very different America. For example, I remember an absolutely
splendid custom called "shooting (or sounding) the anvil", generally
an undertaking performed by one's reprobate uncle while the womenfolk
stood around wringing their hands in their aprons, clucking their
tongues, awaiting in secret glee an event that they wouldn't have
missed for all of the apple pies left burning in their wood-fired
ovens.

   In my case, it wasn't an uncle (I had one of those, a pathetic
wussie who believed that if he voted for Barry Goldwater, his bosses
would find out somehow and he'd lose his cushy civil service job), but
my Dad's best friend Chuck, a gunsmith from Alamosa, Colorado, who, on
ordinary days, was the kind of Klingon who crushed beer cans on his
forehead.

   Back when they were made of steel.

   Chuck would persuade somebody -- he had a bad back, himself (no,
really) to haul a 50-pound anvil out of his garage for the occasion to
a spot reserved for the sacred event halfway down his driveway. There,
in a hollow worn in the asphalt by years of this hallowed observance,
he'd deposit a handful of black powder and have the anvil placed over
it.

   Then my dad's friend Chuck would either lead a yard or two of
cannon fuse away or (depending on his humor and the amount of Old
Turkeywattle he'd consumed that evening) talk some gullible young
candidate for natural selection into shoving a smoldering twig under
the anvil, and _BAHHHHMMM!_, the anvil would leap into the air on a
flaming cloud of aromatically sulphrous air-pollution to the delight
of everybody, ringing like a great bell all the way up and all the way
down.

   Those were simpler days, long before cable television.

   But the whole point to this remembrance is that we kids got plenty
of chances to blow things up, ourselves, and if anybody ever got more
than a scorched pinky or a ringing in his ears out of it, I never
heard of it -- maybe because my ears were still ringing. Fireworks
were just another kid's-toy, and they weren't only for the Fourth of
July.

   My younger brother and I, having grown up in the shadow of World
War II, would spend half a day sculpting elaborate Nazi bunkers and
pillboxes out of snowbanks around our house, and staffing them with
what are now known as Green Army Men. We'd then plant Black Cats --
carefully unravelled from their long, noisy, wasteful strings -- as
expertly as the guys using plastique to destroy the Guns of Navarone,
and contentedly spend the rest of the day demolishing these enemy
fortifications.

   In the house, our mom -- usually overprotective bordering on the
Norman-Bate's-Mother level -- must have heard our explosions. If so,
she never said anything. We were just kids having a good time, and as
long as we didn't blow up the propane tank or one of the cats, we were
fine.

(continued)

Today all three of us, plus Dad (apprehended later at his office,
film at 11), would be treated to Thorazine, therapy, and the wet sheet
treatment, while Paul Harvey -- Goodday! -- made exactly the same kind
of noises about us on the radio, from coast to coast, that the
womenfolk made waiting for my dad's best friend Chuck to shoot the
anvil.

   In an era when small, helpless schoolchildren are routinely
bludgeoned by their principal and teachers, tear-gassed, wrestled to
the ground, handcuffed and bellychained, and frogmarched off to the
Bastille in a Black Maria for having drawn pictures of knives on
paper, I know that all of this must seem insane to the bleeding-heart,
bedwetting, afraid-of-every-known-phenomenon socialists who call
themselves liberals and stumbled onto this website by some terrible
accident. But while you're here, let me tell you more about those
times.

   My grandmother, living in a small city, left her doors unlocked in
perfect safety all her life. I, myself, could walk a mile to school in
the first grade without worrying my parents or enticing some genetic
cull to kill me and eat me. Later on, at the age of 11, I could make
the harrowing 13-mile trek into town after a blizzard had closed the
roads, to operate the radio panel for the weekly church broadcast that
was a requirement for my receiving the God and Country Award in Boy
Scouts.

   It gets better. In my youth, children roamed the countryside with
rifles, and nobody thought anything of it -- adults would go out of
the way to tell them where they'd seen rabbits or deer. Sometimes kids
smoked cigarettes, and no one had the right to say a thing about it
but their parents. Kids started fires in the woods and roasted hot dogs
or marshmallows. In the city, it was potatoes. A generation earlier,
kids got real live jobs and helped feed their families, before Marxoid
intellectuals persuaded unions and politicians to "humanely" condemn
"child labor", sentencing millions of innocent kids to 12 worthless,
nonproductive years of daytime concentration-camps and socialist
indoctrination.

   What you didn't see, back when kids handled more of their own
lives than most adults do today, was public schools being shot up by
homicidal mutants, gangs murdering each other over drug-selling turf,
or national epidemics of unwed motherhood. Kids learned Latin and
Greek, knew how to spell, and passed tests that college students fail
today.

   Now you tell me: have six or seven decades of the calculated
infantilization of American children led to anything resembling
progress? Now that the process has started on adults, are we going to
fight?

   If your answer is yes, the symbolic place to begin is with the
laws against the possession and use of fireworks. These laws must be
repealed, nullified, or otherwise disposed of. For several reasons,
fireworks should be given the protection of a fully-enforced Second
Amendment. At their most innocent, fireworks laws are nothing more
than another example of the so-called liberal's primitive hatred and
fear of fire that I wrote about years ago in the much-crossposted
"Prometheus Bound and Gagged" (included in my recent book of essays,
_Lever Action_).

(continued)

These laws must be repealed, nullified, or otherwise disposed of.
At their least innocent, they represent a conscious attempt, mostly on
the part of those who call themselves Democrats -- and who would be
happier living under Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot -- to flush the American
Revolution, and everthing it was fought to achieve, down the Memory
Hole.

   These laws must be repealed, nullified, or otherwise disposed of.
But don't look for any help from Republicans. The only thing that
conservatives can be trusted to do, once liberals have shoved their
metaphorical umbrella up our collective posterior, is to open it for
them.

   To solve this and a thousand other American problems permanently,
however, it would be best to rely upon Cato the Elder's policy
toward Carthage: the public schools must be razed to the ground, so
that not one stone is left standing on another, and salt sown on the
ruins.

   On nightly TV "news" reports, the Jennings, Brokaws, and Whatevers
love to make snotty propaganda over the charming and ebullient way of
celebrating Arabs have, of firing their AK47s and their pistols into
the air, just as we once fired our muskets and Kentucky rifles. (They
give their children guns, as well, exactly as we used to do.) Most of
us no longer recognize that joyous urge, let alone commend it, as we
ought to. (Please don't give me a load of crap about the safety of the
practice, either; read _Hatcher's Notebook_, if you can still find a
copy in this hive of political correctness, and then we'll talk.) That
urge is the very wellspring of traditional American Independence Day
festivities.

   Whenever you hear, sometimes for several days before and after the
Glorious Fourth, itself, and maybe half a city away, the wonderful
snap, crackle, and _pop!_ of illicit firecrackers, occasionally
punctuated by the lovely _wheeeee!_ of contraband pop bottle rockets,
what you're hearing (although the distant rocketeers are probably
unaware of it, themselves) is the _real_ celebration of American
independence.

   What follows -- the inevitable sirens -- remind us who the enemy
is, and who they have always been, since that other summer day in
1776.

**********************************************************************
L. Neil Smith is the award-winning author of more than 20 novels about
individual liberty and the right to own and carry weapons. To read
more than 80 articles like this one, buy his _LEVER ACTION: ESSAYS ON
LIBERTY BY L. NEIL SMITH_, available for $21.95 plus shipping and
handling from [url]www.webleyweb.com/lneil/leveraction.html[/url]

To order Neil's latest novel, _HOPE_ (with Aaron Zelman), receive free
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btt

btt

Anyone ever think that making fireworks illegal only fosters the spirit of rebellion in our youth? When I lived in Illinois, I would go to Indiana to buy fireworks, then light them off at home. Also, difficult access to fireworks led us youth to, ahem, roll our own. And these homecooked delights were much better than any store bought chinese pos.

And when the cops came, we ran and ran.

Haha, good times.

radioman