At his famous "man in a glass box" trial in Israel,
Nazi criminal
Adolf Eichmann tried to explain how a whole nation went insane
during
the 1930s and 1940s. "Germans," he informed his captors,
"lack civil
courage."
One of the most unexpected and disheartening discoveries I made
as
a youth is that there are different kinds of courage. A man who
shows
admirable valor on the battlefield, for example, may be paralytically
unable to talk to women. Similarly, in a world where people often
say
they would rather die than make a speech, and the terror invariably
first or second on their list is of personal confrontation, the
same
warrior-type may be unable to stand up to the pressure of political
processes.
I've seen the latter many, many times, most recently when the
National Rifle Association cooperated with some of the nastiest,
most
notorious advocates of victim disarmament -- congressvulture Carolyn
McCarthy, that blood-sucking scavenger of the dead for one --
to
"tighten up" provisions of the highly-illegal Brady
Law. Passed by the
congress on an unrecorded voice vote, HR 2640, the "NICS
Improvement
Act" drags us not just another notch closer to national firearms
registration, or even worse, to a national registry of firearms
owners, but to a Big Brotherhood in which everything an individual
does can be monitored and scrutinized electronically by jackbooted
thugs.
There can be no doubt that we are now living in a police state
--
albeit an extremely well-upholstered police state, at least for
the
time being -- and that the National Rifle Association, in its
usual,
typical, dimwitted, bumbling eagerness to ingratiate itself with
that
police state's architects, has just made the police state immeasurably
worse.
No, I'm not repeating myself to no purpose. There is a method
to
my madness. I want all my readers to get accustomed to that expression
"police state", as in, " .. and to the police state
for which it
stands ... "
We are also living in an age of failed and failing institutions,
where nothing is as it's advertised -- to the extent that it ever
was
-- and where, just to name a single example, even the Boy Scouts
of
America are torn between cruel bigotry and a nauseating political
correctness.
We live in a culture where the Congress has given away its legal
right and duty to declare -- or to refrain from declaring -- war,
and
the military that liberated Europe in two successive world wars,
that
distributed food and clothing and chewing gum to starving kids,
now
massacres entire neighborhoods, and terrorizes and tortures helpless
prisoners.
We live in a culture where newspapers have long since abandoned
their sacred Jeffersonian role in perpetual opposition to the
all-
devouring state, where the broadcast media will eagerly prostitute
themselves to whatever purpose the government wants to use them,
and
where wealthy and powerful corporations collaborate with murderous
slave-regimes to deny people their right to communicate freely
with
one another.
We live in a culture where the two major political parties have,
for all intents and purposes, merged into a single monstrous entity
whose only desire it to place its boot on our necks and rip away
everything -- our rights, our property, our lives -- it can get
away
with.
We live in a culture where even the Libertarian Party harbors
snivelling, worm-tongued poseurs who make limp excuses for fascist
tyranny and brutality, and where the organization that has celebrated
itself -- for more than a century -- as the foremost defender
of the
individual right to own and carry weapons, bows, scrapes, and
kowtows
to the second-worst scumbags in the nation's corrupt and collapsing
capital.
"I don't know," writes one of my more naive correspondents,
"why the NRA is supporting the McCarthy NICS expansion bill
as it is currently written, but it doesn't make them the enemy."
Actually, it does make them the enemy. How can we hope
to win our liberties back if we remain loyal to organizations
that have long since ceased to deserve loyalty? Or if we refuse
to judge individuals and institutions by what they actually do,
not by what we think they are, or ought to be?
This is precisely why we have more than 20,000 illegal gun laws
today. This craven, quivering collection of cowardly Quislings
signed off on Thomas Dodd's Nazi-inspired 1968 Gun Control Act.
But that was nothing: if they'd gotten their way in the 30s, the
.357 Magnum would be against the law today because they were willing
to bargain it away. It's long past time -- it's decades
part time -- to amputate the NRA, necrotic Republican appendage
that it is, from the American body politic.
I've been a Life Member of the NRA since the 70s, and until
now,
I've refrained to do something that perhaps ought to have been
done a
long time ago. When I was young, members of my generation opposed
to
military conscription and the war in Vietnam publically burned
their
draft registration cards in protest. (Being a libertarian even
then,
I burned my Social Security card -- but that's a story for another
day.)
Those who own and operate the NRA (and I am not talking here
about
its members, whom the leadership simply regards as warm bodies
to be
counted) should think long and hard about how they'd like to see
a
national campaign of membership card burnings. It would be as
simple
to organize as an Internet "flash mob", and the media,
of course,
would eat it right up. The disgraceful recent conduct of the NRA
has
now brought that group to within an Angstrom unit of that horrible
eventuality.
Which way will their next steps take them?
======================================================================
