Dance of the petulant wallflowers
presenceofmind.net
They were dancing in the streets of Baghdad today. It was the libertarian moment, the defining event, the sine qua non of freedom. Blathering jackass libertarian theorists will insist that there is no such thing as a 'consent of the governed,' but anyone who watched television this morning knows this is false: The governed of Baghdad withdrew their consent en masse and chaotically choreographed liberty was the consequence.
And where were the libertarians in this magic moment? Elsewhere, of course. Where else?
For to be a libertarian, to be a public defender of human freedom, seems to carry with it the obligation to be as irrelevant to
actual liberty as, say, feminism is to the interests of women.
Where were the libertarians on Iraq? With but a few exceptions--most of those equivocating exceptions--the libertarians
were firmly on the side of slavery, tyranny, deception, torture and terrorism. Where else?
With all the relevance of Martha Burk at the Augusta National Golf Club, they worried that Attorney General John Ashcroft
might be sniffing at their ratty underwear. But they were too busy mingling with actual, undisguised Communists to protest the torture and murder of Iraqi dissidents, the rape of their women, the imprisonment of their children. That would require a commitment to principles, not rhetoric.
A nation of millions was beset by the ugliest tyranny the world has seen since the fall of Moscow, perhaps since the fall of
Berlin. And where were the pretend friends of liberty? Standing in opposition to the overthrow of that tyranny. Standing passively, inactively--libertarians rarely do anything that requires exertion or courage--but in opposition.
Standing around like the perpetual wallflowers they are. Libertarianism is a political doctrine born in fiction, and many of its
adherents seem never to be able to escape the world of fantasy. To argue hard, measurable, inarguable facts with them, when the facts contradict their dogma, is futile. They persist in imagining themselves as active, violent people, when they are in fact overwhelmingly slothful and timid. They indulge themselves with the thrill that the Federal Government seeks to persecute them, when in reality the Feds can't even trouble themselves to laugh at their ridiculous posturing. The very last thing Hillary Clinton fears is a mass rebellion of the corpulent, near-sighted, perpetually petulant quibblers who call themselves libertarians. Wherever the action is, you may be assured the libertarians will be elsewhere. Where else?
I am for human freedom, and because I am, I am disgusted to call myself a libertarian today. Government is a fiction. It
persists only because people choose to pretend to believe it, even though they know it is a fiction. This is the actual 'consent of the governed.' Governments fall in the libertarian moment, when the people decide to stop pretending to believe the fiction of the state. It happened in Baghdad today. Someday it will happen in America.
And where will the libertarians be, when it does?
Elsewhere, of course. Where else? |
