To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 22:25:56 -0400
Subject: [WSFA] Fw: L. Neil Smith snipes at 'nondescript liberals'
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

--------- Forwarded message ----------

www.sierratimes.com

"IS TH-TH-THAT A KNIFE?"
By L. Neil Smith 0 7.01.02
Exclusive to Roadhouse Sierra

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A coworker of my wife, middle-aged and teetering on the edge of
grandmotherliness, noticed the other day that Cathy always carries a
nifty little Columbia River folder clipped to the top of her jeans
pocket.
"Is th-th-that a knife?" she whimpered indignantly.

It wasn't the first time the woman had asked this idiot question in an
accusatory tone. They'd been through this before, shortly after the
Columbine murders. The woman's implication then was that it was unseemly
for anyone to carry a knife in the aftermath of those crimes (which, in
fact, involved no knives, but were carried out with guns and pipe
bombs). Any idea that individuals who think more clearly than she does
(and apparently have better memories), might come to exactly the
opposite conclusion had never occurred to her and probably never will.

This is like the woman, another grandmother, who objected bitterly and
hysterically, in a local musical production that included a "Three Blind
Mice" number, to the presence in the hands of the farmer's wife, of a
two-foot "impractical" knife cut from Masonite and spray-painted silver.
What was she supposed to cut their tails off with, a dirty dishcloth?

I measured Cathy's little knife before I started writing this. Its blade
is all of two and a quarter inches long. Her coworker would likely have
fainted at the sight of what I carry clipped to my jeans, a Spyderco
ATS-55 one-handed opener with a sharp, wicked point and an evil-looking
serrated blade almost four inches long. (To put things in perspective,
the very first knife I ever designed, a classic Bowie I later described
in The Probability Broach, has a blade twelve inches long, nearly three
inches wide, and about five-sixteenths of an inch thick.)

As this sort of thing always does, it made me scratch my head and wonder
just exactly what was wrong with this woman and other people like her.
And for once, after a lot of reflection, I think I have an answer.

Santa Claus.

How many times have we watched the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th
Street (and a thousand other movies like it with the same message)
without noticing that it advocates a kind of psychological suicide?

A little girl is brought up by her single mother to trust the evidence
of her senses, the operations of her intellect, and never to believe
something, simply because the notion is attractive. For those reasons,
the little girl doesn't believe in Santa Claus -- and the entire movie
is dedicated to tearing that wisdom down and substituting in the poor
little girl's mind a "philosophy" of "wishing will make it so".

How many other entertainments are there that urge us to trust only our
feelings, bow to every whim, and follow our momentary impulses, rather
than commit the stuffy, boring act -- the Original Sin of dead white
European males -- of thinking about something before we do it? Ever
notice how often it's slender little females (Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany's, Meg Ryan in The Presidio, Natalie Wood in
Miracle on 34th Street) or young children who portray these flighty
creatures? Large, muscular men with poor impulse control are much too
scary.

Maybe that's what bothered people about Jesse Ventura.

"Use the force, Luke!" And with those words, the kid jettisons all of
the science and engineering, all of the training and practice, that were
designed to accomplish the absolutely vital task at hand, and fly by the
seat of his tunic, guided by what turned out to be a bunch of microbes.
(And why didn't Jack Chalker get a credit line for Episode I?)

It's the dark side of Holly Golightly, and it's not without its evil
consequences. After almost a century of this kind of deliberate,
perverse non-thinking (preached incessantly by the mass entertainment
media) the socialists who call themselves liberals today (and a whole
lot of other anti-rational types out there who are just as bad) don't
trust themselves. They can't trust themselves, because they're unable to
predict what they'll be thinking or feeling or saying or doing ten
minutes from now. That's what you get from following a "philosophy" that
so closely resembles the path of the little ball in a pinball machine.

But the consequences are further-reaching. I have relatives who had two
sons at the same time my mom and dad did. Unlike Mom and Dad, they
brought their boys up to be religious in the sort of "wholesome" 1950s
Billy Graham style that you see in movies and TV programs of the day.
But before long, the boys' entire social lives revolved around church
activities -- and yet my relatives were shocked when their sons turned
into fanatical born-agains that even they found weird and frightening.

That's the same way nondescript liberal Henry Fonda must have when Jane,
raised in the fuzzy ways of altruism and collectivism, became a commie.

Likewise, the self-made cretins who can't trust their own impulses are
now petrified with terror at the idea that their kids will behave
precisely the way they brought them up to behave, wandering around in a
fugue-like state of carefully cultivated irrationality, "refreshing
spontaneity", utter unpredictability, and moral unreliability, guided
only by their feelings, their guts, and their momentary whims, instead
of by whatever character or intellect that they might otherwise have
developed.

Hey, dude, why not shoot up your classmates, if that's what the mood
moves you to do? "If it feels good, do it!" Isn't that what Mom and Dad
and their therapist always said? Isn't that just what Malcolm McDowell
did in his critically celebrated first movie, If (which, unlike the more
libertarian The Matrix, didn't get mentioned much in connection with
Columbine)? No wonder socialists who call themselves liberals don't
trust school children with fingernail scissors, Midol, butterknives,
nailfils, or pointed fingers. Anybody could be a killer, after all. One
never knows what one -- especially oneself -- is truly capable of, does
one? And that goes squared and cubed for one's savage loinfruit.

The trouble with the socialists who call themselves liberals is that
they invariably project their own shortcomings onto everybody else,
rather than risk suffering the agony of seeing themselves for what they
really are. Pathological self-distrust is the wellspring of destructive
social and political phenomena like victim disarmament -- the advocates
of which would rather see a woman sodomized in an alley and strangled
with her own pantyhose than see her with a gun in her hand.

Because their own lack of character makes the socialists who call
themselves liberals afraid of themselves and paralytically terrified of
their offspring, innocent airline passengers now get the anal probe
(exactly as I predicted they would 25 years ago in an LP newsletter
article that got censored because nobody wanted to think about the
possibility) and have their emery boards confiscated by mouthbreathing
retards on federal salaries and uniformed, jackbooted goons armed with
machineguns.

When this quite logically and properly engenders uncontrollable fury in
perfectly normal individuals, they're advised -- or forced -- to take
"anger management" courses, "anger management" being a popular liberal
euphemism today for an Orwellian process of character removal similar to
the "self-criticism" sessions the communist Chinese once favored.

Most people don't know that Asians use chopsticks because the Mongols,
practicing "knife control", limited their Chinese subjects to one such
kitchen implement per neighborhood or village. Food had to be cut up in
advance because no one was allowed a tool to do it at the table. This is
where we're headed unless we put the brakes on right now. The cure for
the horrible condition we find ourselves in is going to be long,
difficult, and painful. It begins with a highly pointed answer to the
woman who self-righteously demands, "Is th-th-that a knife?"

"Yes, it certainly is. It's a tool human beings have carried with them
since the first obsidian blade was knapped. I use it a dozen times a
day, and it makes me a much more useful individual than you are.

"Now, y'wanna talk about my .45?"

Roadhouse Sierra and L. Neil Smith welcome your feedback.

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L. NEIL SMITH is the award-winning author of more than 20 novels about
individual liberty and the right to own and carry weapons. Read more
than 80 articles and speeches: buy LEVER ACTION: ESSAYS ON LIBERTY for
$21.95+$6 S&H

Order HOPE (with Aaron Zelman), get free stuff and a special offer:
click here: or read about MAKING A MOVIE of The Mitzvah the
action-adventure thriller by Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith -- and maybe
even help get it done! -- click here

PRE-ORDER L. Neil Smith's long-awaited THE AMERICAN ZONE plus a new
trade paperback edition of The Probability Broach from Tor Books, coming
in November and December, 2001, respectively, by clicking on the titles
above. AUTOGRAPHED COPIES of Lever Action, Hope, Forge of the Elders,
Henry Martyn, The Mitzvah, and a few others are available from the
author. For details, write to him.

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Allow me to introduce myself. I'm L. Neil Smith, and for more than 20
years, I've been writing books, broadsides, and diatribes, not so much
in the defense of liberty, but to advance and expand it in the face of
those who'd like to kill it outright and "reduce us under absolute
despotism". I'm probably best known for my novels The Probability
Broach, Pallas, Forge of the Elders, and maybe the Star Wars: Lando
Calrissian stuff, although I have high hopes for The Mitzvah and Hope,
both of which I wote with JPFO's Aaron Zelman. When I have the time and
energy, you can find me at the range, mostly shooting heavy handguns
over astonishing distances. The rest of the time you can find me at the
local ice rink, watching my wife and daughter skate. With them, two cats
and a dog, I reside by happy choice in what became known, following the
recent election, as the "Red Zone", and pledge allegiance to the flag of
the Flyover States of America.

.

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