Jefferson Fights Back (p449-p461)

(Setting:  During his trial for treason, Jefferson turns the tables and accuses the Mad Hatter, the Safari Golfer, and the Head Honcho as being the true traitors to America).

Jefferson spun to face the Head Honcho. Tears of passion ran down his cheeks. "Treason, when real, merits the highest punishment", he growled. "But most governments do not distinguish between acts against the government, and acts against the oppressions of the government. The latter are virtues, yet have furnished more victims to the executioner than the former. The unsuccessful strugglers against tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in all countries.

"Am I the Insurrectionist? Yes I am!" he snarled with unrepentant pride. "Have I refused to pay taxes? Yes I have! Have I evaded the draft and stopped voting? Yes I have! Have I published condemnations of the bureaucratic leeches in Washington that suck out our lifeblood? Yes I have! Have I exposed corruption at every level of government? Yes I have! Have I unearthed the decadent sham of our democracy by uncovering scandals like Watergate? Yes I have! Have I rallied against the needless deaths of my fellow countrymen in spurious wars? Yes I have! Have I armed myself and my compatriots to defend us from the enemy within? Yes I have! Have I planted the seeds of revolution against a government that is now more abusive than the one we revolted against two hundred years ago?" He paused, knowing full well that these were the final words of confession that his accusers wanted to hear. "Yes I have!"

"I am the Insurrectionist, and overthrowing this government is my mission. But I’m not a traitor. How can I be guilty of treason against the nation I founded with my Declaration of American Independence? That document was our philosophical foundation, our compact with limited government of the people, by the people, and for the people. As its author, I’m the spiritual father of this nation. If there is to be judgment today, it should be rendered by me, not you.

"America isn’t a physical location. It’s a state of mind, a philosophical attitude, a vision. The vision is being abandoned now, not because it lacked validity or because it failed to produce spectacular results, but simply because it was attempted in an intellectual environment where irrationalists, mystics, and power-mongers still reigned. You hold power in a physical place traditionally called America, but I am the American. I’m not a traitor to the concept of America. I’m simply your enemy."

The Mad Hatter recovered from his fainting spell. His grogginess wore off just when Jefferson confessed his conspiracy to revolt against the government holding power over the American people. He banged his gavel and half-heartedly declared, "The convict has admitted his guilt. Off with his head. This trial is over."

"This trial is not over!" shouted Jefferson to the astonished judge. "It hasn’t begun yet! If this is to be a trial about the crime of treason, then we ought to turn the spotlight of judgment on the real traitors in this courtroom. Laws should protect life and property, yet this trial is being administered by cutthroats whose actions violate the lives and possessions of every citizen. This court cannot judge me to be a criminal, because this court itself is criminal. No government so defiant of individual rights and private property can have any recourse to the concept of justice. This government can’t offer any meaningful distinction between a shoplifter and a tax protester, so how can it possibly distinguish a traitor from a liberator? The real traitors are those who have formed an unholy alliance of mysticism, insanity, and power in a corrupt government that tramples the individual rights it was created to protect. I will name these traitors and specify their crimes against America.

"The first traitor is you", he accused the Mad Hatter. "You’re a traitor to the ideal of reason. Your madness and illogic encourage mankind's misguided submission to those who have no rational justification for putting chains around their necks. No truth can ever be extracted from what you say except by taking its opposite. You ignore facts and logic, so therefore you ignore reality. When your insanity prevails, people sacrifice their only real resource, their thinking minds. Without reason, we must entrust our lives to priests or governors, who mysteriously know things we mysteriously cannot. We are free to think or to evade that effort. But we are not free to escape the fact that reason is our means of survival. The question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think'. The unrestrained torrent of irrational killing in our world underscores this."

Jefferson boldly pointed at the Safari Golfer lounging in the jury box. "You too are a traitor against America and against mankind. When people stopped thinking, you plied your treasonous subterfuge of the American ideal. While all hands were below deck mending sails, splicing ropes, and minding their own business, you ran our ship into an enemy port like a rogue pilot. You took advantage of our intellectual weakness facilitated by the Mad Hatter’s insanity and replaced our rational thoughts with mystical opiates. Out of nothingness you conjure gods and religions to which we become inexplicably chained.

"You deal out enchantment incomprehensible to the thinking mind. You are deified, because in your foggy conceptions, people find an impenetrable darkness inside which they fabricate untruths as delirious as yours. Your mystical mantras of the common good, political correctness, and amoral expediency became the secular religion Ismism, an absurd concoction of abominable will o' the wisps. Priests have always constructed bridges of mysticism over the moat of reason, enabling our enemies to slip across and put abusive kings and evil tyrants into our midst with our confused blessing.

"He who controls the mythology rules the world, and evil mythology purveyors have torpedoed our great country. Contrary to conspiracists, the world isn’t ruled by the CIA, the Skull and Bones Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Tri-Lateral Commission, or the Bavarian Illuminati. It is ruled by people who have stolen our minds through mysticism, leaving us at the mercy of imperious men over whom we have no powers of punishment or removal.

"Mysticism, whether secular or divine, is the worst thing to ever happen to humanity. It is the root of all organized evil. The plows of the world turn over corpses every day that were fodder for man's myths and religions. You are a traitor for having violated the dearest and most fundamental of our constitutional protections, the separation of church and state. The religion you propagated is a secular one, yet it has infiltrated our state as completely as Catholicism infiltrated the monarchies of the Holy Roman Empire or as Islam infected the despots in the Middle East. Mysticism is unnatural and anti-human, killing millions of men, women, and children as it spread around our globe, leaving those remaining alive to muddle onward either as fools or as hypocrites.

"Once man surrenders reason to mysticism, he has no guard against monstrous absurdities. Like a rudderless ship, he’s the sport of every wind. Faith takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck. Faith is volitional ignorance, putting everything into the hands of politicians and priests. Faith keeps the intellects of foolish humans chained. He who believes nothing is closer to the truth than he who believes what is wrong through faith. Faith torments us with fables of which we have no evidence.

"Witch doctors, magicians, and priests of primitive societies wielded tremendous power. Early man sought to understand the mysteries of the universe, and it was our eternal misfortune that the priest stepped forward before the scientist to explain. Rational inquiry has ever since been beaten into conformity with faith and dogma. We naturally sought knowledge and mastery; what we got in return was mysticism and bondage. Priests were the original traitors to mankind, just as you are a traitor to America.

"As history unfolded, the palace grew out of the temple. Pharaoh was a divine monarch, a military and civil protagonist for the priest. Mankind's slavery to himself arose through this transformation. It is but a small step from slavery to a theocratic state to slavery to the secular 'common good' or 'species being'. Man as slave to god-kings evolved into man as slave to amorphous collections of other humans. Mythical views on the cosmos evolved into mythical views on social organization, leaving us with Mao, Castro, Stalin, Hitler, Lenin, and Johnson, all purveyors of social mysticisms that differed only in semantic particulars. They all force-fed us spurious values and half-truths that transcended all others, and then coercively or violently suppressed any contrary inclinations by rebellious heretics. Many of history’s worst tragedies resulted from mass psychosis fed by worship of irrational, mystical, and therefore deranged isms.

"Ignorance begets faith, faith begets priests, priests beget kings, and kings beget chains. This is the food chain of power, of which you, the Safari Golfer, are an integral link. You throw pixie dust into our eyes, so we stumble blindly into the unfathomable abyss of dreams, phantasms, and gods. Your treason translates ignorance into bondage, using faith and mysticism to enslave the unthinking masses to the king and tyrant. When people fall prey to mysticism, they become powerless, because their intelligence is abdicated to a spurious authority lurking behind an ism. You are the reincarnation of Pope Innocent, who annulled the Magna Carta on behalf of King John and the barons at Runnymede. Your only fear is that people will rediscover that reason is the sole oracle of substance in the universe, and that it doesn’t matter if charlatans profess there is one god, twenty gods, or no god.

"Your mysticism laid the foundation for the power of the Royal Tyrant, whom I will now accuse of being the most traitorous criminal of all." Jefferson stood eye-to-eye with the Head Honcho, who was bathed in nervous sweat. The pro forma lynching of the Insurrectionist had turned unexpectedly into an intellectual joust that confused and frightened him. No one ever had the courage to stare directly into his soul through his eyes except, he suddenly recalled, Marcus Brutus, just prior to plunging the dagger into the carcass of Julius Caesar.

Jefferson silently pierced the armor shrouding the Honcho's essential being. He hated the Senator. He hated everything the man and his ilk had ever stood for throughout history. He harnessed this consummate hatred to launch a moral assassination. "No man can chain his fellow man without eventually finding the other end looped around his own neck. Man wasn’t born in bondage to anyone or anything here or in the heavens. He is an end in himself, and not the means to the end of society. We are each a sovereign universe, acting interdependently with other sovereign universes. But you have made your universe more sovereign than all others, and for that you are a traitor to everyone else.

"You are the most vile and despicable traitor America ever had because you stole our right to life and liberty. Each finite moment of life is infinitely precious. Our allotted specks of evaporating time are by nature insufficient to achieve all the joy and fulfillment we each yearn for. To claim any of these finite moments by force from another human is the ultimate moral abomination.

"You’re a traitor because you’ve sown the seeds for the destruction of the greatest nation on earth. America is plummeting from a shining example of all that is magnificent about the human race to a tawdry example of all that is reprehensible. We have now gone completely through the classic cycle of every major civilization. We have moved through the typical phases of bondage, spiritual awakening, courage, action, liberty, abundance, selfishness, complacency, apathy, inaction, and now back to bondage.

"We have become a lazy nation of squabblers and shabby proclaimers of entitlement, when we were once a proud nation driven to accomplish. Our moral foundation has evaporated into mindless confrontation between single-issue special interest groups. Your band of traitors in Washington have herded us into a demoralizing debate about how to manufacture excuses and split up dwindling national resources, rather than fueling the engines of productive ambition. You’ve drawn us into a political quagmire, where all power and wealth are becoming concentrated in the federal government, and we are all becoming enslaved to it. We now pay more taxes than we spend on housing, food, and clothing combined. We are now either recipients of federal largesse or we are the victims from which the wealth behind the largesse is confiscated. You lurk within that unimaginably huge machinery of extortion and detrimental reliance, insidiously bankrupting the nation and crushing our spiritual backbone.

"You’re a traitor because you’ve turned us into a nation of thieves. Our civic life has become a zero sums game, in which some piece of the pie must be stolen from someone else, in order for the game to properly proceed. To enforce some rights, other rights must be sacrificed, because you have obliterated the meaning of rights. For some people to gain wealth, it must be stolen through taxation from someone else, because you have forgotten the importance of production. Your government is consuming our wealth, in perverse spite of its reason for being, which was to safeguard our property, and ultimately, our lives. All we have left is to finish riveting the chains on each other’s necks.

"You’re a traitor because you’ve created a world where personal responsibility no longer matters. Your governmental intrusions have relieved citizens of the necessity for making choices, and therefore of the need to develop a rational set of values. The demanding environment of freedom has been sacrificed for the comfortable yet debilitating environment of entitlement and subjugation to a bureaucracy run amok. When you guarantee a man income through welfare, health through socialized medicine, a job through affirmative action, and markets protected from foreign competition, what need does he have for values? He can exist without them. Do you wonder then why he is hedonistic and apathetic? His choices don’t consider the rigors of survival, for which he is no longer responsible. The expectation of paternal care from the government has undermined our national character. We will never return to a values-oriented society until individuals are held responsible for their own existence, and reason, ability, and productivity are honored. Meanwhile, disenfranchised urban youths, wallowing in your destructive moral view, will learn that there is no difference between a transfer of wealth through the welfare state and a transfer of wealth by robbing people directly, because there isn’t.

"If one can claim the right to his own life, and then behave as if no one else has a similar right, it creates an atmosphere where all rights are arbitrary and therefore illusory. We either all have a right to our lives and property, or none of us do. Everyone squawks about rights, but they forget that people do not have an enforceable claim on others for anything more than being left alone.

"You’re a traitor because you’ve turned our democratic process into a corrupt sham riddled with abuse and devoid of representation for the people. You trade our rights for votes, putting political expediency on an exalted pedestal and the voters in a constitutional dungeon. You’re a whore for special interest groups, taking their filthy money in exchange for unwarranted access to the plundered riches and coercive might of the federal bureaucracy. You siphon money from the public till, you take kickbacks from power brokers, you put your cronies on the public payroll, you bribe potential enemies, and you lie incessantly to everyone while employing hirelings who do nothing but lie to you. You sacrifice your allegiance to what is right to the devil worship of party politics.

"You dine and travel in opulence, and then pay for your ostentatious hedonism with funds taxed from a struggling farmer in Nebraska. Despite your drunken and drugged escapades, you insult us by outlawing alcohol, drugs, and other presumed vices that adults indulge in of their own volition and consequence. You engage in sexual escapades so obscene that lurid accounts in the daily papers are turning them into pulp periodicals of sleazy voyeurism. You then have the audacity to censor our television and radio, setting yourself up as a laughably hypocritical judge of our morals and leaving us with nothing but the illusion of choice.

"You abuse your incumbency by diverting the nation’s resources to get perpetually re-elected. You barter in Congress with your fellow traitors, supporting each other’s pork laden bills, thereby casting our wealth down the yawing funnel of the frivolous and the spurious. You tax Peter to buy Paul’s vote. When this doesn't ensure your re-election, you desecrate our constitution by perpetrating scandals like Watergate. As your power grows, fewer and fewer citizens vote out of revulsion for your contamination. As Mark Twain observed, the only inherently criminal class in America is Congress.

"Every government on earth has some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness openly cultivate. For every roach you see, there are ten you don’t, which illustrates one of the pervasive fallacies of big government. If the justification for big government is that individuals are flawed, then who in this big government will restrain and guide these individuals? More flawed individuals? Who will guard the guardians? The FBI or the CIA, who are as likely to kill us as to protect us? If man can’t be trusted with governing himself, can he then be trusted with governing others? Or have we found angels in the form of senators and bureaucrats? Let history answer that question.

"You’re a traitor because you’re a purveyor of death. You are the worst mass murderer in the annals of crime. You sent 50,000 American youths to die in Vietnam, where they were ripped open by grenade fragments, charred by chemical defoliants, and devoured by maggots and buzzards. You subsidize the tobacco industry, which is the leading cause of death in America. You subsidize abortion, killing ten million defenseless babies, surmising life doesn’t begin at conception just as Hitler surmised Jews aren’t human beings. You test exotic weapons on military veterans, the indigent, and the insane, using these unsuspecting social captives as human guinea pigs. Your bans on drugs, guns, and sex created an organized crime tidal wave and a general breakdown in civil obedience, resulting in hundreds of corpses and thousands of victims every day. Your national health insurance is simply a means for the government to ration medical care and become the arbiter of who lives and who dies, creating another way to selectively kill us, under the guise of 'efficiency' and 'the greatest good for the greatest number'. You forced workers to contribute to social security their entire lives, and then blithely informed them the system will be insolvent when they retire. You finance organizations of terror like the CIA, unleashing cutthroats that assassinate our leaders and murder our dissidents. Your welfare state created a terrorist breeding ground of abdicated personal responsibility, giving birth to a generation of alienated and morally adrift hooligans who pillage our inner cities.

"You are as vile and morally contemptible as Hitler for cremating six million Jews, Stalin for starving 16 million peasants, and the British for decimating the population of Ireland. A grave is always your answer to the right to life question. Your genocidal ambition has filled cemeteries and garbage cans with millions of fetid corpses. And if you don't directly kill us, you confiscate nearly one half of our life's energy through taxation. You have the perverse hypocrisy to kiss babies, smile for campaign posters, and shake the hands of your next victims, while you continually contravene the only legitimate purpose of government, which is to protect life, from the first stirrings in the womb to the final groans on the deathbed.

"You’re a traitor for trying to disarm us, because our weapons are all that stand between you and the totalitarianism you lust for. General Washington told us 'Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty, teeth, and keystone under independence. From the hour the pilgrims landed to the present day, the rifle and pistol have proven equally indispensable to ensure peace, security, and happiness. The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil influence. When firearms go, all goes. We need them every hour. They deserve a place of honor with all that's good.' Washington understood that the 2nd Amendment is to you as a silver bullet is to a vampire. Without it, the Beast is unstoppable.

"Two hundred years ago, my colleague Daniel Webster warned that Congress, with its power to tax, would clutch the purse with one hand and wave the sword with the other. An elective despotism isn’t the government we fought for, but it has descended upon us anyway, proving Webster correct. We banished the tyrant King George, but 500 despots in Congress rose in his stead, making us 500 times worse off. You criminals in Congress have declared war on mankind with injustice and slaughter. The time has come for mankind to declare war on you. Your treason has led us to this unavoidable crisis. We can continue as we are and die as a nation, or we can hoist the banner of revolution and save ourselves and our dream.

"Throughout history, the magician, the priest, the emperor, the king, and the politician have held our devotion and allegiance. Yet as the succession of wars, slaughter, and slavery have proven, none of these objects of devotion have emancipated us. The magician led us to madness, the priest disillusioned us, the emperor stole our wealth, the king led us into deadly war, and the politician made an ostentatious and useless beast of himself.

"Humankind has seen nothing but a succession of masters and institutions shackling it. Rousseau knew of your pervasive treason when he wrote, 'Man is born free, yet is everywhere in chains'. The time has come for us to escape from this desolate predicament and eradicate you and your ilk from the planet. It is time to burst our chains!

"You, not I, should be punished for treason. You put the chains on our ankles and sucked the lifeblood out of our veins, taking advantage of minds weakened by the Mad Hatter's irrationality and the Safari Golfer's faith. But, you won’t be tried in this courtroom, because I am the accused. However, rather than grovel at your feet pleading my innocence and trying vainly to save myself, I will instead plea for all those who can still call themselves Americans to rise up and destroy the abusive travesty that the federal government has become. Like the old Indian Chief, who didn’t go to war over every petty injury, but rather put a straw for each injury into his pouch, we have been patiently filling the pouch of American liberty with oppressions by our government. The pouch is now full, so we should be sending up smoke signals with ominous and unmistakable intent.

"Our government is tumbling off the precipice of politically correct fascism. The seeds for our ruin are sprouting very deep and very broad roots. We must be as aware of this dire threat as was Aesop’s Swallow, who foresaw the hemp seeds being planted by the farmer as the harbinger of the cords and nets that would ensnare all the birds. We must destroy these seeds of evil now!