(Setting:  Freeman collapses in despair at Jefferson's imagined funeral, as he finally comprehends what has been lost).

The song faded to black, only to be replaced by the sound of a lone, plaintive bugle. An unseen muse was playing Taps as if her soul had fingers, her heart had lips, and the very essence of Man was being exhaled from her lungs. It was a slow, deliberate, and infinitely rueful lament that made Sinatra's magnificent rendition in "From Here to Eternity" seem mundane by comparison. Each morbid tone from the bugle ripped another gash in Freeman's wounded heart. He lost consciousness as the final wrenching note bade farewell to his hero.

When he awoke, he was curled in the fetal position, shivering like a lost child in a cold, dark forest. Somewhere very near, wolves were howling at the moon. His shivering intensified. He was drowning in emotional pain from a scathing self-assessment. One of the most brutal lessons in life, he now understood, is learning who you are. Years of youthful exuberance are spent wondering and planning and becoming who you will become. Everything in you and in the world seems malleable and correctable and possible. Then a threshold is silently crossed, and the soft clay of your soul hardens into granite. Your limitless future becomes a limited, uncomfortable present. You are then confronted with the painful discovery that you aren’t who you were supposed to become, in the youthful eye of your idealistic mind. Freeman, like America, had reached this stage in life. He felt irretrievably lost.

(Setting:  Jefferson is sentenced to death by the sham trial, but he declares the immortality of his essence).

"Death isn’t as complete as we mortals fear", Jefferson said cryptically. "These cutthroats can execute me, but they can’t kill me. They can lock me up and throw away the key, but I will still be everywhere. I am eternal, because the ideas of passionate people penetrate every barrier, including the vale of death. As Franklin Roosevelt said, 'No man and no force can abolish memory. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the ideas that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny.' I have done for my country, and for all mankind, all that I could do. I cherished the opportunity to lead the battle for liberty. I sincerely believe that I’ve left the world better than I found it. Now, I resign my soul to the deeper completeness of eternity. Look upon my life and my ideas as inspiration. My body may be buried and eaten by worms, but my infectious spirit will live on. Let my ideas and my inspiration make you think and be moved."

(Setting:  At his trial for treason, Jefferson concludes his speech with a description of the moral and political framework that will be put in place after the 2nd American Revolution).

"After we destroy your criminal government, what shall we put in its place? I’ll offer you a vision. It starts with the right to life, which is the foundation of all rights and all morality. There is nothing more precious than life, and nothing that can be so completely and uniquely possessed by each person. All else is derived from this sacred right.

"The purpose of life is to achieve happiness, which means to experience the joy of existence. Any other motive for living is destructive, because unhappiness is the only alternative. Happiness requires values as a foundation for the actions and choices that will lead to fulfillment. Nobody, not even God or Caesar, can determine these values for us, and nobody else can make the thousands upon thousands of choices consistent with our values to enable our happiness. If we aren’t free to choose our values and to act consistently with them to achieve happiness, then we are essentially dead, even if we still have a pulse. Individual liberty is therefore a pre-requisite for happiness and a direct extension of the right to life.

"All men have the right to their own lives, not just a privileged few. The right to life is an all or nothing proposition for humanity. No man is born into this world as chattel of another man or of a social entity. We possess individual desires and ambitions, which are supreme in each of our own universes. If some men are allowed to forcibly violate other men's right to life, then all such rights will become untenable as society devolves into anarchic chaos or totalitarian lock down.

"The right to earn and keep private property is the only guarantee of a man's right to his own life, and it is founded in our natural right to what we acquire through our efforts, without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings. If a man doesn’t own the fruit of his productive effort, then he doesn’t own his life, because his ability to sustain it is owned and controlled by someone else, rendering the rest of his rights meaningless. Each man's physical and intellectual effort belongs to him alone. If he doesn’t have the sole right to that which his life brings into being, then he is a slave in every sense of the word and is merely chattel to be bargained away in grand political initiatives to transfer wealth from those that produce to those that don’t. Thus, the only moral justification for creating governments among men is to protect property and life, with property understood as that which life produces. If property rights are not protected, then life is not protected, and the social compact will disintegrate as bands of thieves pirate what other people produce. The glaring contradiction of our history is that the governments which should have been protecting us have been instead the greatest threats to our lives and the most audacious thieves of our productive efforts.

"Since individual liberty is a corollary of the right to life, voluntarism must be the fundamental mode of social and economic interaction. Anything else implies forcible coercion by some men over others, which is slavery and which violates the right to life. Every transaction and interaction among men must be voluntary, based on mutual consent and mutual benefit.

"A market system with free exchange of labor, capital, and goods is the only moral economic structure consistent with everyone’s fundamental right to life. It’s the only mechanism that guarantees societal ambitions will be subordinated to individual rights. It’s the only system in which men can consensually trade their labor for other things of value. It’s the only system in which accumulated capital can be made available consensually for others to use, in return for a profit. It’s the only system in which the products of our efforts can be exchanged for other valuables with mutual consent. Thus, it’s the only system in which men can cooperate on an enormous scale, while retaining their individual sovereignty. That it’s also the most efficient way to organize economically is merely a serendipitous coincidence. The true beauty of the market system is not its magnificent productivity, but rather its moral requirement that all interactions and transactions be voluntary. Free men require free markets. Any other system for economic activity is, by definition, a form of slavery. It’s as simple and inescapable as that.

"The sole justification for government is to protect life, civil liberty, and the property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry, or that of his fathers. Rights enforcement, property laws, police, and national defense are therefore legitimate functions of the state.

"The way to have good and safe government is not to create one centralized behemoth, but to divide it among many smaller local governments, distributing to each exactly the functions it is competent to execute. This puts each citizen closer to more of the governmental apparatus than if all things are directed from Washington, enabling them to oversee their appointed officials more effectively. If scoundrels make their way into government, they will be more easily detected, more readily eradicated, and less likely to surreptitiously accumulate irreversible power.

"Any attempt by politicians and judges to enact laws which violate the right to life and property is cause for their removal, first by procedural means, and if those fail, then by violence justified as self defense by citizens. Any step a government takes beyond its charter of protecting life and property must inherently be destructive of either life or property, even if good intentions are professed, and the ultimate result will be slavery, terror, and bloodshed.

"In summation, the moral compact of society is based on each man's right to his own life, and to that property which his life brings into existence. Governments are instituted solely to protect these rights. When governments abuse these rights, it is our birthright to revolt. We have a fundamental right to defend ourselves against our government. Without the 2nd Amendment, all of our other rights are superfluous. As Patrick Henry admonished, 'Suspect everyone who approaches the jewel of public liberty. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined. The great object is that every man be armed.' We must retain the right to bear arms to protect ourselves from tyrannical government when society and law are unequal to the task. Our greatest security is to be found in organizing for defense with our brothers and neighbors in local militias.

"Does this vision have a name? Naming a philosophy is dangerous, because men are quick to suffocate the principles with dogma and suspend their worship of reason for worship of canons. When men look at their philosophies with sanctimonious reverence, faith gradually supersedes reason under their sleepy watch, until the dogma looks nothing like the original doctrine and enslaves them with something unrecognizable and horrible. This is how America ended up with politically correct Ismism, which means nothing and everything at the same time simply because we allow it to, having lost the ability to make proper judgments with reason as our guide.

"America religiously worshipped its founding isms, and then forgot the principles they were built on. These foundations have crumbled, but our dulled minds continue to worship capitalism, federalism, and republicanism, even though we don’t understand their moral and philosophical precepts. We are enslaved by ignorant faith in them, because we have abdicated our responsibility to think.

"We don't need another ism put forth by me. We simply need common sense, which is a commitment to thinking. Thinking will yield more enlightenment in one day than any dogma or ism can in a lifetime. Our lives aren’t meant to be subsumed into grandiose social movements, urged along by terminology and syllogisms beyond our ken. The time has come to abandon our isms, for they are the chains on our ankles and the nooses around our necks. Rousseau wondered why man is born free, but is everywhere in chains. It’s because we surrendered reason in favor of faith, which is the first link in the chain of enslavement to kings and priests.

"We shouldn’t worship our past, our Constitution, or even the Declaration I wrote, merely for their tradition. They served us well, but they are simply manifestations of the much larger human greatness of common sense, the catalytic engine for evaluating reality in a manner that is proper for individuals to grow and prosper. Never let the worship of common sense degenerate into an ism, with dogma, faith, and ritual. Simply recognize that the minds of individual men are sacred, that they must be utilized constantly, and that they must remain free and independent. All rational constructions of society will then be continuously regenerated.

"We should have revered common sense all along. Ironically, Thomas Paine used the title ‘Common Sense’ for his dramatic writings that fueled the intellectual and emotional fire of the original American Revolution. So, if you must name my philosophy, follow Paine’s inspiration and call it Common Sense, or call it nothing it all. In our brief lives on this planet, the goal isn’t to choose one ideology or faith over another, but to resist all such calls and to instead rationally exercise our individual minds to stand firm against all who oppose life, liberty, and the laws that protect both. We must pursue ideas because they are common sense to us, not because our priest or our king has decreed them. If we chain ourselves to an ideology, we will eventually discover that a man like the Head Honcho is holding the other end of that chain. Like Rousseau, we will be left with nothing but to wonder why.

(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!

(Setting:  Jefferson is on trial for treason against the country he founded.  He refutes the charge with a stirring account of the American greatness he fostered).

"Objection!", interrupted Jefferson. "I’m not in contempt of your court. I’m in contempt of you. I’m in contempt of anyone who purveys madness and irrationality. It gives root to mysticism, which grows like mental crabgrass to suffocate objective thought, paving the way for tyrants to seize the day. Irrationality breeds mysticism, and mysticism begets power. And then power nurtures both."

The Mad Hatter suddenly slumped into a dead faint from an apoplectic seizure. Having dispensed with this irritation, Jefferson faced the Head Honcho squarely to begin his defense. "You call me a traitor? What system of morality have I betrayed? Whom have I offended? Whom have I oppressed or killed? What on earth am I a traitor to?"

Without waiting for a response, he continued. "This trial will show that the first object of my heart is America, in which I have invested my life, my fortune, and my eternal spirit. I fathered this nation. I risked my life to nurture it, and my soul has watched over it through the decades as it flourished and then began to whither. I have never betrayed my precious creation. I’ve walked every step of the way with every true American. I was always there to transfuse love of liberty into them during some of history’s darkest moments.

"I was there inside every American's heart when Adolf Hitler and his Axis minions, who had conquered more land and people than Napoleon, Ghenghis Khan, and Julius Caesar, were sinking the planet into a totalitarian abyss. The world cowered in the shadow of a tyrant whose vision of life was silent printing presses, concentration camps, burning churches, and falling bombs. No bigger struggle was ever recorded than World War II, and no other nation than America could have conquered the pure evil of it.

"I wept the same frightened tears that mothers and wives wept on June 6th, 1944, when Eisenhower sent a half million courageous American men onto D-Day beaches code named Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold, and Juno in history’s largest invasion. Humanity held its breath that day, knowing the enormous consequences of the roiling conflict on those sandy strips of French soil turned into churning valleys of death. The sole hope of the planet rested on the Americans.

"The American-led triumph of freedom over totalitarianism was foreshadowed decades earlier by shot-putter Martin Sheridan, who was the flag-bearer for the American contingent in the London Olympics. It was customary for foreigners to dip their flags in deference to the host country’s ruler. But, when Sheridan passed the King of England in the stadium, he held the American flag even higher and snarled, "This flag dips to no earthly king!" This same defiant ritual was repeated by the American contingent when Hitler hosted the Berlin Olympics. This proud American defiance would later be all that stood between the Europeans and concentration camps.

"I stood with the exhausted workers on the Detroit assembly lines, as history’s most productive peacetime economy was converted into the Arsenal of Democracy to rescue the free world during World War II. While the bloodiest battles were waged with mortal vigor in Europe and Asia, a subtle yet more telling battle was waged by the irrepressible might of American capitalism in our factories. Rosie the Riveter was as much a hero as General Patton. Every morning, she left her children at home, overcame the gripping fear in her heart for the unknown fate of her husband on a distant battlefield, and put her back into building the planes and tanks that would eventually destroy the Axis powers. Ford Motor's Willow Run plant produced one B-24 Liberator every hour. While the dark thunderclouds of dictatorship threatened to extinguish the light of liberty across the planet, it was the lights burning late into the night in American factories that ultimately drove the satanic darkness of government run amok back into hell where it belongs.

"This wasn't the only time America saved the world from its cancerous governments and isms. American troops tipped the balance in the World War I episode of the eternal conflict between liberty and totalitarianism. In one battle, the advancing Germans forced the French troops out of strategic Belleau Wood. The recently arrived U.S. 2nd Division was ordered to plug this dangerous gap. As the battle continued, a French colonel advised the Americans to retreat from another German thrust. Marine Colonel Wendell Neville replied with words that defined the unconquerable American spirit, 'Retreat hell! We just got here!' This brave stand earned them the nickname 'Devil Dogs' and turned the tide in a war that had been a stalemated bottomless pit of casualties.

"When Paris was later liberated by the Allies, American troops were showered with flowers and wild kisses by French citizens in a celebration held on the 4th of July. Aware of this irony, General Pershing, the head of the American Expeditionary Forces reviewing the parades on a balcony of the Crillon Hotel, declared, 'Lafayette, we are here!', in homage to the French general who helped America win its own independence 150 years earlier. As I stood with Pershing on that balcony, I wept tears of gratitude for every GI who ever fell into a grave to free the rest of us from mankind's self-inflicted political monsters.

"I was there in Lake Placid when our hockey team defeated the Russian juggernaut in the most emotional athletic event ever witnessed. Though it was simply a contest of sport against our cold war nemesis, the struggle waged on the ice that day was a metaphor for decades of ideological confrontation between the two superpowers. Broadcaster Al Michaels screamed 'Do you believe in miracles?' at the end of the match, as America deliriously celebrated the stunning upset.

"During the next decade, Ronald Reagan stared down the Russian Bear by building up a military, strategic, and technological superiority. The resolve of America to maintain its inviolate capability to defend against the aggression of the Soviet Empire shattered the paper tiger facade of communism. Unable to match the fabulous power of capitalism to produce and innovate, and the power of individual liberty to inspire an unconquerable spirit, the USSR collapsed under the strain.

"When I stood at the Brandenburg Gate as the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain came tumbling down, I silently answered the prophetic question asked in Lake Placid a decade before. 'Yes, I do believe in miracles', I replied across the eternal continuum of time. I rejoiced as giddy East Germans and West Germans intermingled while dismantling the Wall, having suddenly escaped from the onerous shadow of humanity's greatest monument to slavery. 'Yes, I do believe in miracles', I repeated tearfully, never more aware than in that emotional moment of the incredible miracles that the American vision of individual liberty had inspired since July 4th, 1776.

"I walked alongside Abraham Lincoln as he steered the nation through a gut-wrenching Civil War. He not only held the union together, he brought completeness to the vision of American liberty. Eradicating the scourge of slavery removed the glaring contradiction of our revolution and affirmed my initial draft of the Declaration of Independence. The Great Emancipator reminded us, with his immortal Gettysburg Address, that we all are created equal and that all men are free. As I stared with Lincoln out over the desolate Gettysburg battlefield, where passionate men had fallen in defense of that sacred covenant, I shook with tormented agony at the bloodshed needed to make evident the simplest truth of the human condition. All men indeed are born free, not only from each other, but from myths and governments.

"I stood shoulder to shoulder with Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Bill Gates, and all of the other titans of American enterprise and inventiveness who had the daring and ambition to lead mankind through the Industrial and Information revolutions. These giants bequeathed to future generations an unrivaled economic engine of contagious wealth creation that fostered a magnificent new phenomenon called the middle class.

"These giants stood on a foundation of individual liberty, private property, and free markets. In just two centuries, this country rocketed from a sparsely populated subsistence economy to nearly 300 million citizens drawn from all corners of the globe, enjoying an economic miracle dwarfing all other attempts at general prosperity. Not only did we dazzle the world with unprecedented material abundance, we demonstrated the sheer joy of living. American music, television, movies, and other creative expressions of our unfettered intellect wowed the world with a kaleidoscopic cultural display.

"By the mid-20^th Century, our magnificent productivity and creativity sculpted a world that was essentially an American one. But unlike other empires, this American hegemony was not manifested by forced occupation of foreign territories. Instead, it was manifested by the sheer power of a vision whose time had come, by a determined people exemplifying the power of individual liberty and the potential of life freed from oppressive governments. We didn’t send soldiers as the pillaging vanguard of American domination. Rather, we sent abroad an example of human felicity derived from freedom, with Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America as our ideological beacons piercing the desolate skies of totalitarianism.

"In view of all this, I stand here with unequivocal pride at what my philosophical precepts engendered on those hot July days in the old Philadelphia State House back in 1776. America was no longer just an ideal etched on the Declaration of Independence, it was a magnificent reality that rendered the empires of Greece, Rome, and Britain small, profane, and spiritless by comparison.

"Then there was that magic moment in 1969 when Neil Armstrong, an American from Wapakoneta, stepped noiselessly onto the dusty soil of another celestial body, giving life to the most enduring fantasy of our species. We flew through the cosmos and etched our American autograph for all time across the heavens. I watched this epic drama unfold on live television, as another product of our incomparable technology settled on the Moon’s surface with only 20 seconds of fuel left, after a desperate, daring, and therefore consummately American search for a clear place to land.

"I’ll never forget the surge of pride and relief coursing through my arteries as Armstrong's voice crackled across a quarter million miles of space, declaring to eternity, 'Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.' Yes, the American Eagle had landed. Then the hatch to the lunar module opened. Armstrong stepped down the ladder and fulfilled an impossible dream by planting his foot onto the moon. 'One small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind', were his timeless words, generously including everyone else in this American triumph.

"Armstrong planted the American flag into the Moon’s virgin soil, not as an act of conquest, but as a statement of supreme purpose and genius that fittingly reached across 200 years and 250,000 miles into the restless spirits of those who had the courage and the vision to father the American nation. My own spirit soared higher than those intrepid astronauts. Tears streamed down my cheeks and strangers around me hugged each other out of the sheer joy of being an American. For a special moment in time, we were starkly aware of the staggering greatness humans were capable of.

"I trembled at the awesomeness of a seemingly impossible Earthrise glowing blue-green against the dark silhouetted rim of the moon. It wasn’t just the awesomeness of our technology, our spirit, and our daring that moved me, it was the awesomeness of what this nation has meant to the world for two centuries. If America had never existed, what would the world be like today? My mind quickly abandons the despairing proposition

"A thousand years from now, people will look back on this achievement as the finest of our species. We matured from worshipping gods to being gods, from staring in wonder at lightning to creating our own magnificent lightning strike across the heavens. No longer bound by terrestrial limitations or by the ball and chain of our primitive mythologies, we achieved a fundamental spatial and spiritual liberation. The Egyptians created the Great Pyramids. The Chinese created the Great Wall. The Romans created their great networks of roads. But with this adventure to the moon, we Americans created something more enduring and magnificent than all the other world wonders combined.

"Since the moon exists in an airless void, Armstrong's footprints will remain undisturbed for a long, long time. It would be unforgivable if evidence of American greatness on the moon outlasted evidence here on Earth. This impending irony conjures despondence out of joy. Our dream is now crumbling around us as we descend into the hellhole of government run amok. Our greatness is evaporating into ignominy. Bill Clinton is replacing Abraham Lincoln as the epitome of our national character."

(Setting:  Thomas Paine confronts King George with a verbal tirade that recounts the history and terpitude of governmental oppression.  He impulsively declares war on Great Britain when he is finished). 

Franklin started to respond, but Thomas Paine placed a forceful arm across his chest and stepped forward to address the King himself. The King felt another twitch in his curdled brain from the Honcho's reflexive reaction to a Freeman look-alike stepping forward to argue with him. Paine’s jutting jaw and blazing eyes drove home his strident words. "There will be no accommodation! For thousands of years, mankind has accommodated the likes of you, and the result, always and everywhere, has been slavery. With the world’s biggest military to enforce her tyranny, Britain has declared that she has a right not only to tax, but to bind the Americans in all cases whatsoever. If that is not slavery, then there is not such a thing as slavery on earth.

"Cowardice, submission, and accommodation thus far have given the Americans a ravaged country, unsafe habitations, corruption everywhere, slavery without hope, homes turned into barracks and bawdy houses for your soldiers, and a future race to provide for whose fathers they shall doubt of. Let history look on this picture and weep over it!

"The Declaratory Act contained the full grown seeds of the most despotic government in the world. It placed Americans in the lowest state of vassalage, demanding unconditional submission in everything! A congress of men wielding such power over a people, from such distance, with so little accountability, will inevitably make that people mere beasts of burden for their enrichment.

"There are two classes of people...those who pay taxes, and those who live upon the taxes. When taxation is carried to excess, as is happening in America, it disunites these two classes. Parliament, an evil and indolent congress of men, is the most prolific taxation machine ever invented. It has created a leviathan of a government, an overblown monster spewing forth spurious jobs and deadly wars. The taxation required to support you as King is sufficient to feed, house, and clothe entire villages!

"Your greedy ministers thrust their hands into every crevice of American industry, grasping at the spoils of those who produce. This enormous expense and intrusiveness has provoked men to think that governments are evil incarnate. They engage in wars abroad and oppress and usurp at home. Their sole capability is to exhaust the property and resources of the productive world. Governments lavish these stolen resources upon kings, courts, parliaments, congressmen, ministers, and a host of other impostors and prostitutes, such that even the poor must support the fraud that oppresses them.

"It doesn’t matter what form the government takes, for when one government goes out, another comes in, and still the same vices, extravagances, and corruptions occur. Who the ministers are is insignificant, because the defect lies in the system, which defines some as vassals and some as masters. When extraordinary power is allotted to any politicians in a government, they attract every kind of corruption. Give to any men access to millions each year, along with the power of disposing the resources and managing the expenses of an entire nation, and the liberties of that nation will no longer be secure. As the old saying goes, 'Make me a king today, and I shall be a robber tomorrow.'

"Government parasites living in luxurious indolence on taxes not only saps our lives, it also leads to our extinction. War is the common harvest of those who suckle on public money. War is the art of conquering at home, because it’s a pretense for increasing government revenue. Taxes aren’t raised to carry on wars; wars are raised to carry on taxes. One fourth of mankind’s labor is annually consumed by barbarous war and defense, promulgated by governments. We are thus compelled to not only finance the indolence of our oppressors, but also to die for them as well, after our labors have sufficiently stocked the war machine. No war in the entire history of the world was started by innocent citizens pursuing the honest objects of their individual lives, except for the one about to erupt in America.

"Don’t look so startled at the mention of a violent insurrection in America. You still wallow in the mysticism that it’s only God's prerogative to anoint kings and governments, for causes known only to Him and his earthly interpreters. The Archbishop tells us that it’s not our business to overturn the government, that our role instead is to worship the king and pray for his ministers. Fortunately for the world, this mythology didn’t cross the Atlantic Ocean. The Americans understand that kings aren’t taken away by miracles, and that changes in government require only enough guns and courage.

"Alas, mankind has long made large sacrifices to ancient superstition. But it’s now clear to us that priests and tyrants are co-conspirators against liberty. We now understand that the mystery clouding the justification for kings and governments was only to cover the incredibility of it all. The age of political and religious superstition is passing away. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, are merely human invention, set up to terrify and enslave mankind by subjugating reason, enabling some men to monopolize power and profit.

"I don’t believe in the creed of the Jewish Church, the Roman Church, the Islamic Church, the Protestant Church, nor any other church. We can all see the absurdity of worshipping Aaron's molten calf, and we laugh at the folly of the Egyptians who put a pebble on a throne and acknowledged it as their king, but yet we are still blinded from the absurdity of worshipping our popes, our kings, and our parliaments, all of equally earthly constitution, and all likely to do us more harm than if we worshipped pebbles or calves instead. Future generations will burst into laughter when they examine our pious fairy tales.

"It is only by blinding man into believing that government is some wonderful mysterious thing that the ignorant are quieted and excessive taxation is foisted upon the world. When priests and kings set up religions and governments repugnant to human comprehension, they invented a word that served as a barrier to all questions and speculation. This word is 'mystery', and it has been used throughout history to ensconce priests and kings into dominant positions. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, because mystery is a fog of human invention. Ignorance and mystery are mirror images of the same thing.

"We have reached the juncture in human evolution where it’s necessary to declare that we no longer fear god, that we no longer look with awe to kings, nor with affection to parliaments, nor with duty to magistrates, nor with reverence to priests, nor with respect to nobility by birth. We must now inquire into the reason why we have a distinction between kings and subjects, and how came a race of men into the world so exalted above the rest as to become nearly a separate and privileged species.

"We must separate church from state, and see if the state can stand on its own. I think we should find, could we take off the dark covering of antiquity, that the first kings were simply the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in conjuring and mysticism obtained for him the title of chief among plunderers. As time unfolded, we were confronted with a plethora of oppressors staking a claim upon us. Between the monarchy, the parliament, the church, the feudal despotism operating locally, and the bureaucratic despotism operating everywhere, oppressors have overrun us, for reasons unknown to us. Kings on their own deathbeds dispose of their crowns by will, and consign their subjects, like beasts of the field, to whatever successor they appoint. This is so monstrous as hardly to be believed, as are the rest of the mysterious powers binding us.

"Monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy are but creatures of imagination, and a thousand such creatures may be contrived, all of them with the same result. Democracy is the most beguiling and confusing of these imaginations. Because a government is elective does not make it less despotic, if the persons elected possess afterward unlimited powers and are subject to no effective restraint. They merely become candidates for despotism, and one is as bad as another. Swamps breed serpents, and governments breed oppressors. History’s annals abound in such hideous wickedness, such horrible cruelties propagated by governments and churches, that only by reading of them can we form any idea of the baseness of which human nature is capable. The pictures that we behold of kings and priests and their ministers are so horrifying that humanity turns away from them with a shudder.

"Louis XIV said, 'If I were to comply with the will of my people, I would no longer be king.' No more universal truth was ever spoken. For myself, I would suffer the misery of devils rather than make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, and brutish tyrant. I cannot condone crowning a man’s head to make him king. Like the Americans, I would instead glorify the rights of individual men. Every man wishes to pursue his occupation and to enjoy the fruits of his labor and the produce of his property in peace, safety, and with the least possible expense. When these things are accomplished, all the reasons why government ought to be established are answered. We shall then find, if we let the American vision manifest itself, that kings and parliaments are dispensable.

"Universal peace, civilization, and commerce can only be accomplished by a complete revolution in the world's system of governments. Do not underestimate Mankind’s ability to accomplish this. We are maturing with each passing century. We are beginning to see with other eyes, to hear with other ears, and to think other thoughts. And what we are seeing, hearing, and thinking is that it is of no significance to enthrone one king or another, or to elect one parliamentarian or another, but to have nothing to do with them all. Everything that is right pleads for separation from our governors. The blood of the slain and the weeping voice of nature cries, 'T'is time to part!'

"There is an old tale about the canton of Berne, Switzerland, in which it was customary, from time immemorial, to keep a bear at the public expense. The people were taught to believe that if they had not a bear, they would all be undone. It happened some years ago that the bear became ill, and died too suddenly to be replaced immediately by another bear. During this interregnum, people discovered that the corn grew, the vintage flourished, the sun and moon rose and set, and everything went on the same as before. Taking courage from these observations, they resolved not to keep any more bears, which are very voracious and expensive animals, and likely to eat you if you aren’t careful to declaw them.

"The stage is set for the world to abandon its royal bears and golden calves. What were called revolutions in the past were little more than a change of persons or of insignificant particulars of governance. These revolutions rose and fell without measurably altering posterity. But the incipient revolution in America is a universal rejection of the whole order of things that have oppressed mankind forever. Our generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world. Governments will fall around the globe, especially where citizens can read and have access to guns.

"Will you now accuse me of insurrection? If, to expose the fraud and imposition of government, to lessen the oppression of taxes, to extirpate the horrid practice of war, to promote commerce, to break the chain of political and religious superstition, and to raise the degraded common man to his proper rank in the order of things, if these things be insurrection, let the name of insurrectionist be engraved on my tomb! I fear not your priests or your ministers or your armies!

"We have the power to begin the world over again. John Locke said, 'In the beginning, all the world was America.' The cause of America is the cause of all mankind, of those who ever lived or ever will live. The sun never shined on a vision of greater measure. T'is not the affair of a city or a state or a country, but of all the continents of the world. T'is not the concern of a day or a year or an age, because all of posterity is involved in this contest, and will be affected to the end of time. We need no longer wait for the right time, because the right time hath found us.

"Your request for accommodation is impossibly late! The Rubicon is passed. There is no turning away from it. If I ask an American if he wants a king, he asks me if I take him for an idiot. You are now an object more of contempt than of hatred, and the Americans jeer at you more as an ass than they dread you as a lion. For them, the debate is over. Arms, as the last resort, will now decide the contest. Your actions leave no choice, so the Americans accept the challenge."

(Setting:  Thomas Jefferson pens a passionate letter to King George of Great Britain, warning him that revolution in the American colonies is imminent.  He begs the King to consider a peaceful settlement before violence erupts).

Franklin solemnly pulled a parchment from his greatcoat and handed it to the King. "This letter expresses the sentiments of all Americans. It’s addressed to you, from a Virginian named Thomas Jefferson, although who wrote it is of little consequence. Read it and heed it."

As the King unfolded the parchment, the Head Honcho reeled from the shock of hearing Jefferson’s name through George's ears. "How can this be?" he wondered to himself. "Is he the ancestor of my Insurrection Czar?" While he wrestled with this disconcerting enigma, the King read the letter.

It began with a long description of how Britain had abused the American colonies. King George hastily scanned these complaints, as though they were natural and harmless observations of the way things ought to be, rather than angry objections to unholy imperialism. But, the closing words of the obscure American author sent a chill down his slackened spine:

(Setting:  Frustrated by his continued failure to set himself up as Emperor of America, the Head Honcho decides to travel back in time to Medieval Europe, based on the spurious assumption that fascist tyrants were more welcome back then).

"Let's get back to business. I’m going to a time and place where rulers are rulers, peons are peons, and everybody accepts the difference", said the Head Honcho.

"Can the Book take you to a different planet?"

"Of course", sniffed the Honcho haughtily. "This book can increase wealth simply by increasing taxes. The difficulty of interplanetary travel pales in comparison. But, space travel won't be necessary for me to find my nirvana. I can simply go back to medieval Europe and become a feudal baron, with my own castle, fiefdom, and serfs."

"Why would that be nirvana?"

"The only thing wrong with our bureaucratic feudalism in Washington is that Americans are uncooperative vassals. Medieval European vassals were much more submissive. They even believed in kings and queens."

"You should do a temporary flashback, just in case things go badly."

"Can the book do that?", the Honcho asked eagerly.

"Sure. It can send you backward in history for a specified trial period of time. If something dire happens, your return home is as certain as the Great Society was to eliminate poverty."

"Count me in!" The Honcho executed the temporary flashback instructions in the Time Travel chapter and was transported backward in time to a Medieval castle perched atop a forested hill overlooking what would someday become Germany. He had been magically transmogrified into a royal baron, replete with exquisite clothing, a vast assemblage of doting vassals, and a castle with great towers, alabaster figurines, and walls of polished marble. He found himself sitting on a gleaming throne holding a golden scepter.

A submissive vassal who looked amazingly like But Sir! approached him. "Sire, a serious matter requires your attention. An angry band of fiefs murdered the Royal Tax Collector. We need another agent to gather revenue for the barony. The Royal Lifestyle, the Royal Orgies, the Royal Wars, and the Royal Graft, Greed, and Corruption are draining the Royal Treasury."

"The IRS has a million tax collectors!", the Baron blurted. "Just order another one to empty the serfs’ pockets."

"But Sire!", exclaimed the But Sir! look-alike, "It's not that simple."

A familiar rage broiled in the Baron’s innards. "What’s so fornicating complicated?"

But Sire! cringed. "First, I’ve never heard of the IRS. Second, we're mired in the Dark Ages, so we aren’t civilized enough to use millions of people to empty our pockets. We had only one tax collector, who is now dead."

The Honcho moaned. Forgetting what had been invented yet was a pitfall of time travel. He searched his memory for the tax collecting methods used in Medieval Europe. Surely, they must have already discovered the beauty of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, in order to buy political support from the masses. Then it hit him: Robin Hood! Surely, Robin Hood was a familiar name, and his philosophy a familiar ploy, even to these unsophisticated political Neanderthals. The Baron triumphantly declared aloud, "Bring me Robin Hood to serve as the Royal Tax Collector!"

"But Sire!", exclaimed But Sire!. "That's impossible!"

The Honcho clenched his massive fists. "How can it be impossible? I’m the royal tyrant!"

"Robin Hood is just a mythical character whose legend has been passed down via folklore", explained But Sire! patiently.

"Are mythical characters exempt from conscription into my service?"

"Sire, it appears so."

"Pray tell, why?"

"Because.....mythical characters don't exist, sire", explained But Sire! carefully.

"Find out which of these mythical characters profess not to exist, and I'll have them boiled in oil! Be quick about it, knave!" he snarled through clenched teeth.

"Sire, I know the answer already", squeaked But Sire! nervously. "They all profess not to exist."

"My God!", exclaimed the baron. "This is worse than I thought. If the mythical characters turn against me, it won't be long before everyone is swept up in the riptide of insurrection!" Beads of sweat bubbled on his huge forehead. "I need names, knave! If we can capture one of these mythical characters, my agents can infiltrate and destroy this infant conspiracy."

But Sire! was learning how to deal with his demented leader. "That’s easy, sire. Robin Hood is one of the conspiratorial mythical characters."

"Holy Grail shit!", shouted the Honcho. "I almost hired that insurrectionist bastard as my Royal Tax Collector! Capture Robin Hood, squire, and don't return until you do!"

Thus, But Sire! was tasked to apprehend someone who didn’t exist. Fortunately, he had a friend named John the Mischiever, who was a seditious knave that looked exactly like Freeman. But Sire! went to him for advice. "I'm in a quandary", he said miserably. "The baron ordered me to capture the mythical Robin Hood."

"You're really fornicated!" said John the Mischiever. "Not only is he mythical, he doesn't even exist! I'm glad I'm not in your tights. I’ll bet the baron is boiling a cauldron of oil for you as we speak."

"You arsehole!", swore But Sire! "I need advice, not sarcasm."

John the Mischiever rubbed his chin pensively, looking alternately confused and bemused. Then he shouted, "Eureka!"

"What? What?" implored But Sire! impatiently.

"We'll bring Robin Hood into existence magically. Here's how it’ll work. The Royal Treasurer will print cartloads of paper money, backed only by the baron's bluff that they might be worth something. This will give the baron immense purchasing power. It will also cause inflation, which will push wealthy people into higher tax brackets, so that the baron can collect even more taxes from them. This inflation magic will accomplish everything that the mythical Robin Hood is famous for. The baron will steal from the rich and give some of the stolen wealth to the poor to buy their support and keep them quiet. If you can show the baron the effects of this unseen inflationary Robin Hood, he won’t care that you didn’t physically apprehend him."

"You’re a genius!" exclaimed But Sire!. "But are there any pitfalls to this scheme? Every scam you conjure up has dangerous side effects."

"There is one minor risk", confessed John the Mischiever. "Inflation will push everyone into higher tax brackets, including the serfs, who might get pissed off enough to revolt against the baron, storm his castle, and hang the rogue and his ministers from a tree."

"How do we prevent that minor risk from happening?" asked But Sire! acerbically.

"Start a war", said John the Mischiever nonchalantly.

"I don't get it."

"You dolt! Even the court jesters understand this one. The Baron can use the fabricated war as a pretext to rally the serfs behind his rule and his Ism. War will also justify higher taxes, a bigger baronial bureaucracy, and an expanded defense department. When the war is over, the surviving serfs will be grateful they weren’t killed, so they'll forget about the higher taxes, the bigger bureaucracy, and the bloated defense complex."

But Sire!’s splendid report thrilled the Baron. Not only was Robin Hood doing great work for the barony, his altruistic philosophy laid the foundation for a military adventure. However, he feared the Archbishop might not approve, so he sent But Sire! to get the religious figurehead’s blessing.

When But Sire! arrived, the Archbishop was distracted by a new sport he was inventing, which he obliquely called "golf". He fanatically struck at a small spheroid with sticks that he periodically threw in puerile disgust. But Sire! earned the Archbishop’s gratitude and support for the war by suggesting that digging a hole in the ground to serve as a target for the little white ball might spice up the game.

But Sire! reported back to the Baron that the Archbishop supported going to war, with a few caveats. First, the Archbishop wanted lots of soldiers killed, so that he could sermonize about how wonderful the kingdom of heaven is compared to the dangerous real world. Second, he wanted his share of the new taxes in the form of increased tithes. Third, when the soldiers were done fighting the Baron’s war, he wanted them to retake the Holy Land from the Saracens. After all, they were fighting for his ism as much as the baron’s.

The Honcho eagerly agreed to these stipulations, because the ghastly carnage of war beckoned like a temptress. It was exhilarating to know that anonymous people would die defending his rule and his Ism. It didn't bother him that they sacrificed themselves out of ignorance, fear, or conditioned worship of the political and religious order of things. He picked a neighboring barony at random from a map and declared war on its unfortunate inhabitants, using a nearly forgotten territorial dispute as a pretext. As the war escalated, the serfs forgot about the inflationary ravages of the invisible Robin Hood, and the Baron achieved daily orgasm with the reports of battlefield casualties.

Then, in a rare but illuminating moment in man’s history, the naked soul of the species was briefly unmasked of mythology and isms. In the heat of a particularly gruesome conflict, the flag bearers of each barony got carried away by the emotion of slashing swords and skewering lances and charged each other. They collided and fought, and their banners became tangled and indistinguishable from one another. This confused jumbling of the baronial flags stunned the combatants of both factions, as if a sorcerer’s spell was abruptly broken. Warfare unexpectedly ceased. Swords hung idly in the hands of bewildered soldiers. Mesmerized jousters looked at their lances without recognition. They looked like dancers after the band suddenly stopped playing in the middle of a heretofore irresistible tune that had choreographed their steps since time immemorial.

With no flags to kill for and therefore no Isms to die for, the soldiers now saw each other as fellow individuals involved in a common struggle for survival and fulfillment on an inimical planet suspended in a mystifying cosmos. Battlefield enemies intermingled, conversed, and gradually came to know each other. They soon discovered that through trade, cooperation, and friendship, they could achieve an existence far superior to the one that previously guaranteed them only a hero's mortal bon voyage if they sacrificed their lives dutifully to some omnipotent purveyor of myths. Once the flags were destroyed and the Isms deconditioned, they no longer had a reason to kill each other.

The Baron was crimson with rage when he heard of this astounding pacifism. How dare the ungracious serfs abandon their duties and commingle with the enemy? Their ordained reason for living was to die for the barony and the bishopric. There was territory to be won, riches to be plundered, souls to be herded to heaven, and royal and priestly lifestyles to be maintained. Demonstrations of anarchy and agnosticism couldn’t be tolerated! The Honcho knew that the Baron had to quell this nascent insurrection immediately. If such disobedience were tolerated in this millennium, successive centuries of evolving liberty would make life as a modern senator impossible for him.

The two combating barons hastily dispatched fresh squadrons of flag bearers to the stymied battlefield. The pacified serfs were startled from their reverie by the flag-bearing reinforcements galloping toward them. Old passions suddenly flamed anew. Loyalty to barons welled up again in the souls of the soldiers. Sense of duty once again gripped them as the sorcerer's spell seized their hearts. The cosmic bandleader struck up his tune in mid-measure, as if the dance had never been interrupted. While the baronial flags fluttered proudly, swords were unsheathed, lances were hefted, and hatred ruled the day once more. A charge was sounded. Human carnage ensued. This time, the flag bearers refrained from despoiling their holy banners. They stood silhouetted on the ridge, like religious icons atop temples, watching paternalistically as vassal slaughtered vassal. When the sun finally set on the bloody plain littered with carcasses, only Death emerged victorious.

Unfortunately, the Head Honcho couldn’t bask in the glory of Death's victory. The cosmic clock pacing his temporary intrusion into Medieval Europe triggered the magic of the "Book of Liberal Policies, Marxist Economics, and Other Occult Phenomena" to whisk him back to 20^th century Washington.

(Setting:  Jefferson debates the existence of God with Pope Safari Golfer I).

"Is there really a God?" Freeman asked bluntly. He fidgeted nervously, fearing the pontiff actually knew and would banish his comfortably confused apathy. He also fidgeted to generate body heat, because the air had suddenly grown cold and damp, as if the door to an old stone cellar had been opened.

"Why ask me?" sniffed the Pope disdainfully. "I'm a priest, not a philosopher. My job is to interpret the word of God, not to doubt it."

"And two plus two equals five", boomed a confident voice from a dark corner. The Safari Golfer and Freeman whirled toward the disembodied voice. To their astonishment, Thomas Jefferson stepped out from a shadow.

Jefferson’s bizarre materialization dumbfounded the Golfer. "Pardon me?"

"Two plus two equals five", repeated Jefferson. "I believe that."

"That's ridiculous!"

"Prove it", challenged Jefferson.

The Golfer rummaged in his desk. "Okay, here are some matches. I'll put two here and two there. Now, if I slide one pile next to the other, how many total matches are there?"

"My faith compels me to believe that there are five", Jefferson asserted.

"Then show us the fifth match!"

"It's there. You just can't see it, because you aren’t properly conditioned spiritually. You must discard your own perception of reality and rely on mine instead."

"Can you prove the fifth match is there, or must we helplessly believe your silly assertion, with no corroborating evidence?"

Jefferson’s eyes twinkled. "Can you prove it isn't there?"

"But that's insane!", Pope Safari Golfer I declared. "How can I prove that things that aren't there really aren't there? That futile dialectic obligation would end any rational debate and make the Mad Hatter happy as a lark. The burden of proof is on you."

"Okay, let's change the subject slightly. I contend your God doesn’t exist."

"Prove it!", said the Golfer.

Jefferson smiled. "According to your own rules, it’s your burden to prove God's existence, not mine to prove his non-existence."

"Okay then", conceded the Golfer reluctantly. "Who created the universe, if not God? It had to get here somehow."

"Who created this creator of the universe? By extension of the same logic, the creator had to get here somehow."

"The creator didn’t require creation. This is a special exception to my logic," bluffed the Golfer.

"I can more easily argue that the universe didn’t require creation. One incredulity is easier to swallow than two. Why add the complication of a creator who doesn't require creation, especially when there is no evidence of this notion?"

"How do you explain the miracle of life?", challenged the Golfer. "There had to be a god to make humans in his own image."

"It is far more likely that we invented god in our own imperfect image as our feeble intellects evolved, than that some invisible being concocted us out of nothing on the sixth day. There is abundant evidence of biological and spiritual evolution, and none of divine intervention."

"How do you explain the beauty of flowers and rainbows, if god didn’t create them?"

"How do you explain war, earthquakes, and Head Honchos, in a universe created by a god capable of making flowers and rainbows?", said Jefferson. "If your god created everything, then he also created evil, for which he ought to be despised, not worshipped."

"What purpose do our lives have if there is no afterlife with god?"

"What purpose do they have if there is an afterlife with god? The notion is too extravagantly redundant to be reasonable, and there is no evidence of heaven or hell, but for the quality of life and the psychological states we create for ourselves here on earth."

"The purpose of our lives", preached the Pope, "Is to earn an eternity with God."

"If your god put us on earth merely to run us through a metaphysical obstacle course or a moral maze like pavlovian rats, then I want nothing to do with him. If such a god exists, I will never bow to him and sacrifice the rationality that he presumably endowed me with."

"Aha! Your rebelliousness clearly demonstrates the need for a god to restrain people and to induce good behavior. Without religion, we would have moral anarchy."

"Religion has no monopoly on morality."

"But why would anyone do good, if not for love of Jesus or fear of an omnipotent god?"

"You cannot do good out of fear", asserted Jefferson. "Morality ends where the wrath of god begins. And there is certainly more love in the universe than that of Jesus to motivate one to do good. The love of mother for child is an example."

"But there’s no way to know good without God to define it?"

"Those who think that are the building blocks with which tyrants fashion their oppressions. If your idea of good is defined externally and imposed on you unwillingly, then you are a tool. And if the external definition of good is mystical, then you are a tool with infinitely malleable applications. Every tyrant uses secular or divine mysticism to support his rule. There is no difference between the Egyptian god-kings or the Marxian species being, between the divine right of kings or Hitler’s Aryan race, between tribal rituals or Ismism’s common good. All are different manifestations of unverifiable mysticism defining good and bad, benefiting those doing the defining and damaging the rest.

"If you can’t define good without religion", continued Jefferson, "then you are condemned to intellectual slavery, with the shackles applied by your own mind. What tyrants fear most is people discovering what good is without ever opening a religious or political text. Good is what a thinking person values. Values are personally chosen building blocks that enable a fulfilling life to flourish. Personal choice requires freedom. Freedom and mysticism, whether secular or divine, cannot coexist. They are mutually exclusive. One requires constant thought, and the other requires constant suspension of thought. This translates into the political world very directly and elementally. Political power is founded on the unthinking slavery of mysticism, since freely thinking minds will never submit to the tyranny of some humans wielding power over others. One sentence can summarize man's social experience thus far: Ignorance breeds mysticism, and mysticism breeds power. Repeat this sentence a thousand times. It’s everything you need to know about religion and politics."

(Setting:  The Mad Hatter convinces the drunken Head Honcho that he is about to be beheaded for various malfeasances.  The Hatter offers him an escape from this fate that involves using the basics of political power -- mythology and bribery from the public treasury).

The Honcho leaned back in his leather chair and described his latest encounter. Just before the visitation, he had sunk into deep despair after hearing of more insurrection activities across the country. The obvious failure of his Insurrection Act drove him to his liquor cabinet. After draining one bottle, the Hatter made his unwelcome entrance into the Honcho's inebriated sub-conscious.

"It’s amazing how prodigiously someone without a head can drink", observed the Hatter, without offering any other salutation.

The Honcho instinctively reached for his head. Reassured that his cranium was still attached, he snarled, "You're full of shit, you double-talking bastard!"

"He speaks without a head, too!" exclaimed the Hatter. "This is indeed a spectacle. I'd offer you a cup of treacle, my headless friend, but consuming it would be quite futile."

"What in hell are you talking about?" shouted the Honcho much too loudly. "I've got a head on my shoulders, as sure as Ismism is the state religion and the Safari Golfer is the Supreme Being. Here, watch this." The drunken senator pounded his head viciously against his desk, creating nauseating thuds that only a real head could make. "There", he concluded proudly. "I'll have that treacle now." He wiped his brow with the soiled panties to sop up blood seeping from several wounds.

The Hatter shook his head disdainfully. "On our side of the Looking Glass, people who maim themselves are considered to have lost their heads. Also, since you were sentenced to be beheaded by the Red Queen for the Dormouse’s death, I’m doubly convinced that you have no head, because when the Red Queen says 'Off with your head!’ your head invariably comes off. As for the treacle, I don't have any, so there's no use pretending you have a head to drink it with."

"What do you want from me?" the Honcho implored.

"Nothing", replied the Hatter obsequiously. "Why do you ask?"

"Then why are you here to torture me like this?"

"I'm here because my mother, who was a haberdasher, and my father, who was a seamstress, mated and gave birth, although I don't suppose they did it just to torture you, which is a rather self-centered presumption. Actually, I have no idea why they did it. My mother was rather homely, and my father wasn’t well endowed, as you might suspect about a male seamstress. I’m surprised they both weren’t celibate. Haven't we had this conversation before?"

"You're mad!" the Honcho spat out.

"At least I admit it", said the Mad Hatter haughtily. "Whereas you pretend to have a head by speaking foolishness."

Tears intermixed with the blood streamed down the Honcho’s cheeks. "Please! Just tell me why you're here and get this over with."

The Hatter harrumphed. "Okay, but on our side of the Looking Glass, we do not rudely rush conversations to their conclusion prematurely. Actually, none of our conversations come to a meaningful conclusion in Wonderland, so it's all beside the point, which I'm sure you understand, since you’re a politician. Anyway, I'll tell you a little secret." He looked around the room furtively and moved closer to the Honcho, as if to whisper something terribly clandestine. Instead, he shouted into the Honcho’s ear, "I'm here because you've drunk yourself into a stupor again, you headless lummox!!"

The Honcho pawed his ravaged ear angrily. "Your visits are the worst moments of my life!"

"Then why do you drink so much?" asked the Hatter, feeling a twinge of sympathy for the wretched man who kept conjuring him up.

"That damnable Insurrectionist has ruined my re-election prospects, and all my schemes to capture him have failed. The only friends I have left are all named Old Bushmills."

Amazingly, the Mad Hatter grabbed a bottle of Old Bushmills, parked his feet on the Honcho's desk, and took a hearty swig. "Your situation isn’t hopeless, even without a head. You're better off without your head anyway, because it was much too large. It reminded me of the Mock Turtle's shell after we had him for dinner."

"You ate the Mock Turtle?"

The Mad Hatter spit out whiskey and saliva in disgust. "Of course not! He merely engorged himself when he dined with us. Tell me, do you eat your friends for dinner?" The Hatter rubbed his chin for a moment, and then answered his own question. "I suppose that you do, in a manner of speaking."

"What hope do I have?" The Honcho immediately regretted his pensive interest in the Hatter's omnidirectional words.

"Quite frankly, your only hope is that everyone is stupid enough to listen to you, rather than to the Insurrectionist."

"That's hardly reassuring."

"Swallow your pride, lummox. Democracy isn't a contest of wisdom and character. Get back to the basics of American politics. You'll get re-elected, even if your head re-appears."

"Back to the basics?" the Honcho repeated quizzically. "Do you mean graft and corruption?"

"No, more basic than that."

"Unkeepable promises and mindless mud-slinging?"

"Close, but no cigar. Get to the core of the matter!"

"Flag waving and baby kissing?"

The Hatter waved his hand to dismiss the Honcho's errant musings. "No wonder the Insurrectionist is kicking your ass. You've forgotten the essence of political power."

"Out with it, you bow-legged cretin, before I give up drinking and banish you forever!"

The Hatter ignored this impotent threat. "Political power is a function of two things. First, you use mythology to confuse people into thinking it’s proper to chain themselves to a master. Second, in order to convince them that you’re the right master to be chained to, you bribe them shamelessly with riches from the royal treasury." The Hatter looked at his watch and suddenly jumped up from the chair. "Oh my! It's 6:00! The Red Queen will be angry that I missed her tea time."

"You said it’s always 6:00 in Wonderland!"

"It is, it is. That's why it's so unforgivable to miss my appointment." The Hatter turned to go.