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Lever 13
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The Atlanta Declaration: Every man, woman, and responsible child has a
natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil, and
Constitutional right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed,
any weapon -- handgun, shotgun, rifle, machinegun, \anything\ -- any
time, anywhere, without asking anyone's permission.
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L. NEIL SMITH'S \LEVER ACTION\ LETTER NUMBER 13
== THE MANCHURIAN LOBBYIST ==
Gil Russell, Agent
The Meredith Scott Literary Agency
548 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10023
Dear Gil:
After writing 16 science fiction novels in 10 years, I think maybe it's time
for a change. How's this for a political thriller that'll keep you up and
turning pages all night?
In the background, the Defense Department has become no more than a
welfare system for redundant engineers and foundering corporations. The
armed forces are an extension of Foggy Bottom fumbling by other means and
can't tell an airliner from an enemy fighter-bomber. Against foes both
foreign and domestic, the sole bulwark of America's historically unique
institutions is a heavily-armed private citizenry, growing restive under
an unbearab]e burden of taxes and increasingly vocal about it.
The first characters I show are leftist politicos led by a senile,
obsessive -- but totally fictional -- senator from Ohio and his colleague,
a semi-convicted Massachusetts murderer. They form a bipartisan cabal with
the President, an aging preppie just bright enough to see that he's the
Jimmy Carter of the GOP, stoically determined to become its Lyndon Johnson
if he has to destroy the republic in order to save it. Together they scheme
to strip Americans of the hardware they find so discouraging and turn them
back into the loot-producing serfs Alexander Hamilton intended them to be.
Together they enlist the aid of the nation's top gun control advocacies,
which look like any wine-and-cheese pressure group. In fact, they're
virtually memberless fronts created by a sort of Nixonian Odessa of ex-CIA
types determined to drag Dick -- or at least his political ideas -- out of
cryogenics where he stored himself a decade and a half ago and prop him up
in the Oval Office for one more last hurrah. These spooks control the
so-called mental health industry, grim gulags where the light of the
Constitution never shines and real-life mad scientists are free to pump their
helpless captives full of memory-cauterizing voltage and identity-dissolving
chemicals. The result, customized high tech zombies, are sent home on
disability payments to watch daytime TV and gobble Twinkies with inhuman
patience until they're needed.
Now from time to time folks get enough of the gore electronic
fear-merchants splash across their living room carpets every night, or fed
up with intrusive and incessant nagging labeled "public service messages".
Some fraction even appears to have absorbed the fact that the Bill of Rights
means what it says and that the government's latest moral substitute for
war is actually being waged against the concept of a free economy. It's then
that one of these zombies gets a call with key words buried in it, "You
have miles to go and promises to keep, Orville-Bob..." and takes up his
saturdaynightspecial or his evilassaultrifle (depending on how he's been
programmed this month), while senators, spooks, and fear-merchants warm
up the public relations machinery.
The zombie picks a convent or a Campfire Girls convention and blows
away as many photogenic victims as he can. Then he eats his gun barrel and
pulls the trigger one more time. As psychovultures descend on the community,
the media make a big deal of the miscreant's history of mental illness
without mentioning 20,000 laws on the books against his owning guns. They
blame tens of millions of innocent gun owners (the killer isn't available
for a post-bloodbath interview, but his neighbors all say he was very quiet)
give 51% of their time to the front groups who built the killer in the first
place and 51% to a spineless, dull-witted, militantly moderate President and
the senators from Massachusetts and Ohio who spontaneously produce an 1800
page bill depriving Americans not only of guns, but of their kitchen knives,
keyrings, and fingernails.
\Not one reporter asks why liberal Democrats are in bed with
Nixon's CIA.\
Anyone who threatens to point out that this spectacular and convenient
mass-Osterizing occurred the week the legislature began deliberating gun
laws -- and that similar coincidences have occurred in three or four other
states over the last six months -- is kept off the air at all costs. Maybe
he'll get locked up and become the next trigger-zombie.
The new bill violates 15 Constitutional amendments, includes a death
penalty for thinking about Daniel Boone's flintlock, but gets befuddled
blessings from the Chief Executive. Commentators and columnists keep the
pressure up. Lavishing thousands of praise-filled air-hours on the senators
who wrote it, they also condemn it as a sellout to the gun lobby.
Now for the plot-twist: the rich, powerful, multimillion-member group
created to defend the principle of an armed citizenry to the death (and take
whatever heat the President won't accept as his part of the deal) finds
itself inexplicably weak, poor, inclined to compromise -- although the
media characterize it as unyielding. Its official spokesmen help by shaving
their heads to enhance an already amazing resemblance to Nikita Khrushchev.
We don't find out until the next-to-last chapter that it's as stuffed with
ex-Nixonites as the so-called liberal gun control organizations.
Gil, I haven't figured out how the conspiracy gets exposed, but I gotta
have a happy ending. Maybe -- although they don't know it -- the spooks are
conditioned to off themselves like the zombies to give the President
credible deniability. The senators are convicted under a little known
federal statute for violating their oath to uphold the Constitution and are
sent to some high-walled place with bars on the windows where the regular
inmates treat them the same way they've been treating Senate pages for years.
The media -- I don't know, this is where I'm having trouble. My first
thought was, once the plot was exposed, that they changed their ways when
they realized that their First Amendment rights weren't any more secure
than the Second Amendment rights of the gun owners they persecute, but I
can hear you saying right now that no editor will go for that.
This is a novel. It has to be believable.
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L. NEIL SMITH'S \LEVER ACTION\ LETTER NUMBER 13
111 EAST DRAKE ROAD SUITE 7032
FORT COLLINS, COLORADO U.S.A. 80525
L. Neil Smith is the award-winning author of 16 novels including
\Henry Martyn, The Crystal Empire, BrightSuit MacBear, Taflak Lysandra,
The Probability Broach,\ and the forthcoming FORGE OF THE ELDERS
trilogy, beginning with CONTACT AND COMMUNE.
Your contributions to this effort, while extremely welcome, are not
tax-deductible.
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