====================================================================== 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. ====================================================================== 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. ====================================================================== 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. 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