Truculent Fish
The flirtation with libertarian ideas can take years to ripen into fully committed adherence, if that. It could start with seeds planted by collegiate acquaintances, not yet fully accredited instructors, advocating voter apathy. It could turn into a telephone call to the Libertarian Party from a destitute poet stagnating just a few blocks off from a large impersonal urban campus, fast-forwarding three decades later into a chance meet up with a group of dilettantes calling themselves Liberty On The Rocks, a clever bit of punning from an incongruous mesh of anarchists, pot heads, disaffected veterans with arrest records, a very few more upwardly mobile conservatives, and a very angry spastic quadriplegic turned bitterly reactive, if still diffident about the utility of a gun toting populace.
The author of this missive, the angry quad in question, confesses a belated amusement in seeking out a new family among such rabble in a city dominated by African Americans and the soft Democratic left. Listening to Adam Kokesh speak on the night of July 24th, the quadriplegic realizes she failed once again to find private citizens who out of compassion will take her out of public housing, but remains invigorated by the hint of danger in such an unlikely band of talking heads, not a person of color among them, other than the occasional foreign student on a visa in a dalliance with the right wing, in a gathering which might otherwise be called angry white males and the white women who sleep with them. While Kokesh talked about channeling the anger of an emotive “fuck you” against liberal regulators with humor and yoga classes, his acolytes moved near the disruptive wheelchair user at the outside tables to light their marijuana cigarettes, an activity ignored with slight diffidence, this freedom to get high.
It would be a serious infraction in the section 202 housing system, a federal classification created by Congress for the low income elderly and disabled, regulated by HUD, a department which contracts its subsidy system out to ecumenical corporations and secular agents in an anything but pristine paradigm.
The standard synopsis of what drives extremism in ascendancy is the imposition of or the economic collapse into austerity, hence the eruption of the civil war in Spain in 1936, the rise of Mussolini in Italy, and his more dramatic emulator Adolph in Germany. The ambitions of Fascism would collapse in as many decades. Franco may have lingered on in as the dictator relic until 1975, mortality subjugating all authoritarian and permissive ideologies in its wake, but by the end of World War II the system was broken. The welfare state, as a step child of Marxist theory, is not. Its spawn, like a cancer on the American soul, is the compliance model, whether in public housing, or the medical model rationing to which its conjoined, collectively making everyone worse off.
Libertarian ideas eschew socialism, due to the fact that these ideas encompass radicalized individual liberty, so its proponents would dismiss any comparison to the growing prominence of Libertarians like Rand Paul in the GOP to the rise of Fascism in Europe, but its rhetoric created domestic insurrectionists like Timothy McVeigh, whose violence against federalism occurred in the prosperous 90's, his subsequent guilt and execution only to be turned into a travesty by Good Morning America’s coverage. Activists like Kokesh may see ridicule as an anecdote to McVeigh’s destructive anarchism, but progressive overreach is currently salivating at the bit. In the present day concourse of American social mores, no one is allowed to be anything but egalitarian in the process of communicating. Hostility on the basis of ethnicity or sexual orientation is a hate crime waiting in the wings, and forced diversity through statutory correction is so pervasive even a moderate like former Senator Jim Webb calls it Orwellian.
That a disabled writer, career and health destroyed by corruption within liberalism and its promises of opportunity, may be attracted to such radicalized individualism, this isn’t as much of a contradiction as it seems in relation to embattled dependency which victimizes a significant minority within its net, but for collectivism within libertarian sympathies to unite against the state requires shared cooperation antithetical to the renegade mindset. Preaching to the choir is one thing, inconveniencing each other to break the camel’s back when it comes to entitlement might as well be analogous to the ant and the rubber tree plant.
