A letter to Bob Barr about "Good and Evil"

This is a letter that I wrote to Bob Barr yesterday. I decided to post it although I still very much support his campaign. If you agree with me and want to send this same message to Bob you can copy it and paste it into Word, print it and mail it to the address below, or copy the letter and send it to him on his website, although you have to register to do so. Register here

Click HERE to see the interview with GlennBeck where Bob got off track. He is asked about "good and evil" and in my opinion he answers very badly. It happens at 2:50 from the beginning


Barr 2008 Presidential Committee
P.O. Box 725007
Atlanta, GA 31139



Dear Bob,



I have just watched the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the interview that you filmed with Glenn Beck yesterday, the 29th of August. As I watched you banter with the self-avowed warmonger, the hope that I had allowed myself to feel drained out of me like the life drains out of a motor when a rock punctures its oil pan. At the beginning of the interview, when you abandoned the libertarian notion that our state needs to act only in the interests of the citizens, and instead accepted the OneParty idea that the USA should be the global judge and executioner, the motor that has driven me to promote your candidacy with great fervor seized up. Instead of looking out for our self-interest you advocate searching out “evil”. Shame on you.

Bob, I believe in freedom, I believe in individual liberty and I am certain that those goals are not possible in a state that is dominated by a large government which judges itself capable of identifying “evil” and combating it around the world. Who is going to identify “evil”? What do we do when the search for evil reveals ourselves? Let me give you an example. If you ask Americans that tune in regularly to TV if there is evil in the world that must be eliminated, most will answer, yes. If asked for an example, the most common answer will be Osama Bin Laden and the suicide hijacking attack on the World Trade Center. Was that the result of “evil”? Was it “evil” that motivated those men, or something else?

Was the attack on the Twin Towers any more evil than the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo or the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima? The Japanese had attacked us at Pearl Harbor and the Germans had overrun Europe. We entered into the war with a clear goal and we let the enemy, Germany and Japan, know what that goal was. That goal was the surrender of Germany and Japan, the disarming of both and regime change in both countries. Our justification for the mass killing of civilians was that the sooner we ended the war, the fewer people would die. So the Pentagon and the White House decided that killing thouands of civilians all at once might break the will of the enemy and make him accede to our demands, thereby shortening the war.

So was that different than what the Islamic radicals did on September 11th, 2001?

Who were the attackers and what was their goal? Most of the nineteen suicide hijackers were Saudis. They were led by a Saudi: bin Laden, and an Egyptian: al Zawahiri. Bin Laden and al Zawahiri had complained for years that the US military base in Saudi Arabia violated the Koranic dictate against military occupation of the Dar Al Islam. They had also complained for years that the Saudi royalty and the Egyptian President were maintained in power by the US government, thanks to American intelligence, money and weapons. They demanded that the United States stop arming and abetting Israel who has murdered and removed Palestinians from their homes. Bin Laden and al Zawahiri demanded that the United States stop the embargo and bombing of Iraq. So, just as we told the Germans and the Japanese how to avoid our retribution, so did Bin Laden also warn us. Our Bin Laden unit in the CIA, run by Michael Scheuer reported this information in detail, but the intelligence never got to decision makers. As the Islamic radicals were limited to alternative weapons, they decided to steal some jetliners and kill a mass of civilians all at once in order to break the will of the enemy and make him accede to their demands.

Now as you reflect upon the case of 911 and mass civilian bombing in WWII from a moral standpoint, please explain why one is “evil” and the other is not. That same moral problem presents itself in our behavior regards Georgia, South Osettia and Russia. Why is Russia evil to advocate the secession of South Osettia, but Serbia was evil when it opposed the secession of Kosovo? Our foreign policy should have NO considerations or judgments of “good and evil”. That is George Bush’s trademark; you should be wiser than that.

The government has no business labeling anyone or any organizations as evil. When we do we seed the problems that later come back to haunt us. Our actions need to be calculated solely on the possible risks and benefits to the USA. And as libertarians we should understand that the first and most important rule of security is to mind our own business. If we hadn’t meddled in Iran and Iraq and Israel and Palestine and Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, etc., then 911 wouldn’t have happened. We would not be involved in two wars and the Twin Towers would be peacefully looking across the water at New Jersey. Our self-interest is served by having dialogue with everyone, by making friends, and not by the hubris of thinking that we can identify “evil”.

As our government’s eyes look beyond our borders they should be blind to “good and evil”, just as they should be blind to “good and evil” here at home. Our government should simply adhere to the law. When the government makes judgments of good and evil, those judgments will always lead us away from strictly legal actions in the belief that we can bend the rules because what we are doing is “good”. That situational legality will always work against some group of people that are not harming anyone.

You also said that we need a strong intelligence establishment. That stance is antithetical to individual liberty. An intelligence operation requires secrecy to function. If we are to have a government that serves the people and not special interests we need to end the secrecy with which our government now operates. Intelligence organizations regularly break American law and always break international law. Intelligence organizations evolve into covert operations, where they do not only collect information, but actively try to affect other countries through illegal means, which include murder. The most startling reason to abandon our faith in secret intelligence gathering is that it is usually wrong. Look at Iraq for instance. There was some good intelligence, but there was so much bad intelligence that the good intelligence was drowned out. Who was right about Iraq? Historians, journalists with experience in Iraq, weapons inspectors who had spent years in Iraq. Who was wrong? The CIA and the NSA. Billions of dollars does not produce accurate intelligence because the historians and State Department are usually right. In order to justify their very expensive existence the CIA and NSA has to disagree with the State Department and historians, and that is when they start to decide on what they WANT TO find before they find it.

Bob, your answers alienated me from your campaign a bit. I am still going to support your campaign. I am still going to vote for you, but it will be with considerably less enthusiasm than it was last week.



Best regards,



C A Ferrell

Why We Need To Talk About Politics

We are advised that in polite company we should refrain from talking about politics. We are warned not to talk about politics at family gatherings and we are informed that company policy does not permit conversations about politics at work. The campaign against political discourse is a result of our post-modern, non-offensive American culture. Whatever you do, don’t offend somebody.

This strikes me as dangerous. We live in a Constitutional Republic that depends on an informed and active electorate to send qualified and trustworthy politicians to the State Capitols and to Washington to represent us. If we do not talk about politics with our friends and family, if we don’t share our opinions with co-workers, then our votes will be cast without honing our ideas on the whetstone of give and take conversation. If we don’t talk about our opinions, especially with people we do not agree with, then we really won’t understand what we think.

It is not possible to know your position if you have not practiced how to defend it in a logical and amicable debate. In all probability you will simply be repeating something from the TV or a newspaper, or worse, repeating the talking points of a polished campaign speech. The fact that you cannot logically defend the idea means that you don’t understand it. You will cast your vote as one of the millions of lazy Americans who does not accept the responsibility of suffrage seriously.

Normally the average voter is trained by the mainstream media to scoff at any idea or set of opinions that does not mesh more or less perfectly with the ideas grouped into incoherent bundles by the Democratic and Republican parties. The voter that is informed exclusively by the big six media companies is taught that politics in Americas is and always should be a dualistic system where you are either a Republican “conservative” or a Democrat “liberal”. The only option to those two choices is to position yourself between them as an Independent. The implication is that all the serious solutions to the issues that need attention fall on the scale below. If an idea cannot be located on this scale then it is understood to be crazy and dangerous.




There are hundreds of topic areas in our politics that range from defense planning to the proper role of the Federal government in education to whether we should involve ourselves in all the regional conflicts around the world to whether government should support the price of certain agricultural commodities, etcetera ad infinitum. There are thousands of crucial decisions to be made, but most Americans passively accept that there are only two ways that the myriad issues can be bundled and dealt with.

There is a Democrat bundle and there is a Republican bundle. These bundles are really quite arbitrary and often leave the thinking man or woman with no good choice. For example, a Catholic Christian is taught that he must defend life before any other political considerations. What policies threaten human life?
• Legal executions
• Abortion
• Euthanasia
• War – in particular unjust war
Two of these positions generally fall in the Democrat bundle and the other two generally fall in the Republican bundle. We are led to believe that there is some sense in this distribution, but there certainly isn’t to someone who’s values and sensitivities are not aligned upon the American “liberal” – “conservative” axis. So, in this example the Catholic is forced to do a macabre mental calculation; which kills more, war or abortion? There are many obvious examples of people that do not identify with either of the bundles. Libertarians and others that are interested in individual liberties, but definitely are against the redistribution of resources are forced to make a bad decision if they vote along the Democrat-Republican axis.

There are very good ideas that do not fall on the linear axis of mainstream American politics. The linear axis is the American status quo and all of the power elites like our national discussion to stay on that line. The bankers and stock brokers, the bureaucrats and reporters and corporate executives and marketing professionals and the two big political parties want things to stay just as they are because they are all doing just fine. Either of the two bundles is fine with the ruling elites, either of the political parties are on the same program. No mainstream Democrats or Republicans are going to advocate that we close the Federal Reserve Bank or that we legalize marijuana and other drugs. The mainstream Dems and Republicans know that they have to stick to the script if they want committee positions and lobbyist money to finance their re-elections.

But, there are other political parties. Three have survived marginalization: the Libertarians, the Green Party and the Constitution Party. These parties don’t bundle different policies and ideas like the two mainstream policies. They are located off the linear axis and therefore expand our options exponentially. But if we do not talk about politics we will not hear about the ideas that threaten the status quo. They will be feared or scoffed at by the average American because when the big six media conglomerates mention the smaller parties there are trivialized or made to look dangerous. It is only by conversation that the ideas of the real left and the ideas of the greens and the ideas of the libertarians will propagate from the Internet into the mainstream culture. The people who take the time to learn from alternative sources should talk about it.

How different are the positions of the Republicans and the Democrats? They both supported the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They both supported FISA and the Patriot Act. They both pass legislation allowing the deficit to grow to unpayable amounts. They both support Federal oversight of education. They both believe in income tax and they both want to run the economy, the world and your life. The linear axis of American political dialogue is like reducing the scope of music to one piano that is limited to the scale of C major from middle to high C. No sharps or flats, no high notes, no low notes. No other instruments. It doesn’t matter who plays the piano, its range is so limited that it will always come out about the same. If we want a vibrant government that gives us real options, then we need to get the whole orchestra to play. Lets hear all the instruments, lets thrill to high notes and new sounds.

-

In order to debate politics we need to learn how to do so in a positive and amicable manner. I am a libertarian; many of my friends are socialists and Greens. We disagree about much more than the Democrats and Republicans disagree about, but we have enlightening, lively and friendly debates. I learn much from them and have changed a number of my opinions after these talks.

But as Americans we are taught that we must always win at any cost. That leads us to view a political discussion as a competition in which we exert ourselves to “win” against our “opponent”. We want the other guy to back down and concede that his argument has been overwhelmed. We all want the confused sot that disagrees with us to learn that he is wrong, but we certainly do not enter into a debate in order to learn something from that fellow. Political discussions start and end as competitions, and that is why most people fervently avoid them. Many discussions descend into shouting and name-calling, or worse. This happens when we feel that our argument is taking on water and we may end up “losing” or looking stupid. So we just raise the volume and try to win the debate by virtue of more decibels.

That is not the way to discuss politics and we’ll never extricate the national debate from the quicksand of the linear scale of ideas if we don’t learn to speak about politics often and to do so with intelligence, patience and humility. So I suggest that to talk politics to an American, do so with as much peace and restraint as you can muster. When he shouts you down, just wait till he runs out of steam. Try to find something worthwhile in his bluster and start again from there. Reason will convince in the end if you have patience and humility. It is also important not to make people feel stupid, even if it is sometimes hard to avoid.

Try to get people to see that there are valid ideas that are not on the D-R Linear Scale. Try to get them to see that the arbitrary bundling of ideas by the two parties forces us all into bad choices. Try to show them how to easily and quickly access alternative news sources. Don’t be too radical or too intense. Let them see that there really are other ideas that are accepted around the world; like that the Palestinians are actually human beings. Show them how to find news on digg and reddit, give them a link to the Guardian and Antiwar and Haaretz and the BBC and Firedoglake and Salon.com. And tell them to talk about politics and help more people get unhooked from the D-R Linear Scale.

Ron Paul, a Champion of Liberty

If you value liberty, if you love this country and the premises upon which it was founded, if you want to keep us from a financial meltdown that will sentence our children and grandchildren to poverty, then become a champion of liberty.

Ron Paul has decided (unwisely in my opinion) to remain in the Republican Party and to abandon his bid for the Presidency.
Fortunately we have a very good alternative in Mr. Bob Barr, candidate for President of the Libertarian Party.

Vote!

Bob Barr speaks out about phony conservatism and big government

Semantics are important and "Free Trade" is not free

Semantics are very important. Changing the names of things is a potent method of obfuscating their true nature. George Orwell gave us a clear indication of the political power of names in “1984” with his Newspeak. We have been treated to Orwellian nomenclature by the United States government for years, and that naming to hide the purpose of things has been brought to its zenith under the Bush Administration. The Patriot Act comes to mind.

This very short article is going to talk about another nefarious governmental deception: “free trade”. This term is applied to a certain type of international commerce. I intend to show, without citations or statistics but rather with simple logic, that our international trade is NOT free, and that if we called it by a name that more accurately reflects its nature, popular support for it would evaporate. In order to establish a starting point, let us look at the definitions of free and of trade:

Free
adjective
1 not under the control or in the power of another; able to act or be done as one wishes.
• (of a state or its citizens or institutions) subject neither to foreign domination nor to despotic government.

Trade
noun
1 the action of buying and selling goods and services

After reading those definitions I come to the conclusion that free trade should mean the commerce between individuals or companies that is not controlled by any other party, in particular, that is not controlled by governments.

Do we have examples of free trade? Absolutely. The trade between individuals and companies in the fifty different States of the USA is free. According to the “Federalist Papers” free trade among the states was one of the important motivations for the creation of a Federal rather than a Confederate government. Free trade was seen by Madison, Hamilton and Jay as a way to unite the country. We can ship goods from one state to any other without paying tariffs and without restrictions, but we are required o pay the state taxes of each state where we sell products and services. That is free trade. It is not managed by the different parties, and although the Federal government has the ability to regulate commerce, that has come to mean that is has the ability and the authority to see that all states are open to competition from the others.

Is this what happens in the international commerce that our government calls “free trade”? Not even close. All commerce with the countries with which we have “free trade” is regulated in detailed treaties that specify quotas and conditions. Most tariffs are eliminated and there is an effort to control “dumping” or the purposeful sale of subsidized products below their real cost of production. Certain industries are protected, fairness in the labor force is negotiated and critical products are left out of treaty obligations. Tremendous lists of specific industries and products are given their own special rules.

There are numerous “free trade” treaties and organizations. There is GATT and NAFTA and CAFTA and the European Union and the ConoSur, etc. All of these “free trade” bodies encompass hundreds of pages of binding regulations and include the mechanisms for arbitration, recourse and punishment.

The fact is that governmental representatives of the various countries involved negotiate every aspect of a “free trade” agreement. These treaties are long, complex binding documents with the force of law and they absolutely regulate who can sell what, where. They also regulate labor practices and environmental practices. Foreign governments negotiate oversight and regulation of domestic rules, subsidies and taxes. These treaties are written by governments and the treaties and trade organizations manage international trade in exquisitely specific detail.

So is the commerce that the government and big business refer to as “free trade” free? The two definitions of free from above are:
not under the control or in the power of another; able to act or be done as one wishes.
• (of a state or its citizens or institutions) subject neither to foreign domination nor to despotic government.
In the system of international commerce that is purported to be free, an individual is absolutely under the control of others and that individual is not able to act as he wishes. Commerce is under foreign domination which may include despotic governments.

There is nothing free about “free trade”.

I suggest that if we want to continue with these treaty obligations that at least we call it by a more appropriate name. Let us call it International Managed Commerce, because that is what it is.

Perhaps if we call it what it is, people will be less apt to vote for treaties that are not in their best interest.


To see an interesting interview with the lefty libertarian, Ralph Nader about his opposition to "free trade" agreements, click here.

Pissing Away Our Future

How much longer are we going to have to listen to the pundits tell us that the globalized economy is the key to our economic well-being. We no longer produce anything here in America, without production, the only thing that we have to trade are our assets. And that is what we are doing. Foreign investors are buying up our companies piecemeal or entirely. Our own companies have relocated offshore.

Our entire country has become the third generation rich kids, inheritors of a great fortune, who don’t work, but just want to lay on the beaches of Florida and sort cocaine at Hollywood parties until they realize that they aren’t rich anymore.


The Stock Market Reflects The Selling Of America


The reason that our economy has not completely tanked is that our assets are becoming cheaper and cheaper to the foreign investor. That is all that has kept the stock market from taking a dive into oblivion, like in 1929. Please click on the graph to see how cheap our assets have become for the foreign investor. Look at the value of the Dow as measured in Euros. If it weren’t for foreign investment we would be deep in depression. The size of the foreign investment means that we are rapidly selling off all of our assets to maintain a standard of living that is not sustainable without actual production here in the United States.

If we want to save our country we must stop the Fed from further devaluation of the currency. The Fed needs to raise interest rates to 10% until we can get off the addictive fiat money and back our currency with something real. We must balance the Federal budget and immediately end our costly adventures overseas. And we must impose tariffs on ALL imports into the United States of 12%, equally, across the board. Otherwise we are going to be the servants of the rest of the world.

Letter to Nancy Pelosi before Bush-War Part III

The news sources from left and right and from east and west all agree that Israel or the United States is almost certain to attack Iran soon, and definitely to do so before Bush leaves office if Obama is elected.

I couldn't help but remember the machinations of the Speaker of the House, when she took the War Funding Bill of 2006 into committee and struck the language that required Bush to receive Congressional authorization before initiating any attack on Iran. See here She was elected to stop the war, and she has the nerve to say that she has worked to stop the war. She quietly enabled Bush to broaden the war!

So I decided to send the lady a letter. If you would like to send her a letter as well, you can copy mine and paste it into the link to her email below, or write your own letter. Let's tell her that we know what she did. Let's let her know that we will hold her responsible for all the deaths that result from this mindless act.


Mrs. Pelosi,

It appears that the President is preparing to attack Iran or to support an Israeli attack on Iran. The country is decidedly against that course of action, but our hands are tied. Apparently there is nothing that we can do to stop the lame duck President from bombing Iran on his way out of Washington.

There is one person responsible for our impotence to stop this insane and illegal act, and that person is you.



You cut the language that would have required Congressional approval for any attack on Iran from the war-funding bill two years ago. There was no justification for what you did. Your mandate was to get us out of war in the Mid East, and instead you empowered the President to open a new front. You did it behind closed doors and never even explained why you did so.

Well, I imagine that you have invented some powerful spin to justify an act that will result in thousands of deaths and a further decay in America's reputation. Polish up the spin, because after the bombs fall, people will start to ask a lot of questions, and they will all end up knocking on your door.

I hope that you can live with your conscience. May God forgive you,


Chris Ferrell

To send this letter to Mrs. Pelosi, just copy and paste it into her Speaker of the House email here. If you would rather express your sentiments more personally, then write your own letter and paste it into the link.

An American Hero

Ron Paul Speech on the Floor of the House - June 27 2008




Please listen to this man. The foreign policy and the fiscal policy of our once great Republic have been turned on their heads. We must stop this careen towards the precipice.

Democracy and Freedom

A speech given by Congressman Ron Paul

“…man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.” -President Ronald Reagan

We’ve all heard the words democracy and freedom used countless times, especially in the context of our invasion of Iraq. They are used interchangeably in modern political discourse, yet their true meanings are very different.










George Orwell wrote about “meaningless words” that are endlessly repeated in the political arena. Words like “freedom,” “democracy,” and “justice,” Orwell explained, have been abused so long that their original meanings have been eviscerated. In Orwell’s view, political words were “Often used in a consciously dishonest way.” Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language. As a result, Americans have been conditioned to accept the word “democracy” as a synonym for freedom, and thus to believe that democracy is unquestionably good.

The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this, as evidenced not only by our republican constitutional system, but also by their writings in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere. James Madison cautioned that under a democratic government, “There is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” John Adams argued that democracies merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect pre-existing rights. Yet how many Americans know that the word “democracy” is found neither in the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence, our very founding documents?

A truly democratic election in Iraq, without U.S. interference and U.S. puppet candidates, almost certainly would result in the creation of a Shiite theocracy. Shiite majority rule in Iraq might well mean the complete political, economic, and social subjugation of the minority Kurd and Sunni Arab populations. Such an outcome would be democratic, but would it be free? Would the Kurds and Sunnis consider themselves free? The administration talks about democracy in Iraq, but is it prepared to accept a democratically elected Iraqi government no matter what its attitude toward the U.S. occupation? Hardly. For all our talk about freedom and democracy, the truth is we have no idea whether Iraqis will be free in the future. They’re certainly not free while a foreign army occupies their country. The real test is not whether Iraq adopts a democratic, pro-western government, but rather whether ordinary Iraqis can lead their personal, religious, social, and business lives without interference from government.

Simply put, freedom is the absence of government coercion. Our Founding Fathers understood this, and created the least coercive government in the history of the world. The Constitution established a very limited, decentralized government to provide national defense and little else. States, not the federal government, were charged with protecting individuals against criminal force and fraud. For the first time, a government was created solely to protect the rights, liberties, and property of its citizens. Any government coercion beyond that necessary to secure those rights was forbidden, both through the Bill of Rights and the doctrine of strictly enumerated powers. This reflected the founders’ belief that democratic government could be as tyrannical as any King.

Few Americans understand that all government action is inherently coercive. If nothing else, government action requires taxes. If taxes were freely paid, they wouldn’t be called taxes, they’d be called donations. If we intend to use the word freedom in an honest way, we should have the simple integrity to give it real meaning: Freedom is living without government coercion. So when a politician talks about freedom for this group or that, ask yourself whether he is advocating more government action or less.

The political left equates freedom with liberation from material wants, always via a large and benevolent government that exists to create equality on earth. To modern liberals, men are free only when the laws of economics and scarcity are suspended, the landlord is rebuffed, the doctor presents no bill, and groceries are given away. But philosopher Ayn Rand (and many others before her) demolished this argument by explaining how such “freedom” for some is possible only when government takes freedoms away from others. In other words, government claims on the lives and property of those who are expected to provide housing, medical care, food, etc. for others are coercive – and thus incompatible with freedom. “Liberalism,” which once stood for civil, political, and economic liberties, has become a synonym for omnipotent coercive government.

The political right equates freedom with national greatness brought about through military strength. Like the left, modern conservatives favor an all-powerful central state – but for militarism, corporatism, and faith-based welfarism. Unlike the Taft-Goldwater conservatives of yesteryear, today’s Republicans are eager to expand government spending, increase the federal police apparatus, and intervene militarily around the world. The last tenuous links between conservatives and support for smaller government have been severed. “Conservatism,” which once meant respect for tradition and distrust of active government, has transformed into big-government utopian grandiosity.

Orwell certainly was right about the use of meaningless words in politics. If we hope to remain free, we must cut through the fog and attach concrete meanings to the words politicians use to deceive us. We must reassert that America is a republic, not a democracy, and remind ourselves that the Constitution places limits on government that no majority can overrule. We must resist any use of the word “freedom” to describe state action. We must reject the current meaningless designations of “liberals” and “conservatives,” in favor of an accurate term for both: statists.

Every politician on earth claims to support freedom. The problem is so few of them understand the simple meaning of the word.

The Wasp’s Nest

Bart must have been twelve that summer and I was nine. I was staying at our cabin with my Grandmother Stewart. My brothers and mother were in Milwaukee working or something equally tedious. I didn’t really care, because I was at Pine Lake, and that is as close to bliss as we are allowed to get here on earth. Bart and I spent every day together while he was at the Lake, always trying to devise new and dangerous things to do. He stayed with his family in the Ross Cabin that had been handed down three generations to Bart’s Mom, some first cousins once removed, second cousins, aunts and uncles. The Stewart legacy at Pine Lake is now one hundred years old so we are used to complicated familial relationships. In fact Bart is my third cousin. That means that we share the same great-great-grandfather. That man was the visionary Duncan James Stewart and he bought all the land we now enjoy back in 1908.

Thanks to Duncan Stewart all of us Pine Lakers grow up free in the woods and the water. We can canoe and sail boats and swim two miles and water ski and climb the fire tower and stay up all night drinking beer and playing cards. We know all the types of trees in the woods, we know the birds, and the tracks of the animals, we know what mushrooms to eat and we all know the Death Angel that you would only eat once. Every 4th of July is a glorious shout of freedom when everyone from the Grannies to the small kids blow off firecrackers and bottle rockets all day, and the bigger kids have M80s, cherry bombs and home made bombs that look and act like half sticks of dynamite. Pine Lake is paradise but it used to be even better because the grown ups were dumber than they are now and didn’t have a clue what we were up to.

Bart’s mother didn’t have a clue and didn’t give a hoot what he was up to all day, but when we planned to do something amusing that involved explosives or cigarettes or gasoline or diving off the corner of the slide twelve feet above the waves into shallow water we had to make sure that my Grandmother did not find out about our plans or catch us in the act. We had done all sorts of cool stuff already that summer. We blew up fish, made a functioning mortar out of a piece of steel pipe that fired stones powered by cherry bombs. We had practiced swordplay with grass whiffers and Bart almost cut off the tip of my up-yours finger. I still have the scar.

We swam down to the islands without having the required rowboat at hand to save a swimmer with cramps. “Hell, what do you think we are, girls? What do we need a stinkin’ boat for if we’re swimming?” I remember getting terrible cramps in my feet out in the middle of the lake, but I wasn’t about to admit to it. So I gritted my teeth, changed to the backstroke and eventually the cramps went away. We walked around the lake barefoot and down the outlet through the woods and the swamps to Silver Lake. We went fishing almost every day and caught something once in a while. Grandma was always very pleased when we brought a fish home, but cleaning the fish scared me to death.

I wasn’t that afraid of the fish, even the spines on its dorsal fin. I wasn’t afraid of its disgusting guts. I was afraid because the fish cleaning table is behind the old cabin, nailed to a big poplar tree right at the edge of the slope that leads down into Stewart Lake Swamp where the Pine Lake Monster is almost certain to lurk. At night in my bed, alone on the sleeping porch whose big, screened windows look out on those woods, I could hear shuffling and heavy steps above the nightly din of bullfrogs and owls and loons. That swamp with its mysterious inhabitants was terrifying at night. During the day the fear of the Pine Lake Monster was not impossible to overcome, but there was something almost as frightening as the PL Monster back behind the cabin.

A giant wasps nest hung from the eaves of the cabin about twenty feet from the fish table. As soon as the yellow jackets smelled fish they started to buzz around and descended onto the fish. Those wasps caused me to suffer a torture as hopeless as what I read about in the “Collected Works of Edgar Allen Poe” each night in my bed. When they lighted upon the bass or the pike I was trying to scale and gut, I couldn’t get the nerve to wave them off, and meanwhile the mosquitoes would come up out of the swamp and attack en masse. I got to where I didn’t want to catch any fish for fear of the wasps.

Of course, I was not going to tell Bart that I was afraid of wasps, but I did tell him that my Grandma was worried about them and what did he think could we do about the problem? We went and took a look. The nest was a perfect egg-shape, made of gray wasp paper and it hung from below a joist right under the eaves. It was attached by a narrow bit of paper to the joist, like the stem on an apple. Wasps came and went from the little hole in the bottom of the twelve-inch long hive. I didn’t want to get close, but Bart wasn’t afraid, so I stood right next to him.

“Wow, there gotta be like a million wasps in there”.

“You really think there are that many?”

“Yeah, that’s a big hive, do you suppose that we can just knock it down?”

“Yeah maybe, it’s not connected by much, huh? But what are we gonna do after we knock it down? They’re gonna sting us like hell.”

“You scared of a couple of wasps? You’re scared of everything, huh?”

“No I’m not. But if we knock it down and there are wasps everywhere Grandma’s gonna kill me.”

“I know. I know. OK. We gotta burn it when it falls down, we’ll just pour gas on it, toss a match and voom the yellowjackets are gonna be bar-b-cued.”

So we figured it all out and finally decided that it would be better to soak a big rag in gas and throw it over the hive when it was knocked off the roof joist. Then we’d be able to drag it away from the cabin a little so we didn’t burn the house down. We figured with the rag soaked with gas covering the hive the wasps couldn’t get out and we’d be protected. Then we’d ach take a farmer match, light it one-handed with our thumbnails like the cowboys do and whoosh, sayonara yellow jackets.

“OK, how do we knock the nest down?”

“With a stick, or I know, I saw a broomstick in the boathouse. See one of us stands on a chair and whacks the nest right up there where its connected then jump down and we’ll roast these assholes”

We liked to say hell and assholes and shit and other delightful words of that type. We had swearing competitions while we smoked cigarettes that Bart stole from his Mom and his brothers. We were psyched now. This was going to be pretty cool.

“Grandma’s going to town tomorrow. We can do it then and she’ll never know how we did it.”

“Yeah, but she’ll see that the hive isn’t there anymore”

Bart thought about that one and decided that we would say that his big brothers Duncan and Rick came over as a good deed and got rid of the hive.

“OK partner, the wasp killers are ready. Tomorrow we are going to see abundant death and carnage” Bart had just learned that phrase from one of his brothers and thought it was pretty cool. I thought that the whole thing was pretty cool. The coolest part was that we had thought this all out so thoroughly that there absolutely no way this wasn’t going to work perfectly.

I don’t remember what we did the rest of the day, but we didn’t watch TV. There aren’t any TVs at the Stewart end of Pine Lake. That way kids do interesting educational activities like eliminating wasp nests with ingenuity and gasoline.

The next day it seemed like Grandma was never going to leave. Bart and I were down on the shore by the Baby In The Hole court, waiting for her to go.

“Well shit is she goin’ or not?”

“Hey shut up, she’s gonna hear you and then she won’t go to town and we’re dead.”

“You telling me to shut up? Ah you’re still just a chicken-shit kid”

“No I’m not.”

“Then prove it. You knock the hive down.” There it was; he had trapped me. We hadn’t decided that little detail until that moment. So Grandma got in her Buick and backed down the road past the boathouse and she was gone.

“OK, lets go.”

We already had the rag; actually it was half of an old blanket and ought to be able to soak up a lot of gas. We got a can of gas out of the boathouse, we already had plenty of matches and we got the broomstick. It was solid wood, not the flimsy things they make nowadays. I swung it a few times like a baseball bat and it made an impressive whoosh as it sliced through the air. Then we walked into the cabin and got a chair with long legs that children have sat in for the last one hundred years.

We went out the front door, down the steps and around the forest side of the cabin and there was the target. There were the enemies in all their vile yellowness.

All of a sudden this didn’t seem so cool anymore. There were more wasps flying around then yesterday, like they knew somehow. I felt a hollow in my guts and couldn’t breathe deeply. Bart looked a little nervous too.

He saw me hesitate and said nicely: “OK, this is gonna be easy. You just get up on the chair, one good swing and hit it right on the stem, I’ll toss the blanket on it and these wasps are goin’ to hell.”

He was sacred too, I could tell. Bart put the rag on the ground and poured about a half gallon of gas on it. He had the sense to set the gas can a long way away, came back and picked up the blanket.

Everything smelled like gas now and that was heartening. OK, its time. I set the chair at about the right distance from the hive, pushing on the chair, I wiggled it around until the legs sunk into the soil a little so that it sat straight.

“Ready Bart?”

“All ready here. On three, OK?”

I cocked the broomstick back like I was going to swing for the bleachers.

“One” I shifted my weight a little; the chair was a bit wobbly still.

“Two” OK I told myself, - you can do it, just swing hard…. -

“Three!” I swung as hard as I could and the front legs of the chair dug into the soft ground. My big swing went off target and connected with the hive below the stem and heading down as the chair fell over. Whack!

The broomstick sliced about three quarters of the way through the hive but didn’t knock it down. A plague of wasps erupted out of their savaged hive and we ran around the back of the cabin towards the lake as fast as we could go. Bart was ahead of me and there was a cloud of wasps around his head. I ran getting stung everywhere; I didn’t think I’d make it and then I was in the water. I dove underwater but the wasps didn’t let go. They kept stinging my face and my neck, my legs, even my feet. I had to rub the devil-spawned fiends to get them off of me. They clung like they were stapled to my face. I swam underwater as far as I could; when I lifted my head there was still a swarm of the little yellow monsters. Back underwater and swim out further. This time the wasps did not follow me. Bart surfaced next to me with a couple of wasps still stuck to his face. He pulled them off and started to laugh. All of a sudden I realized that was the funniest damn thing that ever happened to anybody in the history of stupid kids.

Fifteen minutes later our faces were puffed up so badly that we looked like someone had inflated us with a tire pump. Both of Bart’s eyes closed all the way shut. And it hurt like a son of a bitch. The sting wouldn’t go away. We felt nauseous, but fortunately there was no shock from the venom. We didn’t look normal for a whole week. I don’t remember if we counted the stings or not, but each one of us got stung more than ten times, probably over twenty.

It was one of the best things I’ve ever done and it still makes me laugh forty years later.

Of course we had to tell Bart’s Mom and my Grandma, but we left out the part about the gasoline.

By the way, I hate wasps to this day.