Indian Summer Of The Republic

Indian summer...
The shops are shuttered and the crowds are gone,
The souvenir sellers are moving on.
Like summer lovers.

Indian summer...
The earth is cracked beneath the midday sun,
You've dragged your shadow round these streets too long.
There is no cover.

Come stay—
We'll live gazebo lives,
And let the world outside pass us by.
Right here...
In our Arabian Nights,
Until the Northern Lights cross the sky.
There is no other.

Indian summer...
The storm that drove you here is far behind
What keeps you waiting on this beach tonight
It's long been over.

Come stay—
We'll live gazebo lives,
And let the world outside pass us by.
Right here...
In our Arabian Nights,
Until the Northern Lights cross the sky.
There is no other.

Come stay—
Right here...

[Alasdair Ian Stewart]

     Play the video. Listen to the song. Immerse yourself in its gentle melancholy. Let the mood of surrender to the passing of summer take hold of you. What emotions does it evoke? What does it make you want to plead for?

     Yeah. Me too.

---

     If you’re familiar with software debugging practices, the term breakpoint won’t require explanation. For everyone else: It’s an artificial halt the engineer inserts into a program at a selected point. It allows him to inspect the internal conditions of the program at that point: what’s in its variables and data structures, and therefore what it’s about to do next.

     If I were “debugging” the United States of America, I’d insert a breakpoint right about here and now. I’d take a very close look at the conditions that pertain and the attitudes of Americans toward those conditions. And I’d give especial attention to the statements and revealed intentions of those whose highest aspiration is the presidency.

     This article provides a backdrop about Americans’ attitudes and overall knowledge of their country. A few citations:

     According to an American Bar Association survey, only 38 percent of all Americans know that the U.S. Constitution is the highest law in the land.

     According to a new survey that was conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 76 percent of Americans support “red flag” gun laws.

     A recent Rasmussen survey discovered that 28 percent of all Democrats actually believe that it should be “illegal” to be a member of the NRA.

     Now give your attention – yes, I know it’s painful – to the collection of miscreants vying for the presidential nomination of the Democrat Party. Every one of them regards the Constitution as a mere “paper barrier” to his agenda, something he could rip through with an “executive order.” All of them have said so. You see, they want to take our guns, and they don’t regard the Constitution as an important impediment.

     Until recently, they hedged. They qualified their statements to obscure their intentions. But no longer. They’re out in the open now. They don’t regard your right to keep and bear arms as a limitation on them.

     A few folks have reacted with the appropriate outrage. A few have openly declared their readiness to resist such an intrusion on our God-given rights to defend ourselves. And the Left is not happy about that:

     Last month, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke proposed a modest solution to the relentless tide of mass shootings: a mandatory buyback program for every AR-15 in the country. The View co-host Meghan McCain responded with a dire warning. “The AR-15 is by far the most popular gun in America, by far,” she told her fellow panelists. “I was just in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, if you’re talking about taking people’s guns from them, there’s going to be a lot of violence.”

     Tucker Carlson echoed McCain’s blood-soaked sentiment on his Tuesday night broadcast. “So, this is—what you are calling for is civil war,” he said. “What you are calling for is an incitement to violence. It’s something I wouldn’t want to live here when that happened, would you? I’m serious.” Erick Erickson, a prominent conservative columnist, also warned of tragedy. “I know people who keep AR-15’s buried because they’re afraid one day the government might come for them,” he wrote on Twitter. “I know others who are stockpiling them. It is not a stretch to say there’d be violence if the [government] tried to confiscate them.”

     “There would be violence” neatly elides what’s actually being claimed: Some gun-rights activists would murder government officials who try to enforce a duly passed law. This isn’t an extreme viewpoint among such gun enthusiasts. If anything, it’s one of their central tenets.

     The cited article becomes even more shrill from there, but those first three paragraphs should suffice. Quoth Glenn Reynolds:

     [A] law that violates the Constitution — which gun confiscation absolutely would — isn’t a “duly passed law.” It’s a usurpation of authority. Funny that all these people who have been yammering about #Resistance and punching Nazis seem okay with the idea of laws that violate the Constitution, laws that are — of course — themselves enforced with guns and violence.

     Of course they’re comfortable with that! They’re the good guys, don’t y’know. The rules don’t apply to them because their hearts are pure! They get to do what they please to us knuckle-draggers. It’s all in pursuit of the “greater good.”

     They can get away with that posture, without being tarred, feathered, and run out of the country on a rail, because “only 38 percent of all Americans know that the U.S. Constitution is the highest law in the land.”

     That’s what November 2020 will be about, Gentle Reader.

---

     “States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude and their decay.” – Walter S. Landor

     The season of America’s manhood might be drawing to its end. Unlike the summer of the year, there’s no way to know that for certain. The calendar gives no indications thereof. But attitudes, trends, and events might. One harbinger might be the paucity of Americans willing to fight for their rights. Another, stronger one might be the paucity of Americans who know what their rights are, and how they differ from a permission granted by the State.

     A man – not a generic, sex-unspecified homo sapiens this time, but a man — whose rights are threatened does the same thing he’d do if his loved ones were threatened: he gets the lead out. He shoulders his rifle, aims as carefully as circumstances permit, and fires at his attackers. He keeps firing until the issue is settled. If he must go down, he’ll go down fighting.

     There are still some who, should they go down, will go down fighting:

     DEAR MR. SECURITY AGENT...

     We really don’t want a problem with you, believe me. And there is no reason for us to have a problem, because we both can read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and neither of us requires a team of black-robed mystics to translate its plain English into Newspeak for improved comprehension. You and I both understand what “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” means, without requiring five out of nine politically appointed Supremes to tell us that it does not mean what it very plainly states in black and white.

     Now, as long as Mr. Security Agent remembers that he swore the same oath that millions of Americans swore, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, he will certainly not permit himself to take part in gun confiscation raids. But if he does, well, let’s be frank: tens of millions of Americans would then consider him to be the very domestic enemy that they swore to defend the Constitution against.

     That’s from retired SEAL and current novelist Matt Bracken. I have no doubt that he’d be firing (and yelling obscenities) at the confiscators to his very last breath. I hope his belief is correct that tens of millions of us, his countrymen, would be beside him, firing our own weapons at the traducers of the Constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms. But there’s only one way to find out – and I don’t want to go there.

     Do you?

---

     The election in November 2020 won’t settle the matter. Here are a few thoughts from William Gensert of American Thinker. First, should Trump win a second term:

     Those on the left will not allow a Trump victory, even should he win the popular vote and the Electoral College. They are used to getting what they want and like spoiled brats, have learned that tantrums work.

     Should Donald Trump prevail in his bid for a second term, the left will go insane, deploying every “insurance policy” weapon at their disposal to negate four more years of the Orange Man. What Obama, Comey, and Brennan et al. did to Trump in his first term will seem mild in comparison to what the left is planning should he win.

     Antifa, the military arm of the Democratic Party, has not spent the last three years practicing and organizing merely to sit on the sidelines. They have used the interregnum to mobilize and learn tactics, while probing to find what government will allow, media will trumpet, and the public will endure.

     But what if Trump should lose to the Democrat nominee?

     The right will never believe the Democrats didn’t cheat their way to victory; in addition to understanding that a Democratic President will undemocratically implement policies by executive order that are inimical to their interests and desires....

     Tone-deaf to this silent majority and emboldened by victory, the new president will borrow Barry’s “pen and phone” and start issuing executive orders throwing open our borders, banning fossil fuels, and of course, implementing “common sense” gun control. Buoyed by media, the new president will start with universal background checks and a gun registry.

     Eventually, the president will overreach, signing an order for gun confiscation, euphemistically called, “mandatory buybacks.” Antifa and their ilk will flood the streets in support of seizing these “weapons of war.” Media will declare, “It’s the will of the people.”

     And for the right, that will be the last straw (plastic or paper).

     And Trump, be it remembered, isn’t all that solid a defender of the right to keep and bear arms. He’s flirted with endorsing “red flag” laws that violate both the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees of personal security and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process of law. He might sign one that’s brought to his desk. Only time will tell.

     Gensert says, in effect, that a civil war is inevitable. What’s the likelihood that he’s correct? Are there any imaginable actions, other than complete surrender to the Left, that could avert those courses? And if the answer is “no, there are none,” are you prepared for what Gensert predicts above?

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     Who can protest and does not is an accomplice in the act. – the Talmud

     Mike Hendrix (who appears to have forgotten that he’s a Co-Contributor here) contributes his perspective:

     I’ve long held that gun confiscation would indeed be the straw that finally breaks the American camel’s back; these days, though, I’m less certain of that than I once was. Already we’ve seen at least one gun owner killed by police in a red-flag-law confiscation attempt, without much more than a murmur from anyone. It will happen again; count on it. So what happens next time? The time after that? The time after that?

     As I’ve said again and again: no sane, normal person wants to have to kill anybody, and will put up with one hell of a lot in order to avoid it. And the overwhelming majority of gun owners are more sane, normal, and above all responsible than most. Their perfectly justifiable reluctance to pull the trigger, especially on a cop, is one of the factors that make me doubt my previous blanket assumption that gun confiscation would amount to putting the match to the American powder keg.

     If Mike is correct, then a Democrat victory come Election Day 2020 would guarantee the decline of the U.S. into just another elite-managed oligarchy. The Roberts Supreme Court could not be relied upon to impede it. (Besides, it lacks an enforcement arm with which to impose its judgment on the rest of the federal government.) The Indian summer of our Republic would have begun. Its descent into winter would be swift, for once disarmed, our populace would have no means of resisting the tyranny to come.

---

     “This isn’t some Outfit wiseguy who’s about to torture you in the middle of a rape. This is premeditated murder of people with families, and lovers, and kids in nursery school, and worries about the future, just like us. And on top of that, these are people who champion the democratic process. You are going to be killing a man because he voted the wrong way.”
     “No,” Cindy said without hesitation. “I am going to be killing a man because he voted away something that wasn’t his to vote on in the first place. The people making the laws think that anything is okay if they can get 51% of the legislators or the people to go along with it. One hundred percent of the people making the rules in the Vegas outfit thought it was just fine for me to be locked in a room and taken out when it suited them. I’ve had enough of that.”

     [John Ross, Unintended Consequences]

     Today, there is a Last Graf. It’s no more than this:

Tell the legislators who represent your district and state that should they vote to infringe your Second Amendment rights, you will hold them personally responsible.

     Is it guaranteed to prevent the grim scenarios presented above? No. There are no guarantees in politics. Legislators have often chosen to believe what they preferred over the evidence before them. But it has a chance of turning them aside from their disarmament schemes...perhaps the only chance.

     Remind them that the armed men who surround them can’t keep them from being targeted. They can only provide a measure of deterrence. In the event of an assassination attempt, they can counter-target the assassin. But they can’t keep their man alive if enough Americans are determined enough to kill him.

     If we can get enough Congressvermin – of both parties; none of them are trustworthy on this subject – to imagine themselves with crosshairs over their hearts, we have a chance of averting a tyrannical future. Otherwise?

Come stay—
We'll live gazebo lives,
And let the world outside pass us by.
Right here...
In our Arabian Nights,
Until the Northern Lights cross the sky.
There is no other.

     Have a nice day.