Foreign Enemies and Traitors (48 page)

“It was two years ago?”

“Yeah, two years ago in September.  You have to understand how bad things already were, even before the earthquakes, and before the big hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast.  Even back then, the economy was so bad that people were calling it the Greater Depression.  People were desperate.  And not just welfare types—I’m talking about solid middle class citizens.  Or formerly middle class, like my family.  Nouveau poor, we called it.  I think people were ready to try just about anything to get the economy moving.  Nothing the government tried was working; everything was in a downward spiral.  We were still using blue bucks then, what they called ‘New Dollars.’  Banks were failing left and right, only the Fed wouldn’t let them fail—they pumped in trillions of dollars in new money to keep them open.  Nobody wanted to hear that it might take years to unwind the economic mess we were in.  That it took us decades to ruin the economy, and it would take a long time to fix it.  Everybody wanted a quick fix, like pulling a rabbit out of a magic hat.  But everything the president and Congress tried just made things worse.  Especially printing so much new money.” 

Doug set his rifle barrel back down on the table and continued.  “The country was already a mess, and that was undeniable.  Everybody and his brother were proposing constitutional amendments, supposedly to fix the economy, or make everything fair for the poor, or whatever.  That’s how Congress came up with thirty-four state legislatures calling for amendments.  There were seven or eight totally different amendment proposals, but it didn’t matter.  Once Congress had thirty-four states on record proposing amendments, they went for it.  I think they were just waiting for the chance.  Once they had thirty-four states, it only took a 51 percent vote in Congress to call for the convention.”

“Congress?  I don’t understand.  What do
they
have to do with the convention?” asked Carson. 

“Everything, under Article Five.  It all came down to Article Five of the old constitution.  Congress runs the whole show for constitutional conventions.”

“It does?  I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, well, join the club.  That was a major surprise to almost everybody, since it had never happened before.  Not in over two hundred years, since it was written.  So nobody knew much about Article Five,” said Doug.

“I guess that changed in a hurry.”

“You’re not kidding.  It was shock therapy.  Especially when the Poor People’s Party marched through Baltimore.  There were already about a million of them camping out in Washington on the National Mall before the convention.  When they took off walking to Philly, it was like a dam bursting.  That was on Labor Day.  Mile after mile of people with flags, signs, drums, musical bands on trucks—everything you can imagine.  Police cars were escorting them, leading them up I-95.  They closed the northbound lanes of 95 for something like twenty miles, for the whole time it took them to walk to Philly.  They kept moving that closed section of 95 north, to keep up with the marchers.  There was nothing else on television, practically.  It took them two days just to get through Baltimore, and when they came through, they spread out like locusts.  I was in Baltimore then, back in my mother’s house.  I’d quit college and gotten my draft notice.  I was waiting to report for basic training.”

Doug took a sip of his instant coffee, and went on.  “Naturally, our own locals got into the spirit and joined the march.  They took whatever they wanted from any stores along the way, and the police just watched.  There was nothing they could do anyway, or it would have caused the biggest riot in history.  It was legalized looting, that’s all it was.  Legalized looting, all over Baltimore.  ‘Redistributing the wealth,’ they called it.  We stayed locked in our house and watched it all on television.  It would have been suicide to go out and see it in person.” 

“So it was, ah…racially polarized?” asked Carson.

“Extremely.  Everything was black and white when they came marching through Baltimore.  Blacks marching, and whites hiding.  I never saw anything like it in my life.  Well, not until Memphis, but that was after the earthquakes.”

Carson asked, “How far is it from Washington to Philly?  Two hundred miles?”

“That’s about right.  It took two weeks for them to make it all the way, and when they arrived, the constitutional convention was just starting.  Perfect timing.  What a coincidence, right?  It was all planned in advance, that’s obvious now.  They held the convention in Philly’s new sports arena, the one that was named for a bank.  I think that bank is out of business; I don’t know what they call it now.  The delegates were down on the floor, and the rest of the stands were full of twenty thousand ‘spectators.’  Yelling and screaming like maniacs—and outside it was worse.  They said there were over a million of the Poor People’s Party in Philly by then, coming from everywhere, not just Washington.  Probably another million just from the Philadelphia area.  They were banging on buckets and pans, turning over cars, barricading streets and smashing store windows.  They kept interviewing the rabble-rousers on TV—it was like pouring gasoline on fire.  ‘No Justice, No Peace,’ that’s all you heard.  That was one of the big mantras.  They called the looting ‘street reparations.’  They said if they didn’t get the economic justice amendment, they’d burn the city down.  It looked like they would, too.  Every street in downtown Philly looked like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, that’s how crowded it was.”

“Jeez, that had to be pretty rough, with that many people packed into downtown,” said Carson.  “There couldn’t have been enough public bathrooms.”

“Almost every store and restaurant was broken open.  Needing to use the restrooms was always a good excuse to force their way in.  That, and needing food and drinking water.  And after that, everything was looted.”

“And the police didn’t stop it?”

“They
couldn’t
stop it.  How could they?” asked Doug.  “The police just stayed back on the edges and tried to herd them.  Even that didn’t work.  A mob that big makes its own rules.”

“Like a human tidal wave.”

“Exactly.  A human tsunami.  So, with that mega-mob outside the arena, you can guess what kinds of radicals were being let in to fill the twenty thousand seats.  The real cream of the crop.  It was a total farce.  That’s when they started to call it the ‘kangaroo convention’ on talk radio.  That was back when we still had AM talk radio.”

Carson asked, “What happened to talk radio?”

“Two things.  First, a couple of years ago Congress passed the so-called ‘fairness’ laws.  That meant that every point of view on a radio station had to be balanced by another radio host or by other callers from the other side.  It got incredibly complicated.  They literally had to count how many minutes were said for this and for that on every subject.  Trying to keep up with the fairness laws made talk radio a money loser, so most stations went to sports or music.  Then Congress passed a law against ‘hate speech on the public airwaves.’  Anybody could take a radio station to court for just about anything that they claimed was hate speech.  They’d cherry-pick a left-wing judge and jury, and it was a slam-dunk every time.  After a few million-dollar judgments, the last talk radio stations threw in the towel.  Now radio is practically all music and sports, with happy talk in between government PSAs—public service announcements.”

“This must really be up your alley, if you were majoring in communications.”

“Yeah, I picked a great time to choose that career path, huh?  Now all we get on television and the radio is government propaganda.”

“I’ve heard it,” said Carson.  “We could get Nashville radio at Zack’s house at night.  So, you were up to the start of the convention.”

“Right.  So to start it off, the Aztlan Coalition said they wouldn’t vote for any other amendments unless they got their regional autonomy deal first.  That was the Southwestern Justice and Compensation Amendment.  That was the first amendment they voted on, and it passed on a voice vote.  Next, it was reparations for slavery.  Five hundred thousand New Dollars for every African-American man, woman and child.  Right after that, it was reparations for ‘survivors of the Native American genocide.’  Another half million for everybody with Indian blood.”

“How was that paid?” asked Carson in astonishment.  “Where did the money for all of that come from?”

“Didn’t matter,” Doug replied.  “It was just instant money from the Treasury…or the Federal Reserve.  What’s the difference?  Ten trillion brand new blue bucks, right out of thin air.  The checks came in the mail, or the money was just direct-deposited straight into their bank accounts.  It was all just electronic digits, but it was real money just the same.  It was just as spendable as any other money.”

“And that brought on the hyperinflation?”

“Among other things, like fraud on a scale never seen before in human history.  People were collecting reparation payments right and left under false identities.  I think there were about a million double-dippers who claimed they were black
and
Indian…but it didn’t matter.  Congress said that the reparations money would stimulate the economy.  It would ‘prime the pump and even the playing field’ at the same time.  It was ‘the mother of all stimulus packages.’  That was another of those clichés you heard all the time.  The convention was already way out of control by the time they passed reparations for slavery and the Indians.

“Next came the Freedom from Gun Violence Amendment, and that’s when the Second Amendment was annulled.  So you see, we didn’t want any of it.  Not regular Americans.  We didn’t ever vote for it; it was all done at the con-con by mob rule.  It was a complete circus by then—the kangaroo convention.  But it didn’t matter what average Americans thought, the amendments all became law.  They became the new constitution.  When the Second Amendment was repealed, the delegates in the arena had a mass orgasm.  We watched it all on TV.  It was surreal, like a bad dream you get after food poisoning.”

Carson asked, “What did the gun amendment ban?”

“Just about every legal firearm that was left.  After the Washington Stadium Massacre, the semi-auto rifles were already outlawed.  The ones they called assault weapons.”

“I remember that,” said Carson.  “I was here for that one.” 

“Well under the Freedom from Gun Violence Amendment, there are no more privately owned handguns, none.  Um, except for the police.  The police and the military.  And no pump or semi-auto shotguns.  Only single shot and double-barreled shotguns—and you need to get a federal license to keep one in your house.  Oh, and you have to take a federal firearms safety course and pass a background check to get your license.  And if they don’t like your background—meaning your politics—no license.”

“Gun control was never about safety: it was just about taking power away from ordinary Americans,” said Carson.  “It’s to make it safe for the police, in a police state.”

“Exactly.  And that wasn’t all,” continued Doug.  “No rifle scopes, only assassins need them, right?  No rifles bigger than thirty caliber, period.  And all of the bolt- and lever-action rifles have to be licensed and registered, just like the shotguns.  Everything that’s registered has to be kept in officially approved gun safes, and they’re subject to inspection at any time.  They even have to be kept disassembled, with the bolts stored separately in another room.  And God help you if they come in to inspect and they’re not ‘properly stored’ according to the law.  That was another part of the amendment: if you manage to get a gun license, you agree to random ‘safety inspections’.”

“What about ammunition?”

“You have to fill out about a yard of paperwork and get police approval to buy a box of hunting ammunition, and then it’s taxed at around 500 percent.  And you have to turn in your fired brass before you can buy more ammo.  Oh, and forget about reloading—that’s illegal.  You can’t even own gunpowder—that’s ‘bomb-making material’ now.”

“And this was all in the gun amendment?” asked Carson.

“Hell, yes.  I think the FFGVA is something like thirty pages long.”

“Damn—the whole Bill of Rights was only a couple hundred words.”

“I hear you.  It took the Founding Fathers four months to write the original constitution.  That was in the summer in 1787.  Some of the greatest minds in history.  The new constitution is about fifty times longer, and they cranked it out in a week.  Of course, they shortened it here and there.  Like by cutting out most of the Bill of Rights.”

“And American shooters just went along with it?” Carson asked with a look of incredulity.

“No, not most of them.  I mean…oh hell, I don’t know.  I didn’t believe any of the polls I read on it.  But you’d be amazed by the number of so-called hunters and sportsmen they found to say it was all actually
quite reasonable
.  They were on TV all the time, telling shooters to be
reason-able
and comply with the new laws.  They could still go hunting, and a
bit of inconvenience
was a small price to pay for public safety.”

“They can always find sellouts and traitors.”

“Yessir they can,” Doug agreed.  “Jamal Tambor was all about
reasonable
gun laws, until the guns were all gone.  But any way you cut it, the Second Amendment was finished, dead and buried after the constitutional convention.”

Carson sighed, and slowly shook his head.  “The end of two centuries of American gun rights.”

“Yep, the end.”  Doug smiled, and patted the lower receiver of the AR-15 carbine lying across the table.  “Legally, anyway.  That is, if you consider anything that came out of that abortion that was born in Philadelphia to be legal.”

“I take it you don’t.”

“Nope, I don’t, not at all.  But the con-con didn’t end with the gun amendment.  The economic amendment was the last one.  That was on the final day of the convention.  It was a rubber stamp, another voice vote.  By then the con-con was like a religious revival meeting, so of course the EJDA passed.  That’s what they call the Economic Justice and Democracy Amendment, the EJDA.  It was another mass orgasm in the Philly sports arena.  We were in shock by then, watching it on television at home.  It all happened so fast!  Only a few months before the con-con, everybody thought the Poor People’s Party was a joke.  We thought the constitutional convention would never happen, and even if it did, it wouldn’t really count somehow.  But it did, and nobody’s laughing now.”