The proposition that democracy is an imperfect form of government is nothing new. Plato wrote a book about his proposed alternative, where a class of philosopher kings would replace the rule of the people, and this year is the two-thousand four-hundredth anniversary of his writing it. Who would actually be good enough, wise enough, just enough, compassionate enough, shrewd enough and brave enough to be one of those philosopher kings, or whether, indeed, anyone could be; how such persons would be identified and put into power; and, how such a system could arise from the existing social, political and economic milieu of ancient Greece, or anywhere else at any time, past or future, is anybody’s guess.
So it was demonstrated quite a while ago that democracy is very easy to criticize and that it is not a great challenge to imagine something that, on the surface at least, appears to be better. Doing so, in fact, has been a favorite pastime of philosophers, courtiers, theologians, economists, sociologists, bureaucrats, polymaths, despots, megalomaniacs, lunatics, and aspiring dictators ever since The Republic hit papyrus.
These days, for example, we have Xi Jinping, the quintessential cold-hearted, murderous, calculating bureaucrat, Viktor Mihály Orbán, the archetypal aspiring dictator, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, a fulminating, bloodthirsty despot, and Donald John Trump, a verifiable criminal and barefaced lunatic, all joined in a unified chorus of such negative assessments concerning democracy. Obviously, they argue, you, citizen, are (or would be) much, much, better off with decisive personalities such as ourselves deciding your fates, and once we rid the world of this stupid democracy thing, a golden age of peace and prosperity for all of humanity will ensue. For those who accept such a syllogism, they should note that there are a number of opportunities to become instantly wealthy, beautiful, erotically attractive, biologically immortal and to participate at high posts in the governments of those gentlemen awaiting them on the Internet, and I advise such persons to avail themselves of those offers immediately, so as to relieve the rest of us of their presence in the body politic, economy, and general society as quickly as possible.
The problem with democracy has never been the idea – it’s one of the best, if not the best idea in history. It’s the execution, the process, the ongoing operation and maintenance of a system so it does not crash. It’s the constant challenge of repairing the aircraft in flight through a thunderstorm, the steam engine while running balls out down mountainside tracks, the ship on the ocean during a storm. It has never been easy, and there have always been plenty of scumbags more than willing to throw a spanner in the works for their own evil purposes.
Consider, for instance, Elbridge Gerry, a pathetic, weak-willed tool of a man, after whom a long-standing practice of scumbags seeking to undermine democracy was famously named. The concept behind that practice stems from the fact that, in order to function effectively, unlike ancient Athens, large democracies are geographically divided up into areas that elect representatives to a governing body – a parliament, say, or a congress. As early as the eighteenth century, scumbags in Britain were manipulating the boundaries of such districts so as to dilute the influence of voters in some districts versus other districts the scumbags favored. And what those scumbags favored was a district with so few voters they could buy them all off and send their chosen toady to do their bidding as a member of the House of Commons. Given the tendency of the population in democracies to factionalize into political parties, once started, the creation of “rotten boroughs” was hard to stop – if your opponents did it and you didn’t, their policies won votes in the legislature while yours failed.
And speaking of Britain, in 1811, there was a fierce debate in the United States about its foreign policy with respect to the United Kingdom. James Madison was, famously, a hawk, and wasn’t afraid of saying so. In order to ensure winning the presidential election that year, control of the Massachusetts Senate was essential. This was because in those days, the Massachusetts state senate chose its Electors in the Electoral College, who, in turn, registered that state’s votes in Washington, thus, together with the votes of Electors from the other states, selecting the President. Channeling his inner whore, as every politician who engages in the practice does, Gerry, then the governor, signed off on a bill put forward by Madison’s cronies in the Massachusetts legislature, changing the shapes of the state senate electoral districts. He was rewarded for his perfidy by being selected to become Madison’s vice-presidential running mate during the election of 1812.
The upshot of these shameful shenanigans had two memorable historical results. The first was that the Federalists, the opposing party who favored peace with England, took one look at the new Massachusetts senate districts and saw what looked almost exactly like the silhouette of a salamander. Since it was the product of Elbridge Gerry’s cowardly approval of such blatant scumbaggery, the famous portmanteau, “gerrymander,” was born. The second memorable historical result was the War of 1812, during which, among other things, President Madison was rewarded for his pig-headed antagonism of the British by having to flee Washington when King George III’s troops burned down Madison’s presidential mansion in 1814.
Reflecting on this story, one might reasonably come to the conclusion it demonstrates that gerrymandering is an evil, pernicious practice that eats at the heart of democracy and should never be practiced by moral, principled people who wish to preserve it. And they would be right. Unfortunately, it only takes one bad apple to spoil the barrel, the lust for power attracts quite a few bad apples to politics, and democracies are no exception to the rule.
In fact, today, in the Year of Our Lord 2024, using demographic analysis, statistical techniques and computing power undreamed of by the Founders, both parties, Democrat and Republican, have gerrymandered the United States of America so scumbagerifically that less than ten percent of House seats are actually in anything resembling serious contention every two years. And today the analogous situation with our presidential election is impacted in a manner magnified by the fact that those Electors who register their states’ vote for President in Washington are no longer chosen by state senates. Instead they are chosen by popular elections held in those very same gerrymandered congressional districts, in states almost all of which have winner-take-all allocations of Electoral votes. Thus, implementation of the fundamental bedrock action of American democracy, its elections, has reached a level of surreal absurdity that must surely delight the likes of Putin, Orban and Xi. As for Trump, he’s absolutely depending on it. Because of gerrymandering, both parties are now poised to pour billions of dollars into selected media markets in seven states where tiny slivers of the American electorate residing in the remaining paltry random collection of incompletely gerrymandered congressional districts will decide whether democracy continues to endure in this nation.
And gerrymandering isn’t the half of it – no, not a third nor a quarter of it, unfortunately. Democracy in America has been under attack since Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville wrote his book about government, one that bears that title. To mention just one more of numerous cracks in the edifice, due to another failure of imagination, perspicacity and foresight on the part of the Founders, our federal judicial system has proved to be an additional salient easily assaulted and occupied by armies of scumbags seeking to devour the heart of democracy in furtherance of their greed, bigotry and lust for power. The framers of the US Constitution, it seems, were a bit too Panglossian about the character of jurists, and being so, they neglected to include any clauses specifying oversight of the Supreme Court in that worthy document. Oops. Big loophole there, and the coterie of fascists that ironically calls itself the Federalist Society have been working for decades, like rats chewing away at dock hawsers, striving to use that flaw as leverage and thus dislodge American democracy from its moorings.
Thanks to liberal and progressive preoccupation with issues like political correctness, veganism, gender pronoun reform, transsexual rights, safe space mandates, trigger warning polices and vilifying white men as the root of all evil, the machinations of the Federalist Society went largely unnoticed for half a century. Now, in an epiphany perhaps fatally belated, it has dawned on such folks that Something Serious Is Going On at the Supreme Court. Well, duh – tell me about it. On Friday, June 14, the United States Supreme Court issued its ruling in Garland vs Cargill, where it ruled, in a six-to-three decision, that devices called “bump stocks,” when attached to semi-automatic assault rifles, such as the AR-15 or the AK-47, do not effectively convert those weapons of mass destruction into the equivalent of fully automatic machine guns capable of firing over six hundred rounds per minute.
Just such guns, equipped with that device, by the way, were used by a maniac in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2023 to kill one hundred and fifty people and injure five hundred others. And all six Supreme Court judges in the majority of Garland vs Cargill were hand-picked by Republican presidents from lists of candidates provided by… wait for it… that’s right, the Federalist Society. This was a big win for them, too, because one of their goals in their campaign to destroy democracy in America is to dismantle the regulatory function of the Executive Branch, and Garland vs Cargill was all about that – whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (locally known as the Rednecks’ Weekend Police) could use its powers as a part of the Executive Branch to classify bump stocks as a mechanical component capable of transforming a semiautomatic firearm into a machine gun.
Well, BATFE lost, and the Supreme Court said, with a characteristic Federalist Society shrug, if there is a general wish to prevent mass slaughter using guns equipped with bump stocks, Congress can just go ahead pass a law specifically banning them. The reason why they, the Supreme Court, couldn’t ban them, they said, is because stuff like this bump stock thing isn’t described by the National Firearms Act. That’s a federal law which was enacted to keep machine guns out of the hands of guys like Al Capone. President Franklin Roosevelt signed it in 1934. That was the last big year in the US for gun control legislation. It was also a year when the only means of commercial transoceanic air travel was the Zeppelin, so don’t hold your breath waiting for Congress to pass a law banning bump stocks. And as it happens, Garland vs Cargill not only serves as another stark illustration of American democracy’s current predicament, but also as the reason for a consultation Tuesday morning with Richard “Dick” Gewehrlauf, a congressional liaison specialist at the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms and gun accessories manufacturing industries’ lobbyists here in Washington.
“It’s a great day for gun rights,” Gewehrlauf cheerfully declared as he sprawled casually on my office couch in front of the picture window overlooking the White House. “Betcha that [expletive] old man back there,” he chuckled, gesturing over his left shoulder with his right thumb and fist, “needed a double dose of Geritol in his Ensure Max Protein to wash down his blood pressure medicine last Saturday morning!”
“I’m not a lawyer,” I responded, “but I’m reasonably sure that Garland vs Cargill had no Second Amendment elements – it was strictly a case of interpretation of Executive Branch agency authority as pertaining to a federal statute.”
“Damn, Collins,” he scoffed with a smirk, “talking like that, maybe you ought to be a lawyer.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I dryly replied, deciding to needle him a bit in return to get things going. “It’s interesting, don’t you think,” I began, “that in writing the court’s opinion Justice Thomas focused so sharply on the mechanics of the bump stock and its physical integration with the weapon and the shooter’s body?”
“How is that… interesting?” Gewehrlauf asked with a quizzical look.
“Well,” I continued, “right there in his opinion, he’s talking about what qualifies as a ‘single function of the trigger,’ and how the National Firearms Act of 1934 ‘specifies a precise action that must “automatically cause a weapon to fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger”’ and that the ‘precise action must “automatically cause” a weapon to fire “more than one shot”’ whereas ‘a shooter must actively maintain just the right amount of pressure on the rifle’s front grip with his non-trigger hand when using a bump stock,’ and how that therefore ‘qualifies as an additional function and thus did not meet the requirements for definition of a machine gun’ as stated in the Act.”
“Yeah,” he shrugged, “sounds about right. So?”
“So,” I persisted, “forget about me – I thought Justice Thomas was a lawyer, not an expert on firearms.”
“Whatever;” Gewehrlauf responded with a shrug, “seems to me, he can be if he wants to.”
“And, apparently,” I pointed out, “a Supreme Court justice can be an environmental scientist, a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, a nuclear physicist or an aerospace engineer too, if they feel like it.”
“Well,” he shrugged again, “somebody’s got to make decisions about that stuff.”
“And you think it’s better for everyone,” I pressed, “that in addition to deciding what a machine gun is, Justice Clarence Thomas should also decide what a toxic chemical is, what constitutes a life-threatening medical condition, what are the parameters of sanity and mental illness, what’s a safe level of tritium exposure, and how many hours can be allowed to elapse between commercial jet engine maintenance cycles, instead of the people who spent their entire lives gaining the expertise to make those decisions correctly?”
“It sure as hell is better for the [expletive] assault rifle business,” he proclaimed, “and frankly, that’s all I’m paid to give a flying [expletive] about.” Leaning forward, he furrowed his brow. “We don’t have a problem with that, do we?”
“Of course not,” I assured him.
“Nice to know,” he said with a nod, settling back into the couch. “Anyway,” he heaved with a sigh of pure satisfaction, “I’m sure glad all that bump stock legal [expletive] is over with, because we’ve got something right up the same alley. It’s new, it’s hot, and I need some serious smarts brought to bear on how the industry is going to roll it out.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
Gewehrlauf’s face lit up like a Christmas tree as he sat upright and began pounding his right fist into his left palm. “I gotta tell you Collins, this… this really gives me a hard-on, this one does! It’s just [expletive] phenomenal, that’s all I can say.”
“And it is…” I lead him on.
“Collins,” he effused, “what if I told you we’ve got another device you can hook up to an assault rifle that’s just as big for the industry as the bump stock and has a loop hole in the NFA that’s also just as big?”
“I’d be curious to know what it is,” I told him.
“It’s an attachment that silences gunfire,” he chortled, “and it really silences it, know what I mean? No sound at all, at least that you can hear at more than three feet away, hooked up to an AK-47, hooked up to an AR-15! Can you [expletive] believe that? And… get this… it doesn’t work like the silencers that were outlawed by the NFA in 1934! So, because of Garland vs Cargill, it’s going to be legal to sell them everywhere in the United States right away, even in the eight states where regular, old-fashioned silencers are illegal! And we’re talking about big, big gun markets here, Collins – California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and more than half of New England!”
“The march of progress,” I opined, “is awesome indeed.”
“You bet your [expletive] [expletive] it’s awesome, my man!” he shouted. “Let’s get down to it! What do you recommend?”
“Flood the zone,” I advised. “Gear up, stockpile a market saturation inventory, then unleash a coordinated advertising blitz concentrating on the target market geographics, leading with the first ten percent of product on sale at major outlets with steep discounts.”
“That’s right,” he agreed, nodding enthusiastically, “get a huge number of them into the customer base before the government even has time to notice, much less react.”
“Then slip some cheese to the usual suspects in the political space…” I continued.
“Yeah, yeah,” he interrupted, “the NRA 90 percenters in Congress, for instance.”
“Exactly,” I concurred, “and have them demo the product in some their campaign ads and PSAs pertaining to issues of concern.”
“Right, right,” he enthused, bobbing up and down on the couch in excitement, “have them shoot up some pictures of that AOC [expletive] or blow the hell out of a stack of queer books!”
“And do so in, say, an outdoor scene with a moderate background soundscape, like a church picnic or a friendly afternoon baseball game, so the amazing effect of the silencer will come through,” I added.
“You mean, so when they blow the living [expletive] out of the target, you can still hear the ball hit the bat!” he shouted.
“Or the parson saying grace over the potato salad,” I elaborated.
“Hot damn! Collins, I was wrong – you shouldn’t be a lawyer, you should be in advertising!”
“Oh, shucks,” I modestly replied, “just brainstorming. But before we get too far into the roll-out strategy, might I ask, this… silencer… it doesn’t by any chance use… [REDACTED] ultra-high frequency boosted [REDACTED] Fourier transform [REDACTED] active anti-phase [REDACTED] noise cancellation, does it?”
Gewehrlauf stopped talking. He stopped moving. He stopped breathing. He stared at me, wide-eyed. His jaw dropped slightly. A long, very quiet moment passed. “Who told you?”
“Nobody told me. It was just an educated guess,” I confessed.
“All… right…” he slowly enunciated, “let’s say… you’re… correct. Then… what?”
“Then… well,” I gestured, beckoning. He rose from the couch and approached my desk. I leaned forward and spoke, dropping my volume down to barely a whisper. “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone I told you this, okay?”
“I promise,” he replied, raising his right hand, “Scout’s honor.”
“You were a Scout?” I very quietly asked.
“I was an Eagle Scout,” he told me, “twenty-four merit badges.”
“All right then,” I confided, “that technology is classified.”
He went white as a sheet. “Classified?”
“Top Secret,” I confirmed. “How did your industry clients find out about it?”
Now suddenly nervous, Gewehrlauf glanced around reflexively at my empty office, then back at me. “We got a demo. At a firing range. In Virginia. In Loudoun County. In a basement.”
“You’re not supposed to know about that device,” I warned, now actually whispering. “And I bet nobody in that basement, including the guy giving your industry clients that demo, is supposed to know about it, either.”
Gewehrlauf cast his eyes heavenward and gasped. “Oh [expletive],” he whispered back at me. “We didn’t know! I swear!”
“Was the guy who gave you the demo wearing any… headgear?”
His face froze in a rictus of shock. “Headgear?”
“Like… a helmet?” I whispered back. “Like a completely round, completely enclosed metal helmet, that covered his head from the neck up, with a thick, high impact glass shield so he could see out of it?”
“No,” Gewehrlauf murmured, a look of extreme concern unfreezing his face as is brow wrinkled and he began to blink rapidly. “Is that… important?”
“The helmet,” I explained, “protects the brain from developing ultrasonic vascular infarcts. The shooter and everyone within five meters has to be wearing one.”
Gewehrlauf’s face, now two inches from mine as he leaned across my desk, was white as a sheet. “And… if they weren’t?”
“Prolonged exposure,” I informed him in an exceedingly quiet voice, “causes the brain to develop a consistency most of the pathologists who examined the… ah… cadavers of victims… compared to that of the brains of extremely prolonged methamphetamine abusers.”
“Meth… head… brains?” he shuddered.
“They describe it as sort of like… cottage cheese.”
“Cottage cheese?” Gewehrlauf shouted, immediately cringing in shock at what he had done. “Oh, my God, [expletive] Jesus Christ,” he muttered as he dropped back into a whisper. “Holy [expletive] [expletive]!”
“So,” I continued as I sat back in my chair and resumed speaking in my normal voice, “even if it wasn’t for that… issue we were just discussing… it would be necessary to sell each silencer with at least one, and preferably several ultra-sound shielding helmets, which, ironically, cost about five times as much per unit to manufacture as the silencers themselves…”
“Oh, my [expletive] God,” Gewehrlauf interrupted, exclaiming “cottage [expletive] cheese! Sweet [expletive] Jesus, I’m [expletive] [expletive]” as he sank back down in the couch and plunged his head into his hands. “Totally [expletive] [expletive]! Game [expletive] over! I’m [expletive] toast!”
After he kept up like that for about two more minutes, I took the door to the left behind my desk out of my office into the corridor leading to the SCIF, to the server room and at last to the galley, where I brewed myself a double espresso and made a fainting goat’s milk cappuccino with it. When that was ready, I grabbed a cold bottle of Ramlösa, put a couple of Alaskan glacier ice shards in a rocks glass and poured a double shot of exclusive sherry matured Macallans 25 over them for Gewehrlauf. Then I went back into my office.
He was gone, though. So I didn’t bother opening the Ramlösa to make him a scotch and soda. I just knocked back the Macallans myself and watched the ice shards melt while I drank the cappuccino and waited for my next appointment.
While I was doing that, I decided not to charge him for the consultation.