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Father's Letter Answering His Brilliant DaughterA
Father's Letter Answering His Brilliant Daughter
I love you too, honey, and I am happy to hear from you. I understand that your monthly payments for COBRA coverage have risen. When I can do so then I will try to compensate you for at least a portion of that increase. Please write me about this compensation in about September, at which time I hope to have in hand more money than I can muster now.
I was in WashDC from 02-07 July, principally in order to attend the Libertarian Party Nominating Convention. The latter kicked off informally on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial in a magnificant ceremony about which I may write or tell you some day if you ask me to do so. C-Span coverage of the Convention began with the starting gavel blow at 09:00 a.m. on Thursday 04 July, and continued until the gavel blow which formally ended the Convention in the early afternoon of Sunday 07 July. It was reported, mainly with a favorable and even exhultatory tone, in most of nation's major newspapers, and on (I believe) all of the major television networks. Some of the best known "liberal Democrat" newspaper writers and television pundits in the country have already demanded publicly the inclusion of the Libertarian Party's nominate, Harry Browne, in the nationwide televised debates. Suddenly our party has become either famous or notorious. There are disgruntled Republicans joining us as well.
I have been collecting signatures desperately ever since I returned from WashDC -- this, in order to fulfill NYState's electoral commission's rule that "minor" party nominees for major national office cannot have their names, and their Party's name, printed on the NYState ballot unless 15001 authenticated signatures of voters have been gathered to that end. I've nearly had heat exhaustion a couple of times trying to collect these signatures after having been wiped out by six hours of lecturing at SUNY. I have thus far collected a total of about 260 signatures, and I sure as hell hope that about two hundred other New York State Libertarians are doing what I have been doing, because we need those 15001 signatures both authenticated and submitted to the Board of Elections before the middle of August or we will wind up not on the NYState ballot and not therefore accessible to be selected at the polls this coming 05 November by voters in the State of New York. This year it is more important than ever before to get our Party and our candidates on the state ballots nationwide, because we are at last a voice that is heard and a force.
The game is this apparently: If the Libertarian Party succeeds in getting on the ballots of all 50 states of the union, and especially if the LP can manage to score significantly (above 5% or maybe even 10%) in the public opinion polls, and if about a million letters hit the small-town newspapers all over the country demanding the inclusion of the LP's candidate, Browne, in the televised debates then... either we will find ourselves participating in those debates, in which case this coming presidential election may be up for grabs suddenly, or one or both of the major parties will have publicly to confess that they do not want to debate with us before the one hundred million people who might be watching, and in that case some separate "minor" party debates might be set up (e.g., for Browne, Nader, and/or Lamm) and the media may suddenly in significant part start supporting the LP candidacies.
If Browne gets to debate nobody except Dole and Clinton, on nationwide TV, then the race will turn out seriously to be a three-way race, and we will get at least the vote total (19%) which Ross Perot garnered in 1992 against Clinton and Bush. Given the latter happening, the Libertarian political philosophy will have to be taken seriously and continuously into account during up to the close of the Century; the LP will be one of three major parties in the United States in the year 2000. And, in 2004 there will at last be a Libertarian President and a Congress with Libertarian members.
My experience in petitioning is radically different from what it was only two years ago when I collected ballot-access signatures for the gubernatorial race (mainly). Two years ago almost nobody had heard of a "Libertarian Party", and had no idea what it stood for. Now most of the bright looking people whom I approach have heard of this Party, know its positions, and have opinions there. Of those, one third don't even want to look me in the face, much less sign my petition. Another third almost leaps on my petition pad in its eagerness to sign. And the middle third is "undecided" but definitely happy that the ballot may offer a serious alternative to the two-party system's TweedleBill versus TweedleBob. Let me read to you from the LP Party platform its Plank 23 under the general heading of Individual Rights and Civil Order. I quote that plank now:
23. THE WAR ON DRUGS
The so-called "War on Drugs" is a grave threat to individual liberty, to domestic order and to peace in the world; furthermore, it has provided a rationale by which the power of the state has been expanded to restrict greatly our right to privacy and to be secure in our homes.
We call for the repeal of all laws establishing criminal or civil penalties for the use of drugs and of "anti-crime" measures restricting individual rights to be secure in our persons, homes, and property, or limiting our rights to keep and bear arms.
The many planks of the Party's Platform were voted on one by one by all of the nearly six hundred delegates attending the Convention from a total of about 48 out of the 50 states of the United States. (NYState had 29 delegates and 4 alternates in attendance at the Convention. I was one of the delegates, and in fact I seem to have been one of the ten most frequently televised delegates out of the 600, since the NYState delegation was one of those nearest to one of the three videocamaras, and since I was one of the most energetically crazy of the delegates in participation, leaping to my feet and screaming approval when each plank I supported was voted into adoption.)
The plank above was supported by unanimous vote of the delegates to the Convention, and when the vote was declared to be unanimous then all except the one wheelchair-bound delegate there leapt to their feet with a huge roar of approbation that must have almost frightened the people behind their videocamaras. The entire country of C-Span watchers saw what looked like nearly a thousand citizens roaring for the repeal of the drug laws in the way that a major-league baseball stadium roars when their beloved home team's pinch hitter has just batted in the winning home run with the bases loaded. It was an earthquake event.
I apologize for the crazy politics, my sweet dear. Your father has truly gone off the deep end. I will turn heaven and earth before I will let the Republican Party keep us off the ballot in 1996. The Democratic Party wants us on that ballot. Of course the motives of the Democratic Party are not pure; it is not simply that Democrats favor the legitimate electoral process whereas the GOP opposes that process; it is instead, rather, that the current perception is that we Libertarians are "right-wing", and will therefore naturally "steal" more votes from the GOP than we steal from the Dems. We are of course not right wingers, whatever the hell that means, which is in the end very little indeed. We are radical anti-authoritarians, who are standing up to an increasingly authoritarian and indeed totalitarian state, a "collectivist" state, which conceals its collectivist authoritarianism under a sham majoritarian rule.
The media elite and the corporate-political establishment they endorse and for which they engage in continuous propaganda are the de facto rulers and law-makers of the United States. Until this month they were, whether "left" or "right" in tinge, in monolithic support of majoritarian collectivist totalitarian control of the bodies, the minds, and the possessions of individual American citizens. Now, however, with the candidacy of Harry Browne, some of "the left" has become unglued from their prior allegiances, and they have essentially joined the libertarian cause. One of the main speakers at our LP convention was Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU. She was cheered wildly. The only place she differs from the LP is on the gun issue. I believe that, within a year, the ACLU will reverse its stance on the Second Amendment, as thousands of gun-owning "right wingers" are flooding into the ACLU's membership on account of the ACLU's recent superb defenses of civil liberties under the First, the Fourth, and the Fifth Amendments of the Bill of Rights.
I will close this now, darling. You are a much more reasonable and mature person now than is your hysterical and aging father, whom you correctly perceive to have gone at least temporarily off his nut about politics. I am immensely happy that you have begun to write up some of the results that your doctoral dissertation may contain... even if you have not yet obtained what you believe to be the dissertation's "principal results". In the happy days when I myself "did" a great deal more mathematics than I do these days, I found that it was exactly the process of trying to write up the stuff I already knew, and to establish a clear terminological framework in which to express the sorts of results which I hoped eventually to find, that I found myself fruitfully launched into the quests which brought me to publishable and in fact valuable results.
Mathematical ideas which float like dandelion fluff or smoke or mirages or sparks in stagnant air at the back of one's mind get lost in time, changed into nonsense, and vanish from the active memory. Mathematics is "real" at last only when it is clearly and crisply written down, its definitions unmistakeable, its aims specified, and its theorems both stated and proved in utterly convincing detail. You are an artist in this realm; your talent exceeds the talent both of your mother and of your father; it possesses you to a pronounced degree which is rare in the human species. Most talented people squander their gifts, but you have the, also rare, quality of WILL which will not ultimately permit you to waste your gifts on foolishness as I have wasted most of my own, more moderate gifts than your are, and as I perceive myself to be wasting myself now in pursuit of political chimeras.
I believe that you have chosen the sort of field for your explorations, symbolic dynamics, which is not only potentially important in itself, but which promises the development of some of the important new mathematical approaches and ideas that will animate the Twenty First Century if we still have a civilization left in the Twenty First Century which can support pure science and pure art of any sort at all.
Katy just came home from work. Sunset is near. I must prepare two exams which I will administer next Wednesday and Thursday. And... I must in the evening venture into town in order to gather a few more ballot-access signatures. I feel myself to be engaged in warfare: It is either gather signatures or hurl rocks through random windows. Forgive me my madness.
I love you dearly, and I am immensely proud of you.
Your daddy, Donald
