Klingons on Ice

Josey1

Klingons on Iceby L. Neil Smithexclusive to Rational ReviewI don't know how I managed it, but I have come to live in a world of contrasts so startling that merely contemplating them, as I'm about to do here, is exhausting.Take, for example, the well-known case, a few years ago, of a woman who ordered coffee at the McDonald's drive-up, spilled it all over herself, somehow, and sued the restaurant because the coffee was -- imagine it! -- hot. Now compare that farce with something totally different, something I'm fortunate enough to witness almost every day: a lovely 14-year-old figure skater (not my daughter, although we're here because she skates in the same session) who's grown six inches in the past year. Every morning, month after month, I watch her skate across the rink as fast as she can, throw herself into the air with every bit of strength she possesses, and try to turn around as many times as she can before her blades hit the ice again.Only it isn't just her blades that hit the ice. She can't quite get those long, giraffe legs she isn't used to yet unwound in time. Her skates slip out from under her and she goes down hard, on her thigh, on her tailbone, on her back, on her shoulder, maybe a different place each time. The thud that her slender 100-pound body makes as it hits the ice can be heard -- and felt -- in every corner of the rink.The wonder of it all is that she gets up, ten, fifteen, twenty times in an hour's session, and does it all over again. Sometimes her face is set in a grimace that normally wouldn't etch itself into her beautiful features until much later in life. Sometimes she gets up with tears streaming down her cheeks. But she gets up, and she'll keep getting up, over and over again, until she's made that particular jump her own, and goes on to the terrors of the next jump. For every double axel or triple salchow, she will have taken hundreds of falls, maybe suffered a stress-fracture, possibly even an arm or a leg broken outright. So much for the blathering ignoramus whose column I read the other day. He wants to cancel the winter Olympics (I can think of plenty of reasons, myself, all having to do with the Olympic organization's utter contempt for the Bill of Rights) because, he says, they're boring. They're not boring to anyone who knows how much an axel costs.Think about that, the next time you see figure skating on TV. And now think about that stupid, useless woman again, and her cup of hot coffee. The kids I watch doing this stuff -- quite astonishingly, I discover that my own daughter is among them -- are young Klingons. Nobody makes them do it (that isn't what this column is about). Nobody could make them do it. Some think of themselves as athletes and are motivated by whatever it is that motivates gymnasts, fencers, and so on. I've been a competitive shooter myself, and I can't define it, you just do it, no matter how cold or hot it is at the range, whether the wind is still or blowing, or whether you're up to your popo in rattlesnakes and wolf spiders.Others among these "rink-rats" primarily think of themselves as artists, telling a story, interpreting music, lending their amazing beauty to a world that needs it very badly. My daughter is one of these, and it's the artist in me -- the novelist -- that responds to the dancer in her. Ballet, I have long believed, is a dead art that would vanish altogether if it weren't for state support. Whatever it attempted to accomplish is now being done on ice, sometimes public, but often private.What does any of this, I pretend to hear you ask, have to do with the issues I'm supposed to be writing about in these virtual pages? Only this: how many of the individuals in today's freedom movement are engineers of various kinds and software people? Is there a reason for that? I think so.The oppressor-state we find ourselves living in today is founded on lies: the lie that people are incompetent to feed and clothe and house and transport themselves without increasingly intrusive and abusive government supervision; the lie that they can't even be trusted to defend themselves physically, but must be watched over by masked baby-killers in black Kevlar, wielding submachineguns. A lot of time and effort is expended to maintain these lies and countless thousands more like them. But you can't kid or con a drive shaft spinning around at 4000 revolutions per minute, and if you make a single transposition in a thousand-line computer program, it'll blow up on you even if you got everything else right. Individuals who are accustomed to thinking in terms like that tend to apply them to other aspects of their lives. They quickly grow impatient with a culture rooted in euphemism and deception.In large numbers, they become libertarians.I've often wondered if this isn't at least another reason why the socialists have made themselves the enemies of gun people. Maybe it isn't the guns themselves, quite so much as the self-discipline and exactitude that using guns proficiently and maintaining them requires -- a self-discipline and exactitude that socialists don't possess and never will.But as usual, I have digressed.Maybe the next thing we must do, for a while, is to find ways to recruit the young Klingons who already understand that there are goals worth suffering for to accomplish. Unlike the surf-potatoes who can't bring themselves to click on a FORWARD icon in the cause of liberty, they know what it is to go out of your way for something you want. They hurt and bleed for it every day.The geeks and nerds of the Old Movement (I've been one of them myself) have long been disdainful of "jocks" and "jockettes" in the past. But we have something in common with them: immutable standards. The jocks and jockettes respond now to a well-waved flag. But historically, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, at least, they responded well to the prospect of individual liberty and the opportunity to defect. Let's see how they respond to the idea -- explained in terms they can understand and agree with -- of Bill of Rights enforcement. http://www.rationalreview.com/archive/guestcolumnists/lneilsmith011602.html