Washington Monthly - September/October 2020 - 122

tance to land-use laws fueled a campaign of terror against local residents.
Group members poisoned hundreds of
people in the county by spraying salmonella bacteria on salad bars, and
the commune's leaders targeted state
and county officials for assassination,
sending one county commissioner to
the hospital with a potentially deadly
case of salmonella poisoning.
Again-would it be funny if it happened to you?

hese shortcomings, and many others like it throughout the book,
would diminish Hongoltz-Hetling's
narrative even in normal times. But
today more than ever, there is nothing remotely amusing about a group

American tension between "Don't
Tread on Me" and "E Pluribus Unum."
Certainly, one cannot fault a writer for failing to anticipate the specific details of the present disaster. This
time last year, none of us could have
foreseen that a new, fast-moving virus would spark a global pandemic,
claiming hundreds of thousands of
lives, nor that wearing a mask to prevent infection would be viewed as a
political statement. But the test of a
great writer, or a great editor, is the
ability to look deeply into a specific
set of circumstances and to extrapolate from them, to assess the present
and then take a leap of faith into a
prophetic vision of the future. In the
Grafton experience, we see clearly the
chaos that can be created when a significant
chunk of the community rejects the strictures
of government, science,
and the notion of community itself.
As I write this, more
than 159,000 American
lives have been sacrificed to failures of government at almost every level, and to the
refusal of millions of
A mer icans to cur ta i l
their sense of personal liberty and submit to relatively
brief inconvenience to protect their
neighbors and t heir communit ies.
It is heartbreaking to think of how
many more lives will be lost to COVID-19 by the time this magazine goes
to print.
This is what happens when massively funded propaganda campaigns lead
large numbers of Americans to lose
faith in our system of government.
This is what happens when that loss
of faith leads to blind opposition to
taxation. This is what happens when
public services and public infrastructure are systematically starved of resources in the name of "fiscal responsibility." And this is what happens,
shamefully, when those who are best
able to recognize the threat and sound

Today more than ever, there
is nothing remotely amusing
about a group of wrongheaded
extremists plotting to take
over a government and impose
its own dangerously eccentric
views on an unwitting and
unprepared majority.
of wrongheaded extremists plotting
to take over a government and impose
its own dangerously eccentric views
on an unwitting and unprepared
majority. And it is this reality that
makes A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear
such a painful missed opportunity.
With the story of Grafton, HongoltzHetling was handed the American
character in an ant farm. This New
England hamlet twines together the
most significant strands in our history: tax aversion, religious fervor,
veneration of individual liberty, and
a deep vein of cantankerousness, all
counterbalanced by our equally powerful belief that we are on a God-given
mission to establish on this continent
a shining City on the Hill. In Grafton,
we find a microcosm of the constant
122 September/October 2020

the alarm choose instead to treat local politics like some sort of lowstakes sporting event for out-of-shape
people.
Today, we are all living in Grafton. Armies of rabid bears are wandering through our streets, clawing
at our window screens, and gnashing
their teeth at our children while the
phone rings unanswered at the state
department of fish and game. The old
village church is erupting in flames,
but someone has slashed the tires on
our town's lone fire truck, and the
fire hydrants-unmaintained for a
decade-have all run dry. Terrified,
we beg our neighbors for help, only to
be told that the Lord will protect us,
or that the cataclysm in the streets
is just punishment for our moral failures or our political misdeeds.
And all of this is happening because
a large, disgruntled minority of Americans dutifully memorized the Declaration's listing of our inalienable
rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness without perceiving that
these rights can exist only within the
context of the social contract-an Enlightenment concept so deeply familiar to the Founding Fathers that, tragically, they didn't consider it necessary
to mention.
Right now, I am sitting in self-imposed quarantine with my husband, in
a small Michigan town far from our
home. Our beloved daughters-both
adults-are thousands of miles away,
in California. We haven't seen them
now for almost seven months, and in
my darkest moments, I wonder whether we will ever be all together again
in this lifetime. We are separated today, and likely will be for long weeks
and months to come, because millions
of my fellow Americans have been unwilling to sacrifice even a shred of
their perceived personal liberty to the
higher consideration of what we owe
to each other.
And it's not funny. None of it is funny. It isn't funny at all.
Elizabeth Austin is a writer and political
consultant. She lives in Oak Park, Ilinois.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2020

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