[Bombard]

[Continued]

Let's talk for a moment about John Lennon. Adam Smith brought him up. I'm particularly interested in this one because John and Yoko had something very similar to what my wife and I have: two equal people who happened to be able to witness each other's life to the fullest possible extent. The grand passion. The real thing. Now it's gone.

When all is said and done, the real tragedy of John Lennon is that he dinosaured out. He ought to have known better. He stayed in the house for four or five years, and when he came out again, the world had changed. He could have had a bodyguard, for Christ's sake. He could have lived in the country. He did not have to stay in New York City and rub people's noses in it with his $150 million and his blue jeans. The clown who killed him did it for fame, not money, obviously. But if someone is willing to stick a knife in me for thirty-five dollars and not bother to find out what blood type I am, you can just imagine what they are willing to do to someone who has real money.

I think a lot about John Lennon. You know what I think? I think, Jesus Christ, if it's this bad for my wife and me now, what will it be like if either of us ever becomes well known?

More to the point, let's talk about Adam Smith's friend Michael Halberstam. I did not know Halberstam, but I liked his work. He surprised a burglar in his Washington, D.C., home and was shot.

Halberstam figured all of this out in the very last seconds of his life. He didn't like being killed. He must have thought it was pretty damned unfair. He was furious. In his last few moments, rushing adrenaline and pouring blood, he got in his car and ran down his assailant.

You know what? If he had made this discovery even slightly earlier—long enough to buy a weapon and wait for the permit to go through—he would very likely be alive right now.

Now listen to me a minute. The guns themselves don't cause all this. What causes it is that people think they can have the American dream by sticking someone up for it. They think that there ought to be a huge equal society out there. Equal shares for everybody. Forced equal shares if necessary.

What is true is that we are entering a time of vast restratification. The United States is becoming more European...but it is a Europe of a different century. We are moving toward a culture in which we'll have cooks, chauffeurs, maids, carpenters, brewmasters, vintners, industrialists, bankers, machinists, hat makers, shopkeepers, and kings and queens of a sort. And, of course, we'll also have highwaymen, cutthroats, and thieves. Think of it in terms of a vast panorama, a huge cross section much like the—world Balzac,, Hugo, and Dumas described. Think about Dlckens. Read Weber's The City. Read Pirenne's The Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. None of this is new. What is new is that we're experiencing it. What was new was the social structure in America of the past three or four decades, which has collapsed.

To have any kind of culture or civilization in a world like this, it is going to be necessary to stop talking about things like prisoners' unions and start talking about the concept of crime and the definition of the word "criminal."

It would be nice also to talk about police. But if you'll read these books, you'll find very little mention of police. What you will find are numerous references to people who wore swords and pistols whenever they went anywhere.

People now fashionably put down the Seventies, but it was a time when many people reached a level of personal success and satisfaction that may not be achieved again in our lifetimes. By comparison, we are in the pit, and I don't mean the floor of the commodities exchange. In many ways the Seventies gave us a glimpse of what life may be like in 125 years.

But it's like the Dark Ages now. Each time there is a major change, it is necessary to gain a clear understanding of what the changes are, what skills still hold, which ones need to be discarded, which new ones need to be developed.

Now, about those fifty million handguns: taking them away will not automatically give us a society like England's or Holland's. We are just not like that. It would be nice if we were. That's why Americans run away to Europe. What might help is a good set of disk brakes on people's behavior here. But anything that might put such desperately needed stops on people's personal "freedoms" is perceived out there in the streets as a violation of civil liberties, of constitutional rights. That is, it is a "right" to mug, rape, burglarize, murder, and commit arson for the insurance money. So there you are: a nation of pirates.

I would like to see impossibly tight gun registration laws, but I secretly scoff. Anyone who's honest can get through any registration process we can come up with. Anyone, who's not honest won't bother. The way guns get into the criminal underworld is that they are stolen. That makes registration a useless exercise.

As for the manufacture of all those devices and all those bullets, during World War II the United States became "the great arsenal of democracy." It is a damned good thing for the English that we were, too, or they would be holding Oktoberfests right now.

Do you really think the rest of the world sees us as insane because we bear arms? Try going to one of the South American countries. Try going into a country in which only the government has weapons. Try watching armed soldiers carrying their semiautomatic carbines around the airport gates and the customs offices, while the people have none. You want the wealth redistributed? Try it under those circumstances.

Don't talk to me about the saintly Japanese either. Everyone says they have a very low crime rate. No one really knows. It could be, because they are very big on making each person responsible for himself and also to his fellow countrymen—a sort of "One for all, all for one" attitude. They are sublimated like mad and they are rich because of it. It looks good on the surface, but just below that surface is a caldron; and if you look close you can see it. They have a history of barbarism that goes back for centuries and that we could never hope to match.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the first thing I thought was, now I'll never get to go there. Try putting yourself in Afghan shoes: no matter what you think, from your current vantage point, with a cellarful of good vintage wines and a wallful of Wittgenstein, if you lived there and the Soviets came trucking in with tanks and occupational forces, I am willing to bet you would hock your house, your automobile your Baume & Mercier watch, or your ass on the street for a good gun and the bullets to put in it.

So much for international relations; on the home front, suffice it to say that as long as we live in a society in which a large constituency thinks it can do whatever it damn pleases—no sense of morality asked for or required—then those of us who have the middle-class work ethic, those of us who believe the Freudian epithets of work and love, will be seen as potential victims by the flocks of hustlers and lurkers who are out there. It is sometimes tough to get a job. It is also, right now, easier to rob people than it is to work for money. It's easier because it can be gotten away with. These people believe no one will stop them. They're right. No one will. Not the police, not the courts, not the penal system. No one but the growing number of us who have decided we will not be victimized again, ever.

We moved from Venice in 1979. Our old friends blew away to various other places. Their dreams, like ours, blew away too.

We moved to a condominium in Culver City. Very uptown. Top floor, surrounded by Russian olive trees and flaming bougainvillea. Three swimming pools, Jacuzzis at every turn, an underground parking lot, and a tennis court. We didn't have anything to put in our place, but still it was pretty.

People were robbed in the parking lot. People were mugged on the tennis court. There was a rape nearby and then another. My wife began carrying her .38 again when she walked from our place to the car. We were burglarized again. We didn't even call the police.

One night we went to West Hollywood to see the movie Watership Down. We sat through it twice and couldn't understand why neither of us could stop crying. Sometime after that, we packed up—a simple matter, believe me—and drove east. We parked my rabbit, Nicole—who had survived Venice by digging a hole and hiding in it—in a picnic basket so we could sneak her into motels.

While we were looking for a house and staying in a motel, a white teenage boy and his girlfriend knocked on the door of a nearby room and asked to use the telephone.
Inside, they held the couple at gunpoint; tied them to chairs with wire rope; took their wallets, clothes, luggage, traveler's checks, and car. We slept peacefully that night. If they had come to our door, they would have been surprised.

Now we live in a big old house out in the Midwest, big enough for each of us to have a studio. Huge yard, ravine, et cetera. The neighbors are friendly. A lot more friendly than we are, because we have memories we're trying to forget. It's not completely safe here, but it is a notch or so better than other places we've lived. We keep the guns, loaded, in the house, but we don't have carry permits anymore and we don't carry them around as though it were 1880...or 1980.

I've stopped going to target ranges to practice. But I still keep my hand in, as they say. Because every time we leave this relatively sublime neighborhood and enter the world of hotels and airports, we enter into a world of imminent danger—an area where the law is no recourse. So we remember how to use the guns, and try to forget that we have had to use them or ever will again.

When President Reagan was shot, I was outside painting a trellis. Some neighborhood children told me. At first I thought they had just seen a documentary on JFK. It seemed as far away to me as the moon...or the "forbidden planet." But it isn't.

Are human values luxuries? Could be, right now. If so, I lead a pretty luxurious life. I've paid for it, though, and the price was too goddamned high, because those human values used to come free. Part of the American package. Although sometimes I wonder if something so precious could ever have been, or be, free.

So you can fuss and bitch, Adam Smith, all you like, and you can rail at the hillbillies in the NRA, but the next time someone breaks into your house or your apartment, the next time someone busts the window of your car and rips off your FM radio and your thirty-five millimeter camera, the next time some woman you know gets raped and busted up and you have to visit her in the hospital and try to cheer her up, the next time you are totally freaked out after coming up against a gang halfway between the restaurant and the car, sit yourself down and do some serious considering about who has the right to do what to whom. Often this stuff has to touch people personally before they think about self-protection, and often by then a tragedy of far more epic proportions than getting knocked off for a Sony stereo receiver has occurred. I hope that doesn't happen to you. You have a right to carry on merrily with what you're doing.

Whenever I'm perplexed, upset, need some stillness, you'll find me out in the yard somewhere, pulling thistles out of my rosebushes, digging in the dirt. That's where I am today.

Let us know, you guys, when you figure out that sociopaths may be worthy of your concern, but not your life. The rest of us would like to come out of hiding.