You may notice a new photograph of yours truly has replaced the austere visage at the end of my columns. I'll venture the self-indulgence of an explanation.
Generically enough, the previous photograph was getting dated (over six months old). I figured a new millennium called for a new picture.
The cheerful pose before you appeared at a bookstore appropriately called Liberties (an ironic name given its location in an anything but libertarian city). Although I'm partial to my local Borders and Barnes and Noble, that's where my friends and I were spending that Saturday night. My disposable camera on hand, I decided to immortalize the occasion.
Some of you might find Smiley Myles incongruous with my subject matter. As I glance at my archive, I hardly find the stuff of hilarity. "So whaddaya smiling for, Kantor?"
While consistent critique of statism is incumbent upon proponents of liberty, it's very easy for lamentation to displace goal-oriented analysis. The leap from "The War on Drugs has terrorized Americans" to "We will never be free of the War on Drugs" is closer than it seems, which is to say the line between critique and quietism is fine.
Imagine a libertarian group characterized by the following:
"The country's doomed, man!"
"Yeah, man, we might as well move to the mountains!"
"But the feds declared u2018em a nature preserve!"
"No!"
"Yes!"
"AAAHHH!"
It's enough to make you flee to a NAACP rally.
One of Murray Rothbard's most attractive qualities is a zeal for liberty that suffuses his writings. The "scintillating prose style" Ralph Raico rightly praises could never have blossomed in works like For a New Liberty and The Irrepresible Rothbard if he were a doom and gloom screedsmith. Consider these robust sentiments:
"Perhaps, some day, their [Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln's] statues, like Lenin's in Russia, will be toppled and melted down; their insignias and battle flags will be desecrated, their war songs tossed into the fire. And then Davis and Lee and Jackson and Forrest, and all the heroes of the South, u2018Dixie' and the Stars and Bars, will once again be truly honored and remembered. The classic comment on that meretricious TV series The Civil War was made by that marvelous and feisty Southern writer Florence King. Asked her views on the series, she replied: "I didn't have time to watch The Civil War. I'm too busy getting ready for the next one. In that spirit, I am sure that one day, aided and abetted by Northerners like myself in the glorious u2018copperhead' tradition, the South shall rise again." ("America's Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861," in The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories)
It is no coincidence that photographs of Rothbard often show a merry gent, short yet towering in sanguine sagacity. In Hans-Hermann Hoppe's description, he was "a happy warrior."
I too believe anti-statism should be done with a smile. Of course, some topics and circumstances preclude smiles. The overall pursuit of liberty, however, should be guided by a grin, not a grimace. If we scowl at our opponents, it is because their policies perturb our bliss.
I'll stick with Smiley Myles for now, if only to surprise those who expect a brooding countenance at the end of a bristling column.
January 13, 2001
Myles Kantor lives in Boynton Beach, Florida.
