About a billion and a half years ago, way back in the 1950s or 1960s, on some long-forgotten weekly western television drama, a nifty little language lesson was offered that has somehow stuck with me ever since.

A cowboy and some kind of newcomer to the west were riding a prairie fenceline, looking for breaks to repair. Having found one, they dismounted, and the cowboy, attempting to pull the fence back together, asked the other to get in his saddlebag and give him the “plars”.

“The ‘plars’?” inquired the dude. (And please take note that this is the original and correct use of that last word.) “What’s the ‘plars’?”

The cowboy looked up from his task. “They’re t’fix the bob war with.”

“The ‘bob war’?”

The cowboy indicated the twisted strand with its occasional nasty sharpened inclusions he was holding in his gloved hand. “Yeah. The bob war.”

It was the first time I understood that the way I spoke—my paternal grandpa was a cowboy from North Park, Colorado—probably sounded as funny to other English language-manglers as they sounded to me.

I don’t know what kind of an accent I have now. I was raised all over the continent, from California to Kansas and from Newfoundland (where they all spoke with a heavy brogue it was hard to understand, at first) to the Florida panhandle. I remember consciously trying to sound like Walter Cronkite at one point in my young life, but toward the end, I could hear an accent in his speech that I don’t think mine reflects.

But once again, I have digressed.

This blogsite, The Moratorium is still shiny and new. Unlike other Net entities I contribute to, it’s meant to be almost entirely tactical, neither literary nor strategic as my other efforts are. It’s very hard to keep it that way, as it requires some changes in my own thinking, but this is a good thing in many ways. It forces me to generate new synapses, which is supposed to be good for preventing senility of various kinds, and I hope it will generate new ideas, as well.

Another difference between this site and others is that it will seem to violate a long-treasured libertarian custom. Whenever anybody used to say, “There oughta be a law”, we’d scream and stomp and holler “No!”

When the expression “Bill of Rights enforcement” first came to me, I suddenly realized consciously that those ten amendments were laws. They were the highest law of the land. But they applied only to the minions of statism, and there was still one missing: the one about any public servant having been duly convicted of violating any of them needing to be hanged by the neck until he—or she—was dead, dead, dead.

Having long ago thought the unthinkable, I’ll say the unsayable. There ought to be a law, maybe even many such laws, applying only to politicians, bureaucrats, and policemen, defending the life, liberty, and property of the American Productive Class, and featuring the most stringent, most Draconian penalty clauses conceivable. They must be enforced. Those who will not enforce them will become subject to them, themselves.

The first entry on this site was an essay about The Moratorium itself, an effort to amend the United States Constitution so that no new law may be passed, at any level of government, for one hundred years. I am dead serious about this—given what I’ve written above, people in government should be, too—but I also believe that simply discussing it, as widely and loudly as we can might just affect our future.

My second entry might seem a little lighter-hearted at first: modeled on the way that their Egyptian successors attempted to erase the very memory of the Bill and Hillary Clinton of their age, Akhenaten and Nefertiti. I have proposed another amendment that would totally repeal, nullify, or otherwise dispose of each and every law, decree, promulgation, or other poliical act of the gangsterish Obama Administration.

Yes, I know we should go back further than that, to before the Bushes and the Clintons, before Nixon, before the New Deal. Vin Suprynowicz wants to go back to 1912 and nip the income tax and Federal Reserve in the vile, slimy bud. There’s a lot to be said for going back to 1794 and the whiskey tax, or before the Constitution was perfidiously ratified so we can breathe life back into the Articles of Confederation.

But it’s not our own imaginations that need to to be set afire at this moment. We don’t have to be reminded of freedom. It is others—who no longer even know what freedom is—whose imaginations must be illuminated.

Start simple. Almost anybody will agree (once they know a couple of facts) that there are too many laws and we could probably get along without making any new ones for a while. A century is a nice round number that will stay in their minds more easily than any other figure might.

Short of a thousand.

In addition, a rapidly increasing number of individuals, most of them deeply disappointed Democrats, can see now that it was a suicidal mistake to elect Obama. I’m not certain they learned anything from it—Republicans suffered disillusionment on a similar scale, starting in 1994, after their so-called congressional “Revolution” and it doesn’t appear to have taught them a damned thing—but you can never tell.

If we’re convincing, if we work hard enough, what can be done with regard to the worst, most dedicated, most implacable enemies of individual liberty—you know who they are; you know their first names and the names of their children—is to cut off their path to the future, by outlawing new legislation for a century, while erasing their past out from under them, by repealing everything they’ve ever “accomplished”.

They’ll be caught, like a moth in a web, like a fly in amber, like a cockroach in the jaws of … of … what was that word again? Oh, yeah.

Plars.