There is in America a certain sub-strata of political thinker roaming the roadways and stalking the streets, crowding the air waves late at night and filling the idle time of many a bartender across the land. By their own design they are known as “Libertarians.” You could point one out and say of him, “That man is anti-government,” and you would be essentially correct.

“A Libertarian is,” says Harry, “a person who believes in the rights of the individual over the state, the sanctity of the Constitution, and the general tenets of a live-and-let-live, you-don’t-hurt-me-I-don’t-hurt-you philosophy.”

        Quietly, Harry had always been a Libertarian and now, within the circles and hollows of his own paranoia, his beliefs came to the fore as his last foothold in an alien world. Harry began to speak out to anyone who would listen to his impotent rantings, on the unfairness of it all and more particularly, to the egregious sins of the current administration in Washington. Even as we talked there in prison, he would sometimes become restless and slightly unhinged as he lectured me on our “lost freedoms.”

        “Harry,” I asked one afternoon as we sat under the oaks in front of the dorm, “are you trying to tell me you’re a political prisoner?” I’d only been in jail a year but I knew that truly innocent convicts were rare. Rarer than rare. Rarer than blue moons or honest politicians or brilliant conversation out at the weight pile. “Who the hell did you piss off with your rhetoric?”

        Harry spread both hands wide like an evangelist and smiled. “Everybody, Gary,” he said. “I pissed off the whole world.”

        “There’s places for guys like you.”

        “I was a dynamo. I wrote letters to the paper. I harangued people in bars. I went to rallies and sat in the back row listening, convinced I could do a better job than whoever was speaking. I engaged perfect strangers, Waid, and beat them over the head with their lack of freedom in America. In between times I sat in my room and stewed. Finally, I ranted and raved to my next door neighbor and he was so alarmed he called the cops and the cops contacted the feds.”

        I tried to picture Harry drooling and pounding a podium. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said,” I said.. The image didn’t compute. “What did you tell these people?”

        Harry sighed.  “Nothing that isn’t true. I think it was the power of my conviction that overwhelmed them. You should understand, Gary, that depression tends to make you obsess on things. It makes you think everyone in the world is aware of you.  You’re egocentric. Your world shrinks. You can’t escape the eye of the needle.” He stood and began to gesture, forming ideas with his hands like a teacher. “How did I know that my thoughts would become self-fulfilling, Gary? I’m still not sure I understand my own carpool. But one day, while I cried in my beer, going on about wanting to shoot Bill Clinton of all things, the feds recorded me. They had a mike on my neighbor.”

        “YOU WANTED TO KILL BILL CLINTON?”

        “Cute, huh? The guy next door goaded me into flapping away into the tape recorder.” Harry sat and cradled his head in his arms. “From there on it was down hill,” he said.

        If Harry had been a truck, it would have been a dump truck. His whole life would soon be plopped in a pile on the ground for the world to pick through. From the moment the federal government inserted its mighty proboscis into Harry’s head, everything he could have dreamed in his wildest Libertarian fantasies began to come true. He was monitored on the phone, observed and followed about, photographed, typed and classified. His likeness was faxed here and there amid the different agencies throughout the federal web and in the end he was made the object of an intense probe by the Department of Justice and more particularly, the Secret Service whose sole responsibility was to protect the President.

        Among these invasive episodes there occurred a series of interviews, held in Harry’s apartment, in which he was encouraged to let his feelings out and trust in Uncle Sam to do the right thing. Harry was contrite and uncommunicative at first, not believing the outrageousness of the whole thing. But by coaxing and bullying and by promises and lies, the feds were able to get him to relent, expose himself as a dreamer of great fictions, and in the name of therapeutic revelation and for a pledge of clinical help, seal his own fate. In spite of knowing better, Harry trusted in the clean-cut Wally Cleaver types to understand him and to recognize in him the unreal world of imploding hallucination which he had been living with and dying with in the lonely cocoon of his mind.

        The feds, of course, were very happy to have found such a dangerous man. If your job is to save the President, you might as well save him from someone who’s completely cooperative.

        In court the agents denied their treachery in coercing the confessions and ignored any evidence of the disturbed defendant’s illness, claiming Harry was perfectly rational and was not a “NUT” but a “MENACE.”  He was awfully gullible, really, when you think about it. Instead of an understanding father figure to tuck him in and check under the bed for monsters, little ignorant Harry got the pointiest stick, the hottest poker, the sharpest scythe the feds could fashion, and in the courtroom they shaded the truth of it all to make him out as the Charles Manson of the assassination set. They said they were trying to PREVENT a crime. When they were finished, Harry the history teacher became a masterful political executioner of the far right fringe, a man that only a James Bond could ever hope to defuse unless something was done RIGHT NOW.  In the end, Harry B____  was convicted of conspiring to kill the leader of the free world.