In the past, I have heard and read all sorts of testimonials about killers and rapists and serial killers and serial rapists and all that, and if there is a recurring theme in those "True Crime," Reader's Digest" lessons it is this: Everyone, without exception, is horrified that the bad guys were allowed to roam the streets of our towns with impunity, having been released countless times by judges and jailers with no sense of proportion.

Now I meet Harry. He THOUGHT a crime. One crime in his whole life while he was very sick, and must do at least five years on a six year bid to pay for his incontinent mind. He never stole cars as a kid or toasted kittens on the bar-b-que with his teen pals. He didn't show any children his weenie at the mall or shoot out windows in neighborhood houses. He grew up, went to college, joined the Air Force, taught History and Comparative Literature in high school and came down with a whopping case of clinical depression in the middle years of his life.

The feds will say that he knew the law and that he did what he did anyway.

DID WHAT? He was ENCOURAGED to discuss his delusions with the agents just as if they were Doctors. They obfuscated his right to shut up. He was ASKED to come clean so that help could be granted and understanding and love could be dispensed because, as we in prison all know, loneliness and desperation cloud judgment. Then, when he committed the confession, his Libertarian fears were realized and off he went to the slammer - a dangerous man. Okay, I realize that threatening to kill the President is a crime. But this kind of thing should be looked at in the spirit for which it was designed because otherwise, we all must admit to homicide in our hearts. Barroom talk might be courtroom evidence any time someone gets a notion to roast his buddy on the next stool over.

True assassins, it seems to me, just ain't as malleable or tender or prone to beery confession as what those agents with the raises and the promotions made Harry out to be.

Harry's defeated posture, as if gravity for him is more contentious than it is for the rest of us, gives no credence to his laugh and no support or forgiveness for a failed patriotic past. What can be said with certainty, though, is that Harry has something to live for now and he has people around him who understand some of the hurt. Convicts, it must be said, tend to listen and to forgive. He lives as a justified Paul Revere, correct in his assessment of the common man's withering rights. A Libertarian no longer wronged in fantasy but in fact, Harry is living, breathing proof of all he feared and fretted over, a casualty of the thought police, a burn victim in the on-going forest fire of control coming from Washington.

But in a way, prison has helped Harry regain a touch of equilibrium and focused his sense of irony. Everything is not so serious anymore. If he's depressed, at least he has something concrete to blame. What if he was never put in jail? He might have killed himself fooling around with that gun. And now when he teaches history, he can do it with a sense of his real participation in the course of things because according to his P.S.R., Bill Clinton was briefed about Harry and the assassination plot. In his literature classes (he'll have to teach them in the park or under a bridge somewhere) a full range of emotion will be felt: passion, humor, rage, fear, irony, lust... He'll be a poet and a star. Jobs will open up for him in constitutional circles. He might be a speaker on the lecture circuit. And really, if the feds think Harry is so dangerous, why are they gonna let him out in five years now that he's pissed off for real. Surely they can find something to charge him with. Maybe they'll build a whole prison, like Spandau, just for Harry to holler in.

My friend Harry is easily recognizable. He's the gullible Gulliver traveling our imagination holding a big, round, black bomb in his lap. The fuse is sputtering only seconds from ignition and there is a maniacal grin on his sad-eyed, history teaching face. We all must digest this new reality, a reality not of reason but of cartoon pratfalls, a Mad-Magazine, Spy-vs-Spy, Boris-and-Natasha panoply of evil lurking in the minds of men and God bless our ever-diligent pillars of light who take pride in holding up the banner of freedom for all except, of course, the roving bands of murderous assassins and teachers out to get the Commander In Chief.

When I listened to Harry I heard fear's echo and the timbre of lost passions, and I saw before me a man who's educational roots in history and literature, even after all he had suffered, still forced him to see things in perpendicular manses and colonial foundations on fertile fields of America's past. The ringing of anthems and hymns, so out of tune now in this new place, were still part of his heritage and a wounded spectre in secret dreams at night.

Looking at the tragedy of his incarceration, I see the wide bleak involvement of our government in everyday lives and have no confidence in the kindness humans might ordinarily display towards one another in a rational world. As the federal authorities stack the deck in their delusional attempts to protect themselves from the people they claim to represent, more and more Harrys will be stranded and ruined and left to rot in the federal gulag.

My heart goes out to anyone with the courage to fight back but the war may very well have been lost long ago when our leaders decided to structure a set of laws to bypass the constitution, protecting the kings and queens and princes from the peasants they've decided to piss on. I hope Harry lives to become a royal pain in their asses but for now, he must be content to be a foaming-at-the-mouth, would-be killer of Bill.

THE END