"Speaking as a judge," he continued, "I dismiss this case on several grounds. The State is clinically insane as a corporate entity and is absolutely unfit to arrest, try and incarcerate those who disagree with its policies. But I doubt that this judgment, though obvious to any man of common sense, quite fits into the rules of our American jurisprudential game. I also rule, therefore, that the right to destroy government property is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and therefore the crime with which these people are charged is not a crime under the Constitution. Government property belongs to all of the people, and the right of any of the people to express displeasure with their government by destroying government property is precious and shall not be infringed." This doctrine had come to Judge Bushman suddenly while he was speaking without his robe. It startled him, but he had noticed that his mind was working better and faster this afternoon.
He went on, "The State does not exist as a person or thing exists, but is a legal fiction. A fiction is a form of communication. Anything said to be owned by a form of communication must also thereby be itself a form of communication. Government is a map and government paper is a map of the map. The medium, in this case, is definitely the message, as any semanticist would agree. Furthermore, any physical act directed against a communication is itself a communication, a map of the map of the map. Thus, destruction of government property is protected by the First Amendment. I will issue a more ample written opinion on this point, but I feel now that the defendants need suffer in durance no longer. Case dismissed."
Many spectators trooped out of the courtroom sullenly, while those who loved the defendants surrounded them with tears, laughter and hugs. Judge Bushman, who stepped down from the bench but remained in the courtroom, was the benign center of a cluster of reporters. (He was thinking that his opinion would be a map of the map of the map of the map, or a fourth-order map. How many potential further orders of symbolism were there? He barely heard the praises showered on him. Of course, he knew his decision would be overturned; but the judge business already bored him. It would be interesting to get into mathematics, really deep.)
Harold Canvera had not bothered to fill out a questionnaire and therefore was not under observation and was not protected. He returned to his home, and his job as an accountant, and his avocation, which was recording telephone spiels against the Illuminati, the Communists, the Socialists, the Liberals, the Middle-of-the-Roaders and all insufficiently conservative Republicans. (Mr. Canvera also mailed out similar pamphlets whenever anybody was intrigued enough by his phone messages to send him twenty-five cents for additional information. He performed these worthy educational services for a group calling itself White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism, which was a splinter off Taxpayers Warring Against Tyranny, which was a splinter off God's Lightning.) In the following weeks, however, strange new ideas began to appear in Canvera's taped phone messages.
"Lower taxes aren't enough," he said, for instance. "When you hear some so-called conservative Bircher or some follower of William Buckley Jr. call for lower taxes, beware. There's a man who's squishy soft on IIluminism. All taxes are robbery. Instead of attacking Joan Baez, a real American should support her for refusing to pay any more money into the Illuminati treasury in Washington."
The next week was even more interesting: "White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism has often told you that there's no real difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Both are pawns of the Illuminati scheme to destroy private property and make everybody a slave of the State, so the International Bankers of a certain minority group can run everything. Now it's time for all thinking patriots to take an even more skeptical look than ever before at the so-called anti-Il-luminati John Birch Society. Why are they always putting up those stickers saying, 'Support Your Local Police'? Ever wonder about that? What's the most important thing to a police state? Isn't it police? And if we got rid of the police, how could we ever have a police state? Think about it, fellow Americans, and Remember the Alamo!"
A few of these new strange ideas had come from various right-wing anarchist periodicals (all secretly subsidized by Hagbard Celine) that Canvera had mysteriously received three months earlier and hadn't glanced at until swallowing the AUM. The periodicals had been mailed by Simon Moon, as a joke, in an envelope with the return address Illuminati International, 34 East 68th Street, New York City- the headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations, long regarded by the Birchers as an Illuminati hotbed. "Remember the Alamo," Canvera had picked up from Bowie Knife, a publication of the Davy Crockett Society, a paramilitary right-wing fascist group which had splintered off God's Lightning when their leader, a Texas oil millionaire of gigantic paranoias, became convinced that many apparent Mexicans were actually Red Chinese agents in slight disguise. Later, the dogma became retroactive and he claimed that the Chinese had always been Communists, all Mexicans had always been Chinese, and the attack on the Alamo was the first Communist assault against American capitalism.
The third week was quite remarkable. Evidently, AUM, like LSD, changed some personality traits but left others fairly intact; in any event, in Canvera's irregular evolution from right-wing authoritarianism to right-wing libertarianism, he had somehow managed to arrive at a thesis never before enunciated except by Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade. What this rare man did was to give a three-minute spiel in favor of the right of any person, of either sex, to use any other person, of either sex, with or without their consent, for sexual gratification of any sort needed or at least desired. The only option he granted the recipients of these intimate invasions was the reciprocal right to use the initiator for their own needs or desires. Now, most of the people who regularly called Canvera's phone service were not offended by any of this; they were Lincoln Avenue hippies and dialed him only when stoned, for what they called "a really weird and far-out head trip," and they were bored that he was no longer as funky as in his old Negro-baiting, Jew-hating and Illuminati-castigating days. However, there were a few members of White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism who called occasionally to check that their contributions were still financing the dissemination of true Americanism, and these people were severely puzzled and finally disturbed. Some of them even wrote to WHORE headquarters in Mad Dog, Texas, to complain that there was something a little bit peculiar in the Americanism lately. However, the president of WHORE, Dr. Horace Naismith, who also ran the John Dillinger Died for You Society, Veterans of the Sexual Revolution, and the Colossus of Yorba Linda Foundation, was in it only for the money, sad to say, and had no time for such petty complaints. He was too busy implementing his newest fund-raising scheme, the Male Chauvinist Organization (MACHO), which he hoped would milk mucho denaros from Russ Meyers, illegal abortionists, pimps, industrialists who regularly paid female workers thirty percent of the salaries of men doing the same jobs, and all others threatened by the Women's Liberation Movement.