No Special Features; No Alternate Ending

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I strongly recommend that when the DVD of the Reagan funeral is made available all lovers of liberty get a copy and watch it. Indeed, study it.

Because more mercilessly than ever I could, it will unfold what we are up against. More than any handy reminder or a book of quotations, that DVD will serve to impress upon you the immensity of the task before us, the expansiveness of the battle that still lies ahead. Watch it and see there the monster strutting his unmasked glory and showing us the crushing strength of the fist by which he holds your neighbors in its thrall. See there, ladies and gentlemen, the Cult of the State.

Anyone who imagines that this monster is to be fought with the political weapons it itself grants us, who dreams that political action will unseat it, who indulges the fancy that participating in its rites will overthrow it has simply failed even to discern the outline of this great enemy.

The State is like one of those serial image, random-dot, stereogram pictures. You look at it and study it and think you have seen it. You imagine that the two-dimensional world it presents can be manipulated by two-dimensional activities. But a spectacle such as Ronald Reagan's funeral has afforded us is like that inexplicable moment when, staring at the picture, suddenly the childish drawings you were looking at disappear and another as complex as time emerges. You feel as though you have fallen into the page, and you see the three-dimensional image of the ancient, magnificent horror that was there all along, bellowing, but you did not hear. It takes your breath away.

At first you may gasp and cry out with Chief Brody, "We're gonna need a bigger boat!"

But it's not a bigger boat you need. You need to get out of the water. We swim in the water of the State all our lives; but it is not until such a display as this funeral, when we momentarily glimpse the monster, its arresting, cloacal beauty inspiring us at once to gasp with awe and to gag with nausea, that we see at last it is not armed with stingers or teeth as we had thought. We see it commands tentacles that writhe in the heart of the sea and stretch throughout it, over its floor and into it, their girth dwarfing Yggdrasil, the knots they create Gordian. Only then can we come to our senses and say, "This is no place for a man."

It dwarfs our nightmares, and our sanity will not quite allow us to believe that what we have seen is either real or humanly imaginable. Mental defense mechanisms strain to protect our violated intellects, and they tell us that it was not, could not have been, as terrible as we think we might once have remembered.

So I say: get the DVD when it comes out. Play only a little at a time: none of us is strong enough to face it full. And don't bother looking for special features: it comes with no alternate endings.

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