Let's Hope Everyone Washes His Hands. By Jeff Smith THIS IS THE day the world changes. Like, and yet unlike, the prologue to 2001: A Space Odyssey when we see prehistoric hominid's first tool--a murder weapon, it turns out--hurled skyward in a portentous, slow-motion arc, this meeting of ours will leave each of us forever changed. Read on and know that you have left a place to which you can never return. Not to sweat: Nobody's going to whack you on the melon with a bone. Unlike 2001, which dealt with technology and its dehumanizing implications, today's historic watershed is in the realm of ideas. Literary and philosophical ones. Allow me to digress, briefly and not too far afield, to acknowledge my debt to James Burke, for the lede of this piece. Burke produced an excellent series of documentaries for PBS, each keyed to a pivotal event, after which civilization was significantly altered. Most of Burke's episodes keyed to familiar events--Galileo's discovery of a non-Earth centered universe, for instance--and the myriad ways in which they changed things. At the other end of the continuum is your butterfly fart in the Congo, which sets in motion a chain of events culminating in some guy in Seattle being late for the opera. Or the last day of mankind. This one lies somewhere in between. Sticks and stones can break your bones, but contrary to Mother Goose, words can hurt you worse. I like to imagine a day deep in Anglo-Saxon history when a mob of serfs are contesting, say, the haunch of a hart left uneaten after m'lord's Sunday barbecue. The biggest and meanest takes the whole joint and trudges off to his hovel to gorge himself alone, and the rest glare at him in impotent rage...until an anointed one steps from the crowd and calls after the lout, "You...you...you ASSHOLE!" No one has ever called anyone this before. It's blunt. It's graphic in a way no insult ever has been before. It is divinely inspired. I imagine the clouds parting and a shaft of heavenly light illuminating the speaker's face, while the rest prostrate themselves in awe. At points such as these history has pivoted upon the power of a single word. The words I wish to share with you today deal with personal responsibility, a subject that occupied my pensive moments these last few years. Some of you may have wondered at my infatuation with armaments. Part of the attraction lies in a fascination with machinery, things that have heft and substance and intricate interworkings of carefully sculpted parts. Like motorcycles. Metallic stuff that makes a great racket. Another part of me responds to the implicit self-reliance and responsibility one accepts when one goes abroad armed. This world is full of wonderful things, and a few not so wonderful. Things that can hurt you. In the ultimate extreme I would like to be able to prevent the preventable hurts, and I do not believe it is anyone's job but my own to see to it. It was during one such internal dialogue that I was blinded by the light of a literary epiphany. This has happened before: I grew up in a talkative family that was pretty well-grounded in the written word. We were less than an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters, but we did manage to combine sufficient words and ideas in such a way that occasionally someone blurted out something nearly brilliant. Sometimes our brilliance betrayed us and what we blurted tended more toward idiot than savant, but still there was wit in it. "She was all up in a heaval," came from my mother's Aunt Dot. Liza, my dearest daughter, was enlightening me on the evils of tyranny one afternoon, approaching her summation when her tongue came unhooked from her brain and "police state," which is what she meant to say, could only dribble out as "big, martial law place." One of the reasons we both love the Second Amendment and act out that love is our fear and loathing of living in a big martial law place. I myself first observed, "What is a libertine, after all, but a libertarian with a hard-on?" And it was my friend Jeff Dytko who first said something everybody in the English-speaking world says, so often it has become a cliché and a country-and- western song: "No matter where you go, there you are." He said it because a friend was moving to Oregon to change his life, of which he had made a mess. Dytko was skeptical the behavior patterns which threatened to ruin this man's life would be left behind when he fled the desert for the forest, and he put his doubts in such unconscious poetry that I was compelled to share it with the world. But Dytko hasn't seen dime one of royalties from his creation, even though Clint Black probably has pocketed millions from the song he made of it. I'm not giving away the ranch another time. My ruminations on responsibility--the moral imperative that one mend one's mistakes, amend one's misdeeds, tidy up one's messes--produced the insight to which I earlier alluded, and this aphorism, which should secure my place in history: A man's got to wipe his own ass.

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