You have heard the term “isotope” many times.  Do you know what it means?  It describes an odd class of atom, some of which work, some of which don’t and some of which prove that the ancient dream of alchemy, the transmutation of elements is a fact of everyday life.  If Merlin had had big
enough magnets, he could have actually turned iron into gold. 

Stick with me, because this will explain both David Horowitz and a new and rising class of southern black Republicans.  To do it, however, I will have to drop back from modern physics and punt an old ball.  Modern physics is fit only for people who drool and live in rooms with rubber walls.  It is closer to mystical eastern religion than it is to fixing a carburetor.  Modern physics is almost un-American, residing as it does in a fairyland of particles that act like waves without an ocean, and which are both here and not here at any given 
instant.  It’s Alice in Wonderland Cheshire Cat science, fit only for the mentally disturbed.  No, I’ll stick with post-Newtonian, pre-string theory physics, where atoms are things, not music from an instrument that doesn’t exist. 

The most basic atom is hydrogen, a gas at normal Earth temperatures and a liquid on planets far from the sun.  The standard hydrogen atom has one electron (which has a negative charge), and one proton (which has a positive charge).  Your car battery is a model for the hydrogen atom.  It has a
negative pole and a positive pole. 

You may think of the atom as a miniature solar system.  The nucleus is like the sun.  The planets are electrons.  The only change you have to make is to picture the more complex atoms as having electron-planets that orbit the center at every angle, instead of a flat plane like our solar system.  Now, when you add protons to the nucleus of an atom, you add more positive charge to that structure.  Since for stability, like a tightrope walker, you need balance in a natural structure, the adding of more protons creates a problem.  Something must be done.  Thus we have the neutron, a particle with no charge that isn’t rejected by the proton.  (Remember from high school?  Opposite charges attract and like charges repell each other.) 

It isn’t accurate science, but you can think of the neutron as having two really great qualities.  It’s sticky and it insulates protons from each other.  By adding a neutron, you can add a proton, and make a different element.  The whole thing will stick together and work just fine. (Some of the forum readers I admire have visualized a bunch of great political similes and metaphors from this text, already.) 

Now, as I pointed out above, when you add more protons to an atom, it becomes something else.  As you go through the elements from hydrogen to uranium (which has a slew of protons, neutrons and electrons) the thing this atom is becomes different with each alteration.  But, when you add more neutrons without adding a proton, the element doesn’t change.  Oxygen remains oxygen.  It just gains a new number next to its name.  (You’ve heard of uranium 235 and uranium 238.  Both are uranium.) 

But, because of these extra neutrons it is now called an “isotope.”  That’s all an isotope is.  An atom of something that has more neutrons than it needs. 

So, you say, past a certain point, neutrons are useless.  They don’t accomplish anything.  Wrong.  You can pile too many neutrons on an atomic nucleus.  When you do, it becomes unstable.  Since nature constantly tries to equalize everything out (get rid of imbalances, like sending air from a high
pressure area to a low pressure area -- creating wind), something has to happen with this atom.  One kind of thing that can happen to an atom with too many neutrons is for one of the neutrons to shoot off a negatively charged electron, thus altering its own charge to positive and becoming a proton. It’s like pasting in a new proton from outside, but it happens all on its own in there. 

When you overload an oxygen atom with one too many neutrons, it does that electron release thing, and becomes fluorine.  It goes from a gas you must breathe to keep alive to a chemical that taken inside would kill you in seconds.  That one neutron shooting off that tiny electron and turning into a proton was what did it.  The straw that broke the camel’s back. 

Jim Wooten of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution recently wrote a column about a new phenomenon in his neck of the Georgia Pines: black conservatives preaching smaller government, the failure of liberal social welfare programs, personal responsibility, real local control of schools –
all the precepts in which the American Right believes.  He said these folks, if they run for office, will not be elected in the gerrymandered black voting districts of our lifetime.  They’ll have to run in white areas.  J.C. Watts has certainly proven the truth in that observation.  He couldn’t be elected
dog catcher in the South Bronx, but the white folks of Oklahoma sent him to congress. 

The question is, what happened to those Georgia blacks Wooten describes?  Why, in today’s climate of black hate toward black conservatives, would any of them join the Right?  Wooten says that most of them began as hard core liberals, yet have in later years left the fold. What happened to them, apparently, is what happened to David Horowitz, once a driving force for the far left in America.  An organizer, a demonstrator, an author of ridiculous leftist verbage and a founding editor of a bigtime leftist magazine. 

One too many neutrons landed on him.  That’s what happened to all of them.  Neutrons called “facts.”  They don’t have a charge.  They just are. 

It was a tragedy of observational consciousness that got these folks..  They argued for social welfare and other programs, then, unlike most other liberals, noticed that nothing ever got better.  One too many neutrons of truth, a particle unconnected to any ideology, but with a tremendous atomic
weight, slammed into the nucleus between their ears.  The last one was one too many.  The laws of natural balance took over.  It shot off an electron and became a proton.  An atom of liberalism became an atom of conservatism. An ideology that suppresses became an idology that enthuses. Where once was one kind of thinking, there now was an entirely new kind of thinking. 

In the big atomic super-collision machines, they send matter scooting along at the speed of light going clockwise.  Then they send anti-matter scooting along at the speed of light going counter-clockwise.  When the two types meet, they annihilate each other, generating the heat of the interior of the sun in a tiny spot.  This forces normal everyday atoms of stuff to accept neutrons and protons they would normally never even visit, let alone live with.  Stuff becomes other stuff, some of it very unstable, like California.  In fact, one of these unstable, short-lived artificial atomic elements is called Californium. 

That is what our schools, big media and Hollywood are – big smashup machines which turn normal, stable people into freak elements.  But nature will out, eventually.  Californium sheds its extra mass and returns to real world stability in some ridiculously short span of time like a trillionth of a second. 

This should encourage you if you’re a conservative.  There is clear evidence that the natural state of humans is constructed of  (p)articles from the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Liberals are merely human isotopes that have suffered from the impact of too many Begalatrons. (Cosmic BS rays.)  In time, like California, they will decay into something useful.

(LL)  Note: Sept 07 -- recent shocking events at U.C. Berkeley have proven that last line. The faculty banned the distribution of patriotic items, but the students said they wanted that distribution.  The faculty lifted the ban.  Flagwavers at Berkeley, folks.  Leonard's Theory of Political Physics verified in actual experiment!  Someone must notify the Nobel committee.

© 2002 Oregon Magazine