The Essential Maggie McNeill, Volume I: Collected Essays from \ by Maggie McNeill

The Essential Maggie McNeill, Volume I: Collected Essays from \ Reviews

• 
  Pedro L. Fragoso

  If you love to be alive, to enjoy some degree of freedom, if you yearn for a world of some justice and balance, if you try to guide your live with values of respect for others, and some rationality of reasoning, if in a world of wanton stupidity you can’t but admire and cultivate the human capabilities of intelligent thought and compassion, if you find an articulate, well founded polemic argument something to cherish, if… (well, you get the drift of it), then Maggie McNeill is your lighthouse in the dark, stormy nights of our current predicament.
  
  Blue pill, red pill; the other side of the looking glass; the world how it ought to be… “The Honest Courtesan” was one of the most important intellectual discoveries of my life and its author one the best, and the most important, of living essayists on the subjects that matter most, namely freedom, individual responsibility, and the human condition.
  
  Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, a propos of “non-fiction” that “not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought.” It so happens that, as Maggie McNeill can’t write a dull phrase, reading her is, in content as in form, a rare treat. I think that the other essayist I could, maybe, place at the same height, is the late Christopher Hitchens (the entries in Arguably are the level here, I’d venture).
  
  Anyway, I now hope that Maggie manages to keep the collections coming.
  
  The whole glorious text is eminently quotable, of course; here are a few morsels:
  
  “Nobody can pinpoint exactly when the goal of universal criminality, long sought by the ruling class, was finally achieved; all we can say is that it was sometime during the 20th century, an era which opened with the criminalization of dozens of private, consensual behaviors (ranging from non-marital sex to intoxicant use) and closed with the “tough on crime” laws, “drug war” escalation and discarding of the concept of criminal intent in the 1990s.”
  
  “It’s true that, as Voltaire said, “It’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong”; however, our government is so totally out of control that even following all the laws one knows of to the letter is no guarantee against destruction. The “law-abiding” citizen is a thing of the past, so it’s better to do what one knows to be right even if it’s illegal, because everyone is constantly in violation of some law anyhow.”
  
  “Police, prosecutors and other government actors who enforce such laws are not legitimate authorities, but rather the myriad tentacles of a mad, amorphous abomination flailing about wildly in its delirium and killing or maiming everything with which it comes into contact.”
  
  “To prohibitionists, human rights, happiness and even life are subsidiary to “sending a message”, and the cost of that message can never be too great. Various penalties proposed for the “crime” of drinking included torture, whipping, branding, imprisonment in Alaskan concentration camps, sterilization, enforced celibacy and even execution; some wanted the punishments applied to drinkers’ children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. Others plotted to execute drinkers stealthily by releasing poisoned alcohol through undercover agents posing as bootleggers; they understood that the death toll could be in the hundreds of thousands but declared that a “price worth paying” for an alcohol-free society.”
  
  “A free society is based on the conviction that every adult person has the right to make his or her own decisions, even if others don’t like those decisions or consider them foolish and/or self-destructive. Sex, whether or not one ascribes mystical qualities to it, is among the most personal of behaviors; it is therefore even less appropriate a realm for government interference than many others. Nobody but an individual has the right to decide which willing partners he will engage with, nor what their characteristics should be, nor how many at one time, nor how long the arrangement between them should last, nor why they choose to make that arrangement in the first place.”
  
  “But when we recognize that self-ownership and personal agency are the birthrights of every single sentient being, governmental abrogation of those rights is seen for what it truly is: Violation. Usurpation. Theft. Rape.”
  
  “While I understand why many activists and allies argue decriminalization from human rights, libertarian or harm reduction viewpoints, and indeed use these arguments myself because they are all valid ones, it’s sad that almost nobody wants to acknowledge another, equally important factor: human society needs whores every bit as much as it needs farmers, soldiers, physicians and builders, and far more than it needs preachers, academic feminists, politicians and 90% of the other control freaks who work so assiduously at rousing the rabble against us.”
  
  “But for now, I’ll have to content myself with urging activists and allies to stop ceding ground to prohibitionists by pretending that prostitution is an evil to be tolerated rather than a good to be celebrated.”