Archives for May 2019

A Phoenician maiden forced, as it were, to become a Jovian victim if only then to accede to the lofty position of continental queen, Europa trod a quite difficult path through the course of her mythological life. Hers was, doubtless, a most unexpected journey, combining both trauma and triumph in what would come to us moderns as a tale remarkable in every way. Certainly, as any student of hers or of the now tenuous landmass by whose name she’s remembered knows well, it wasn’t a journey upon which she embarked voluntarily. Indeed, she hadn’t a say in the matter being, as she was, forcibly thrust toward her fate. Such is the insuperability of the cosmos, a lesson well-learned and better mythologized by the Greeks. Innocent at its start though puissant at its end, it was a journey at whose middle Europa was damaged inalterably and unforgettably. Perhaps more crudely, put it another way, she was ravished somewhere in between.

Slightly tongue-in-cheek—which is, in my perverse opinion, the only way in which one ought ever to carry his face—I mean this in both a literary and anatomic sense. Almighty Zeus—most prurient among a Pantheon of sex-addicted deities—transmuted himself from a heavenly to a taurine form. In a flash, he became an impressive-looking bull, one moment godly and the next grazing in a field over which Europa and her family presided. Obviously enamored of her, she reciprocated Zeus’s interest with an exploration of this strange, new, divine-bovine addition to her father’s herd. Seeing it only fit to test the fitness of this magical beast, Europa—unencumbered by caution and youthfully curious—hopped upon its back.

Zeus, in that moment, sensed not only Europa’s nubile limbs astride his back (undoubtedly enough to render unstable with excitement even his lordly knees), but his chance to get away as well. His celerity was accelerated by his providential lust, and he quickly availed himself of the opportunity to escape. Alacritous, amorous, and now shockingly amphibious to boot, the bull that was Zeus leapt into the Mediterranean Sea and decided, amongst all available options of locomotion, to swim away. From the coast of present-day Lebanon to the still-ancient island of Crete, this ambitious cousin of the cow endured over six-hundred miles in an inhospitable sea. Exactly how he propelled himself, we mustn’t tempt an answer. In the name of lust, much more so than in that of love, men and gods have accomplished the most unlikely and extraordinary of feats.

That said, landing upon the beaches of that insular progenitor of the Greeks, Zeus was finally, literally able to consummate his plan. Tired from the long and arduous swim across the deep but indefatigably tumescent as always is his wont, he brought to bed that lovely Europa. Under the ephemeral cover of night and of love, he planted in her womb his Titan-slaying seed. The former proved unsurprisingly virile, the latter welcomingly fertile. This amorous job of his now finished and his sex-drive at least momentarily appeased, Zeus thought it best now to go back home. Hera, already notorious in this dawn of mythology for the capaciousness of her wrath, awaited with vexation his quiet return. The epitome of jealously, she despised his assignations, frequent as they were. Anticipating the English playwright William Congreve, Zeus knew full well that Hades hath no fury like a Hera scorned. As such, he hastened back to his peremptory queen and the Olympus whence he descended to indulge himself with this European fling—one of his many seminal dalliances that would form around him his macho-myth. 

Europa, having played the part of mortal mistress par excellence, now found herself living in a completely unfamiliar land. Little did she know, her transition (a euphemism, if you will, for what seems to me an abduction) from Phoenicia to Crete was one-way. There would be no return flight, be it on the wings of an eagle (an animal by which Zeus often was identified) or the back of a bull. She was stranded. An involuntary voyager, a wayward Gilligan turned accidental founder of the young nation of Greece, Europa’s life started anew. A colonist by necessity (or, as we might more accurately put it, by Zeus’s rather shameless lechery), she became the island’s de facto queen. It was now her responsibility to govern the very civilization from whose genius all modern forms of government would emerge.

A question here lingers: over whom was she to govern? History, in response to this seemingly humble inquiry, remains frustratingly silent. Yet, so far as the old chronicles of the world are concerned and as far as genealogy cares to look into the matter, Europa is important for having been the woman by whom the great King Minos was born. After her unwitting assignation with the lord Zeus, she’s relevant because of her quasi-divine yet fully Cretan son, Minos. He, rather than she, is the Cretan leader of whom we moderns take note. King of Knossos and precedent of imperial Greece (and, by distant extension, of Rome as well), it was Minos who made the bull—the very creature by whom he was sired—a national emblem by which we recognize the origins of Western civilization to this day.

Perhaps, if we’re to examine him critically and accept as possible his rather dubious historicity, he was slightly biased toward the beast by whom he was begotten. And who among us would blame him for being so kindly disposed toward his own kin? So skewed an assessment in favor of one’s father surely isn’t a bias particular to him. And so, with leniency, we chastise him not. This, we might remember, is a fault of which all men are guilty; we esteem far too reverently and judge far too generously the men upon whom our own lives depend. This sort of daddy deification begins the moment we begin to think. Our fathers become our exemplars, regardless of their merits or sins. Indeed, a high threshold need be breached if we’re to be disabused of this notion. That being said, and that being a mistake common to us all, we forgive Minos this. Surely, we can chalk up his totemic celebration of his father-bull to an exuberant and overly-reverent sense of paternal piety—a sentiment to which we’re all bound. We do so, as he certainly did, if only to preserve his and beloved mythology.

After the rape (a word, mind you, synonymous with what might be called an “abduction”; hence the rape of the Sabine women by the founder of Rome was more a matter of thievery than of venery) of Europa by the Jovian bull, the animal responsible for her deflowering became an absolute idol in the nascent Mediterranean world. Indeed, speaking of synonyms, the beast became a byword for the Cretan civilization as a whole. Famously and quite daringly, children of that unassuming island became internationally known for their ability to leap over and dance around charging bulls. Theirs was, in retrospect, an encouragingly clement alternative to the bloodthirsty matadors of today—whose gratuitous craft is in a long-awaited decline. No culture of antiquity of which I’m aware quite equals in splendor the acrobatic suppleness or the intrepid devotion of this breathtaking act. What’s more, the images of so athletic a maneuver upon Cretan walls and vases are astonishingly well-preserved, having been first memorialized literally thousands of years ago. At Knossos, that forgotten capital of the Western world, they still can be seen. Pliant and radiant, lithe and illustrative, these images give us unmatched access to a civilization hushed into quietude and yet, by any measure, boisterously resonant.  

The bull, now sexual-deviant now societal-hero, would be manifested once more—this time, in his most unforgettable iteration. He’d become the insatiable, gnarled, brutish, and nasty Minotaur—bane of Athens and all tribute states alike. Something of a pagan portmanteau, the great beast’s name leaves little to the imagination: he was part Minoan and thus human, and part bull (Taurus, or course—by which we know the constellation—is Greek for “bull”). The story of his conception and his nativity is much more shocking than that even of King Minos—begotten, as you’ll recall, of the strange encounter between the abstinent Europa and the deviant Zeus.

Fantastically and—as soon will be made clear—punitively, the Minotaur was conceived by King Minos’ own neglect. In order to solidify his unelected position atop Crete, the new king supplicated the god of earthquakes and the ocean—Poseidon. This chief maritime god understandably mattered most to an island enclosed on all sides by the wide-ranging sea. Omnipotent in this medium as was Zeus up above, Poseidon was called and, ever prompt in his dealings or wrath, responded with haste. The god sent the king an albino bull, doubtless a marvel to behold. The implicit agreement, however, was for Minos to sacrifice the bull in homage to Poseidon.

Smitten with its unique, colorless beauty, Minos decided against slaughtering it and instead chose to keep it for himself. Perhaps hoping to make an addition to his burgeoning Minoan menagerie, the king hid the alabaster bull by which he was so wondrously taken. Feebly, he offered to Poseidon an ordinary bull plucked from his herd and brought it to the alter in the other one’s place. Poseidon, often capricious yet seldom humorous, wasn’t the least bit amused. Mind you, this was a god whose injured pride would later cause the noble Odysseus to spend a toilsome decade at sea—ten years appended to those already spent at Troy.

In response to this insolent offence, Poseidon forced Pasiphae, Minos’s human wife, to become enamored of the great white bull. He had loved it (and, having loved it, brazenly sequestered it from the god) and now, so would she. The now cuckolded king could do nothing to prevent his wife from satisfying her desire. Another instance of Cretan coition between human and beast was on the horizon and Minos was helpless to intervene.

This consummation a bit more difficult to achieve, Pasiphae was made to outsource her amours. She turned to the ingenious Daedalus—chief craftsman of the land and father of the fallen Icarus. In loyal service to his queen, in short-order Daedalus created for her a vestibule in which she could entice the great beast, a hollowed-out heifer to which the grand white bull couldn’t help but be attracted. Having manufactured his design to every bestial, royal specification provided, he built this odd contraption of conception and showed his queen the way. Beaming, the infatuated Pasiphae climbed on in, as later the bull did on her. The result, presumably nine months hence, was the Minotaur—half man, half bull, and a fully terrible sight to behold. Unlike King Minos—himself similarly born of a woman and a bull, albeit one in the shape of a god—the Minotaur was grotesque. He had no natural home and his diet was rather ungenial to the better part of his human race. Thus, he was immured within the walls of the labyrinth, a circuitous maze for whose construction the reliable Daedalus was recalled.

More need not be said of the ghastly Minotaur’s tale, as his story already has reached a near universal level of literacy. In brief, though, valiant Theseus, founder and champion of Athens, eventually navigated his way through the labyrinth at whose center the monster awaited his annual feast. There, he slew him and hurried back home, doubtless too quickly, as his sails were improperly raised. That was in itself a tragedy, but our new hero was solaced by having ended the devotional sacrifice of his fellow Grecian youth. Forevermore, mainland Greece from Cretan hegemony would be free. And the bull, for all time to come, a distant memory.

Alyssa Milano, an actress of middling theatrical renown but of increasing political relevance, has called upon her sisters-at-arms to initiate what she’s calling a “sex-strike”. Though not a particularly novel idea (the Greek comedian Aristophanes inaugurated it on the Athenian stage), the declaration of so abstemious a decree was bound to arouse the attention of every self-respecting man toward whom it was intended. It certainly has caused quite a stir amongst men and women alike. The feminine response has been tepid; that of the male, expected. It’s struck not only fear but flaccidity into the masculine heart and head (and exactly which “head” is the one of which I speak, I’ll leave to you, indecent reader, to decide) and Milano’s call has been taken under the strongest advisement.

The purpose of her recently announced coital embargo, her ambitious penile prohibition of an impracticable sort, is apparently to stir into action those ladies who stand athwart the idea that abortions need be constrained. Lately, and quite distressingly if you ask Ms. Milano and those for whom she’s come to be considered an intellectual leader on the Democratic side, a succession of conservative state legislatures have been passing increasingly stringent abortion bills. The name most commonly applied to said bills is that of a “Heartbeat”—a reference to the time at which the unborn child’s ventricle contracts and produces its incipient beat.  

This type of bill, anathema to everything for which the political left has stood over the course of past fifty-odd years, would enjoin a pregnant woman from receiving an abortion at any point following the detection of a fetal heartbeat. In accordance with the normal process of gestational development, this usually tends to occur at around the sixth week—the point at which the first trimester, comprising twelve weeks in all, might easily be split into two. You might think of it as the entr’acte of the woman enceinte—the cut-off point after which the child can’t be cut out.

Presently, in most states, the allotment of time during which an abortion can be performed without any legal ramification is about twenty-two weeks, quite deep into the second of the harrowing three trimesters. At that point, a woman’s belly is quite demonstrably plump and no amount of long-flowing maternal trousseau will succeed in concealing this often-cumbersome fact.  

Important to note here is that the Heartbeat bill, restrictive though it may be, places no interdiction on the woman’s ability to have an abortion prior to her sixth week. It simply, and perhaps onerously means that a woman must act to accomplish that end rather fast. If caught by surprise by so unlikely an event as a false-negative pregnancy test, she’ll be made to respond to a literal life-or-death situation with unexpected haste. Unfortunate but true, fertility meets alacrity in this way. The result is an acute diminution on the availability of one’s time to decide. A woman so unenviably burdened would be made to assess herself, her future, and her morals at this very early stage and seek—depending on the conclusion at which she arrived to those difficult above investigations—the care of the requisite health care provider in a much smaller window of time. Yet she still retains the right to secure a medical intervention to abort that which slowly matures from within under circumstances that quickly impress upon her from without. She does so in a manner commensurate with that which would be expected of any other woman living in the most progressive of abortion-promulgating states.

After that time, however, the opportunity to receive an abortion effectively and now legally will have come to its end. Its expiry will have been reached and the baby, notwithstanding some sanguinary voluntary act, will be brought into the world. To Milano and the bien pensant of the left, this is no good; the time restriction is too soon. And it’s this restriction on the allotment of time during which a woman can legally access an abortion that’s inspired Ms. Milano’s sans-sex decree. With an eye toward its amendment, if not its outright revocation, she’s staked her enthusiastically missionary position to effectuate its end. 

Abstemious but inauspicious, Ms. Milano’s sex-strike is very likely to fail. The reasons for this are many and perhaps needn’t my explanation here. But, the moment compels me and the time is free.

For one, her treatment of sex is as though it were an entirely commercial act—not at all consistent with the way in which any actual romantic worth his or her salt imagines it. In her estimation, sex has been transformed from a demonstration of love and commitment into one of callous enticement and exchange. Used as both carrot and stick, sex as she sees it is nothing more than a means by which a man is to be manipulated. He’s to be drawn in, tantalized, and finally beaten back. It’s the high and the low of a tireless tumescence thwarted by a continual cooling-off, and that’s no salutary approach to love nor life. In her understanding, it’s a process at whose conclusion a useful expedient is gained and a new power found. It’s a struggle for dominance by that historically and biologically indomitable sex—the female of our species. But intercourse can never be so coarse, and Ms. Milano really ought not to add to the debasement that the act has suffered already.  

Secondly, the women—and by extension, the men—for whom this decree will have any resonance whatsoever are already on the political left. Comfortably and dare I say obdurately, they all agree with her as she expresses them and as things stand. Unless she’s attempting to tap into that small, if not completely illusory segment of the population of liberal women who are enjoying relationships with conservative men, her strike will have no effect. Thus, her sex-strike is essentially stuck within an echo-chamber from which it can’t hope to escape. The only women likely to heed her message are those who already are in agreement with her and the other positions on which she stands—as probably their spouses do as well. These aren’t the people whose minds need to change, nor those whose guiltless mates deserve to suffer.  

Finally, Ms. Milano neglects to consider the fact that many women might actually be of the pro-life position. Indeed, they may vehemently be so nobly-inclined. Though the temerity of such crazed women, I should hope, will in time prove forgivable, the current statistics are worthy of note. Just about fifty-percent of women consider themselves pro-life. On this schismatic issue, the country’s ladies are nearly at an even split. Naturally though somewhat despairingly, this percentage drops as one’s education gains. It’s a consequence of that odd inverse relationship by which the accumulation of one’s years spent in school tends to diminish the sympathy with which one examines the pro-life point. The more learned, the more lenient you’ll be to the woman. The more urbane, the more unamiable toward the child. Milano misses this point, and by so doing, fails to consider half of the women in the U.S. and their deeply-felt sentiments.

In contrasting the ambitious Ms. Milano with the scurrilous Aristophanes (any critic of Euripides and killer of Socrates—of whom both were contemporaries and superiors, mind you—is no friend of mine), we see the divergence of the actor from the author. The former is playing a part and her fantasy will soon end. Her ill-conceived sex-strike will breathe its last before it has a chance to begin. Aristophanes, on the other hand, wrote and created the world in his Lysistrata as he wanted it to be—a world where sex was the ultimate tool, a veritable weapon of mass fornication—an armory of amorousness. Only on the stage could so potent a weapon be wielded with success by the “gentler” sex.

Recently neglected, if not fully forgotten, is the beautiful line by which our beautifully liberal society once lived: “While I might disapprove of what you have to say”, the immediately recognizable quote begins, “I will defend to the death your right to say it”.

Indeed, without your knowing it, you may have spoken to yourself that subsequent and ultimately defiant line by which it’s deservedly known. In my own thinking and philosophy, this quote is extraordinarily deeply ingrained and, as such, every time I hear its beginning, it elicits in me a nearly autonomic response. To me, when composed and uttered in full, it reads like a secular biblical verse. It’s like a piece of political scripture to which every liberal republic in this congregation of the world must respond. It’s a veritable paean to free speech, an ultimatum of decorum, a full-breasted defense of intercourse—however coarse that may be.

Ultimately, it’s a declaration to the untrammeled right of expression and thought. It’s the very foundation upon which our modern world of ideas is built. It’s the liberty and justice due to all to express their points of view—irrespective of how transgressive or indecorous they may be to a sensitive or a brutish ear.

However well we once knew and passionately we’d once regarded this reverberative and noble line, the author by whom it was conceived remains largely hidden from us today. If asked for its attribution—a probing inquiry into its etymology—you’d surely be surprised at what you’d learn. One would expect, as one was conditioned to think, that the answer would be the preeminently epigrammatic patron saint of sapience—the unceasingly fresh and vibrant Voltaire. He’s the man, after all, from whom all bon mots and happy sayings originate and derive their vital force. But he’s far from the only thinker to which such delectable and enduring aphorisms can be ascribed. Shakespeare, Franklin, and Twain are the others—Emerson, to round out this unexpected list of Americans, might be as well—but this greatest of lines in defense of free speech was the product of Evelyn Beatrice Hall—a biographer of Voltaire of a relatively minor order.

So Voltairean is Hall’s statement, however, that most believe it to have been uttered by the sage himself. History and the increasingly overlooked eloquence of Hall have largely failed in disabusing us of this misbegotten belief, but we can’t help not to congratulate and further to celebrate Voltaire for what you might call his indirect creation. At the very least, we tip our hats to him, as did Hall, for his inspiration.

Our society needs to recapture this line—inspired by Voltaire and inscribed by Hall. And at the risk of sounding out my feelings on this matter in too peremptory a tone, we ought to stir ourselves to do so rather quickly. The reason that I think so alacritous a response is necessary is that, as it stands, free speech is in a bad way. As if injured, it presents itself before us with a crutch and a limp. It certainly isn’t the sanguine color of its youth, but an acquired black and blue, and should we retreat henceforth from tending to its care with solicitude and tact, it may prove permanently damaged. It’s suffering at the moment from a sort of neo-Puritanism and prudishness that’s hampering the free commerce of ideas and the sometimes lucrative, though often impoverished exchange of thought. But the value isn’t always in what is said, but that it’s said at all.

Though perhaps he didn’t utter the above quoted line, Voltaire was nevertheless perpetually concerned about the status of free speech. Being a speaker and a writer of a provocatively free bent, one can understand the acuity of his interest in so weighty and consequential a matter. His bread and his income (so short in supply at century’s end during the age of revolutionary France—for whose instigation Voltaire is said to have played no small role) was dependent on his unfettered ability to speak. Yet this ability, considered by the censorious legislators of Paris an illegality, caused him twice to be locked away in prison. He spread ribald rumors about the regent and his buxom daughter—intimating an incestuous relationship between the two—and was in possession of so sharp a tongue that it nearly brought him head-on into a duel. It was at this time, exasperated with the stifling prudishness and hypocrisy of the Parisian ruling class, that he set his eyes and his heart upon England.

Bacon he loved best and Newton was—in his seldom humble opinion—a veritable god amongst men. Yet the man in whose writings he may have found the greatest source of comfort and encouragement was the most potent and polemical of all Protestants, the inimitable John Milton. Doubtless, Voltaire was aware of Milton’s earlier work. Indeed, all of the continent must have been, as his contribution to the Western canon was singularly vital from the very start. No work on theodicy, no literary exploration of the wretched plight of humans and demons and the damned was of higher estimation than was his Paradise Lost. The man to whom we look for this astonishing piece of work’s closest competition was an Italian who went by the mononym Dante—a man exiled, disillusioned, and filled with unrequited love. That said, he lived three centuries before the emergence of Milton and the canon expanded now to include two.

Fancying himself something of a devil in his own right, Voltaire likely enjoyed the presence of Milton’s fallen protagonist—a figure with whom he doubtless had sympathy. But had he read Milton’s Areopagitica, he surely would’ve been more than a little bit moved. Composed in the middle of the seventeenth-century when the English Civil War as at its fullest tilt, Areopagitica is a literary man’s most ardently and eloquently liberal appeal. He crafted it in opposition to England’s newfangled licensing and censorship laws, introduced toward the sanguinary and premature culmination of Charles I’s reign. The aptly-named Rump and Long and Short Parliaments had come to their collective end and the Stuart interregnum was about to begin. An understated Whig by the name of Oliver Cromwell was on the rise, yet the cause for free speech was still being laid low. Parliament, ecstatic no longer to be so embarrassingly impotent in the face of a tyrannical king, set forth a rule that required every author to have a license in order to publish his thoughts. Insistent that this oversight come from above, Parliament rendered unto itself the right to distribute or rescind its imprimatur.

However happy he may have been that his side had won the country and the day (and that his erstwhile king’s head no longer held congress with its formerly regal neck), Milton was upset about Parliament’s oppressive censorship laws. Named in memory of the ancient Greek Areopagus—the rock upon whose jagged and wild surface criminal trials were held (in that city of chryselephantine statues, ornate columns, and shaded porticoes)—Milton’s argument was executed as if a master stroke.

The expression of sentiments and ideas, he exclaimed, should not be fettered. On this point, Milton stood athwart the censorious inclinations of those conservative Parliamentarians with whom he’d once worked. More than that, he was unconditional in his determination to see speech liberated in every way. If, he said, “we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes—all that is delightful to man”. And what to man could be more delightful and more stimulating than the unrestricted annunciation and exchange of his ideas? Further, Milton exhorted the purportedly more broad-minded government under which he now lived to “give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”. I might here add that the italics inserted are of my own placement and choosing. Speech, you see, was the apotheosis of liberties—the liberty to which all other freedoms merely aspired. It is the liberty most jealously to be protected.

But what if, as some of his more moderate detractors responded, this radical liberation of conversation invited more bad words than good? Would the situation not be unlike that described by the mid-nineteenth-century economist Thomas Gresham, to whom we bow in thanks for his clever and eponymous law? If everyone was given an unchecked say, wouldn’t truthful statements eventually be corrupted—or worse—replaced by false claims? Would not veracity fall prey to its sinister partner falsity—ever on the prowl to gain an advantage? Would we not then begin to exchange in false rather than true ideas and would not the essence of speech become completely vitiated, worthless, and open to mindless abuse?

Milton scoffed at so pessimistic and cowardly a view. He thought better of the robustness and the staying-power of truth. Instead of censoring falsehood in behalf of the truth, Milton tossed out the following challenge: “Let her (the truth) and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” Yes, let them duke it out. I couldn’t have said it better, nor has anyone since. Unlike those Parliamentarians overly zealously legislating in his day, I share in Milton’s optimistic bent as it pertains to the resilience of truth; it’s a combatant in the battle of ideas, a fighter in the ring of open discourse, and it simply can’t and won’t lose.

The tradition of free speech in England was the one attribute of that peculiar island of which Voltaire was always so boyishly enamored. We moderns, so complacent with our access to YouTube comments and our surfeit of blogs posts, can only smile at this noble adoration. For all the inveterate hostilities between the country of his birth and that of his highest esteem, he wanted nothing more than to import this uniquely Anglican liberty back to the house of his mother—to his home of France. He, along with such later philosophes as Diderot, Condorcet, and D’Alembert, largely but incompletely succeeded in doing just that. Yet still, if you wanted to express yourself without fear of the guillotine’s blade and an unnaturally premature end, England was the place to do it, not France.  

And it was done over and again, perhaps reaching its highest and most lucid expression in the words of John Stuart Mill. Unfortunately, Voltaire missed by a quarter-century the birth of the eminent Mill—a man in whom the wit would’ve found a profound depth of insight and richness. The prosaic Mill was of course much drier than the poetic Voltaire, but both would’ve agreed in the primacy of pleasure. The precocious Mill and the audacious Voltaire, I think, would’ve gotten along famously. Hedonistic chasers were they both—Mill in philosophy, Voltaire in debauchery—and this shared reverence of the ultimate good would’ve ensured their fraternity and mutual good-will.

But Mill, while best known for his promulgation of the principle of utility in contrast to Kant, was a figure of immense import in the struggle for free speech. You might imagine him following in the line of Milton, picking up where the national poet left off. Mill, whose very name seems a derivative of the incomparable Milton’s, writes on the freedom of speech in his quintessential essay, On Liberty.

The verbiage, deviating mercifully from the old-style language by which Milton crafted his Areopagitica, is perhaps more accessible to us today, but it reads with all the same erudite force. Consistent with his treatise’s title, Mill demanded an unconditional liberty of “thought and feeling, of absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological”. To deal in “absolutes” is to deal rather seriously, but one can be sure that Mill wasn’t being loose with his words when he demanded what he did. Freedom, so far as it concerns thoughts, feelings, and opinion, must be absolute.

No thinker before Mill had articulated with so adroit a style nor with so compelling an approach exactly why it is that the freedom of opinion ought not to be encumbered. What’s more, he linked as an extension of the formation of an opinion the action of speech. Speech, he said, was “almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself” and, as such, “is practically inseparable from it”. Toward the conclusion of the essay, Mill iterates this one last time: “this one branch is the liberty of thought, from which it is impossible to separate the cognate liberty of speaking and of writing”.

The foregoing line could be no better said. The very movement of free speech hinges upon it. As such, it’s proven itself a ready fulcrum of mighty and persuasive strength. Mill’s is the consummate statement in the defense of free speech. He is the archetypal apologist and the most enlightened of advocates. Yet he continues in the tradition of Voltaire and of Milton and undoubtedly of innumerable others who were silenced before they could make their positions and arguments known. These, of course, are the men to whom we and he owe an immense and often unmentioned debt.

But we must ultimately acknowledge this debt. This freedom for which our predecessors so passionately and, as evidenced above, eloquently fought has become a kind of banality by which we’d rather not be bothered. And when the freedom of speech is infringed or impeded (as has been the case on such sundry and ubiquitous platforms as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and a disquietingly large number of elite and public university campuses) we must arouse ourselves to the implications. Working backward from the syllogism of Mill, to stifle expression is to oppress the very thought from which the words spring. And no matter how bad those words may be, and no matter how loudly they might yearn for my disapprobation, and no matter how vehemently I might disagree with them, I will defend to the death your right to say them. Will you do the same for me?

There’s one heroine of Greek literature, more pitiful and beautiful than the rest, of whom I’m perpetually enamored. That woman—if one can say with certitude that she garnered enough years even to be designated a woman—is Cassandra. Not a goddess but a princess, she was arguably the most ill-fated of the many ill-fated children born of Hecuba by Priam. Neither Hector nor Polyxena, Troilus nor Paris (of whom all were the unhappy progeny of that virile father Priam) suffered through so wretched and unfortunate a life as did she. Of all the children by whom that royal first family of Troy was numbered, and of all those dozens of innocents and militants who were murdered in the course of the Trojan War, Cassandra’s claim on our sympathy is always strongest. Her tragedy is eminently compelling and she’s the woman, or girl, I admit shamelessly to loving best.

Assuming even a peripheral familiarity with her story, I think you’ll understand why my poetic regard for her is so high. What began as a divine gift (bestowed upon her by the uncharacteristically amorous god Apollo) ended as a most frustrating and ultimately fatal curse. Tempting the deity with the nectar of mortal virginity, Cassandra was given by him a fantastically useful gift. She was endowed with the super-human power of prescience—to see into the future what others could not. As readily and as lucidly as we perceive the very moment before which we stand, Cassandra could see the future through unfailing eyes. With startling acuity and unprecedented clairvoyance, she was able accurately to predict all that might come to pass—and very little of it was good. She foresaw her own death, that of her captor, and the fall of her own city walls.

But that’s getting slightly too far in advance of her story. That which is bestowed by the gods is rarely done so without an expectation of something sacrificed or given in return. Deities, as we know them, tend to requite themselves with a slightly unbalanced manner of trade, and Apollo’s agreement with her was no exception to this burdensome rule. But, alas, the gods craft the tablets by which we humans live—the rules to which we must submit. For having acquired this formidable and supernatural gift of prophecy, Cassandra was to disencumber herself of that which made her “pure”. I speak, of course, of her fundamentally earned and jealously maintained virginity. She was to be an innocent maiden no more, but rather an accommodating, if not a fully willing nubile receptacle of this particular god’s earth-bound lust.

Fickle and sexually exasperating as only a female could be, Cassandra had other plans in mind. What’s more, she implemented them without so much as a second thought. She decided to withhold from her godly admirer the gift she’d promised him in return for her own. Needless to say, Apollo—god of poetry, sobriety, and truth—was overcome with an unusual feeling of rage. Never had so sacrosanct an idol been so flippantly spurned and this once temperate god was uncontrollably vexed. His affection unrequited with his honest transaction abused, Apollo decided in light of this to modify her gift. Still she’d retain the ability to prophesy the future—having granted this power, he as a god could not so easily rescind it. What he could do, however, was shroud in a cloak of incredibility everything that Cassandra said. While what she prophesized might still be true, her publication of it wouldn’t be believed.

Hence, unheeded went all her desperate exhortations. Having made his eponymous and, if I dare say, venal judgment (as forced to do so by the three goddesses: Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena—a veritable trinity of vanity from which a man might choose) Paris was warned by Cassandra of the consequences of seeking and taking a foreign bride. Though a brother detached from her in their recent youth, Paris was Cassandra’s sibling, but that mattered not. Not even Paris would take stock of his sister’s forebodings and her honest pleas. His abduction of Helen, as myth knows and history cautiously agrees, was the beginning of that decade-long war for whose origination we have him, and for whose depiction we have Homer to thank.

Later, Cassandra warned her countrymen—now a bunch of war-hardened and tired Trojans nearing the war’s end—of the truth that lay within that ponderous wooden horse. She foresaw in its welcome embrace the destruction of the city that she and they called home. Again, thanks to Apollo (and to her own infidelity to what any impartial observer might consider an arguably reasonable pact), she wasn’t to be believed. The same would be said of the tragically brief time she spent at the court of her captor—the king of Mycenae and son of Atreus, the promiscuous and filicidal Agamemnon. Astride her old life and her new—the Asia of her yesterday and the Greek of her end—Cassandra foresaw the fury of a woman scorned. Ultimately, it was a fury that would take not only her life, but that of the man by whom she was abducted and swept away.

Alas, Cassandra, while foreseeing everything with absolute accuracy, was never to be believed. The most sapient of us all, she was ultimately the least free—being, as she was, chained to this Apollonian curse. She was shackled to the catastrophes of the future that were evident only to her. Yet one must imagine the decimation and the slaughter that might’ve been avoided had she been taken only a bit more seriously. One must consider the troubles that would’ve been obviated if her distant and discerning vision were welcomed as though legitimate and indubitable fact.

Cassandra—though ancient in conception in fable and art—seems to me a recurrent theme. Again and again, ridiculed prophets like her have arisen throughout history whenever men become too complacent and the masses too myopic. Such a time might be at hand as we speak.

While I can’t rightly proclaim myself an alarmist when it comes to matters regarding this delicate environment in and upon which we live, I can’t help but think that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—the young congresswoman from the state of New York—might be our own modern-day iteration of a Cassandra. Granted, the association is a perhaps immoderate leap. She seems to have morphed in the course of a single year from a bartender, to a socialist, to puissant force in Washington, to an outright Grecian myth. One can only imagine what next she’ll become—to what liberal apotheosis she’ll soon aspire.

As it pertains to the future of the climate, however, she might be divining secrets in the here and now. And, true to the narrative of our beloved Cassandra, they’re secrets that we stubbornly refuse to hear. We—the incredulous United States—might be playing the role of Cassandra’s elder brother Paris or her unconvinced Trojan countrymen. We, like them, might stand and gaze at the immense symbol before us in a state of celebratory stupor, incautious of what it all might really mean.

That said, both Cassandra and Cortez struggle to disseminate their respective messages. Both, in the attempted promulgation of their vision, employ a celerity that verges on the peremptory. As far as one’s aim is to acquire a devoted audience that might be stirred eventually to action, this is not good. To those listeners and voters of which her audience is composed, and those to whom her message desperately needs to spread, this is simply off-putting. This is made clear to me after watching her iridescently-crafted video entitled, “A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”.

Having watched it, my immediate impression was quite mute. I was elevated to no sentiment beyond that of derision. In the course of the film, she dances between the hortatory, the peremptory, and the imaginary (she continues to push the idea that the world as we know it will end in twelve years—a reason, one might argue, to stop making videos and instead to say your goodbyes). She envisions herself as a venerable socialist sage whose now risible, now practicable “Green New Deal” succeeded in pulling the country from the brink of disaster and to the verdant fields of a utopian dream. Beyond the issue of the environment—putatively the whole reason behind this proposal about which we’ve been made to talk so much—she speaks of Medicare for all and federal job programs with guaranteed and high wages and security.

On the proposed implementation of a fully socialist society, as she does many others, Ocasio-Cortez loses me. Yet on matters regarding the environment, I can’t shake the feeling that she might be right. She might be our Cassandra. Sadly, never do the stories in which she’s featured end well.

While I’ve long considered the president to be a man rather of a foolish than a knavish bent, the contents of the Mueller Report tempt me to reconsider this ordering of terms. Perhaps from the outset it was far too sympathetic an order and, on top of that, exceedingly ingenuous. I admit that in saying so, I feel a bit embarrassed. Indeed, at this point, after having read what I’ve read and heard all the commentary by which it’s surrounded, a complete reversal of the terms might be needed. In the newest organization, in light of Mueller’s inglorious deluge of evidence, knave may well insert itself before fool if I’m to employ the best, most candid correction.

Granted, the understanding of which I’m availed is of a lay and not a legal type; I can’t speak to the nuanced intricacies of the law—subtle and unpalatable they may be. I’m not the one upon whom you should look to expound those points of prudence and legality and the like. What I can say, however, is that Mueller’s voluminous work (nearing in its entirety some four-hundred and fifty pages), for whose production two and a half years were necessary and to whose funding twenty-five million taxpayer dollars were allocated, doesn’t make the president look good. Quite the contrary, and—if we’re being completely frank—quite unequivocally, the report depicts the president in a highly unbecoming way.

Of course, the report draws no mean caricature of the man. In no way is it a fictive work. No latitude of artistic license was required. President Trump isn’t made to look knavish nor villainous by the imaginative effort of Mueller’s prosaic pen. It was his own conduct that etched him into that form. Doubtless, his personality and his comportment aren’t an invention—contrived somewhere in a joint Disney-MSNBC sketch room. When all is gilded artifice, there is no artifice. President Trump isn’t a man to whom many creative attributes need be ascribed. In fact, I’m not so sure that even if given such ascriptions, his already-bursting personality could contain them. No team of writers would be required to craft his character, as he’s all but inimitable—for better or for worse.

To worsen in the eyes of Congress and the American public the president’s image was, in part, the report’s obvious intent. Having read it, it’s impossible to conclude otherwise. The inquiry for which this investigation was opened—whether or not the Trump campaign colluded or conspired with the Russian government to benefit his electability in the 2016 race—was addressed in the first of Mueller’s two garrulous volumes. On this point, the conclusion was rather explicit. This, I think, provided a sense of finality by which most Americans were impressed. Seldom is prevarication tossed aside for the blunt truth, but it wouldn’t be long until it was picked up again in the second volume.

Comprising hundreds of pages more, of which some are written in the inscrutably boring language of legalese, the second volume begins with renewed force. The question into which this subsequent volume delves is whether or not the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration obstructed justice. As opposed to his pronouncement at the end of the first volume, that of the second is far more equivocal. While Mueller takes pains to state his disinclination to prosecute the president, he makes clear that he isn’t prepared to jettison the prospect of exonerating him either.

To use the parlance of a completely different field, Mueller seems here to have “punted” on the answer to the question around which this entire investigation (or at least what the later investigation became) revolved. Contrary to James Comey’s responsibility in the summer of 2016, it was Robert Mueller’s job to recommend or discommend prosecution. Comey, you’ll recall, inserted his opinion where it probably didn’t belong. After failing to attribute to Hillary Clinton the requisite “intent” of jeopardizing classified material on her private computer server, Comey infamously recommended against Loretta Lynch (then the Attorney General under President Obama) pursuing further legal action against her. Thus, there were two glaring errors for which he was responsible: he incorporated “intent” into a crime for which it ought to have been irrelevant (harboring classified documents on a home-brew server is a crime irrespective of your intention either to disseminate or to destroy them) and he imposed his own predilection upon the case that Clinton not be charged nor pursued in a legal sense.

By concluding his investigation in the aforementioned way, Comey rendered unnecessary the need for the case to go to the Attorney General. He’d already dictated the result. As for Mueller’s conclusion, he went about things in the exact opposite way. For one, he was investigating a possible crime at whose center lay intent. Unlike the attempt to harbor emails (an admittedly venial but prima facia crime), the attempt to collude with a foreign nation or the attempt to impede a body of oversight looking into such an act is dependent on one’s intent. And, so far as Mueller was concerned, he was frustratingly unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that intent. Instead, he made visible all the indiscrete actions in which the president engaged, made clear all the peccadilloes and all the more unprepossessing sins of which he was the author, and told the current Attorney General, Bill Barr, to decide what to do.

Much can be made of Barr’s consequent actions. Suffice it to say, he’s proven himself an invaluable legal asset to the preservation of President Trump. The latter’s political longevity, in some ways, is tied up with Barr’s legal acumen. And acumen, as was evidently on display after watching his many hours of public testimony in front of an indignant and vicious Congress, is not something of which Barr is in short supply. As sagacious as he is contumacious, Barr is impeccably clever. He’s full of wry comedic timing, stolid erudition, and indiscernible tact. With unflappable and at times scholarly sangfroid, he went about his hearing as if he’d done it a hundred times before. Of course, he was the Attorney General under President Bush, and probably has done this hundreds of times before, but that was some time ago. This time around like last, he handled every question put to him and made his opposition appear quite unpracticed and small.

Ultimately, he was responsible (along with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein) for having decided against the prosecution of President Trump. This was the conclusion heard around the world for which the country awaited with bated breath. There was, in Rosenstein’s and Barr’s opinion, as well as in that of Mueller, no clear and explicitly definable crime of which the president was guilty. At least he wasn’t found guilty on traditional legal grounds.

Yet that doesn’t mean that in the absence of Barr’s conviction, the president is somehow guiltless, much less deserving of our approbation. Far from it, there’s no lens through which one can view the second part of the Mueller report and find himself nodding in approval or genial satisfaction at the conduct displayed by President Trump. His behavior was, to put it mildly, completely indecorous. More bluntly stated, it was downright capricious, subversive, and vile.

Without scruple, foresight, or even a little bit of self-restraint, the president attempted on multiple occasions to do things that might’ve led to possible crimes. And, if I might take from the cartoon Scooby Doo its redundant final line, he would’ve gotten away with it too—had it not been for his meddling staff. And by “gotten away with it”, I mean he would’ve successfully carried out a criminal act, and would likely now be impeached.

It was the stark lack of pliancy—and, as I might’ve once earlier impugned, servility—displayed by the most intimate members of the president’s staff that prevented him from achieving that ignominious end. If that’s meddling, I urge them to do it some more. Over and again, the president—in his intermittent piques of rage—directed his staff members to carry out some action whose legality would now be considered dubious at best. And as many times as he ordered or asked, his staffers demurred. They proved heroically, perhaps even salvifically unavailing in carrying out his plans. For all the lack of scrupulosity and candor of which this staff has been accused, on this occasion, it proved its worth Indeed, it proved incapable of disobeying certain imperatives of conscience we thought it never possessed. It’s for this reason, and probably only this reason, that the president isn’t undergoing an impeachment trial as we speak.

Once considered jesters, the people by whom the president was surrounded proved ultimately heroic. We laugh at them no more. They deserve and they’ve earned not our raillery but our respect. It’s for no reason other than their obstinate stolidity and defiance in the face of Trump’s pique that the president remains where he is. They may have been castigated and mocked for their efforts (by both the president and the press), but they served as a last and insuperable barrier between a country and a Constitutional crisis. And while they play the heroes, the president plays the knave.