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The shadowy and, frankly, the dubious circumstances by which Richard Epstein’s death is surrounded reflect the tenebrous nature of his life. Both dark, neither is likely to receive sufficient light as the world dawns. Epstein, a financier and a pedophile of the most profligate kind, was found dead in his maximum-security federal prison cell but a week ago. Putatively the harshest, most attentive, and most punitive of all American prisons, this, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, was the same building in which the notorious Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and a coterie of mafia members were held. Confined there for no more than a few months, Epstein had already attempted, albeit ham-handedly, an effort to take his own life. Falling short of his aim, he was privileged—if only a bit longer—to live.

The second of his two attempts on his own life would prove the better in terms of its execution. Succeeding once with the exertion for every two efforts, Epstein’s suicide-success rate is equivalent to that of a “.500” baseball player—no poor statistic for a hitter, nor an enviable one for a sadist. As said, the cause of so premature and seemingly unnatural an end (availed of his prior physical health, he was a robust, large, and an insidiously virile man in the sixty-sixth year of his age) is alleged to have been an act of self-violence. As he failed to do so initially, he succeeded this time in killing himself. This, bitterly, marks an end not only to his incorrigible life, but to the vital momentum of his case as well.

How is it that he was left vulnerable to the violence for whose infliction we have nothing and no one but his own hand to acknowledge? Away from the unwatchful eyes of the two guards by whom he ought to have been monitored, we’re told that Epstein managed to strangle, asphyxiate, and ultimately to murder himself. He did so, in accordance with the received account, without rousing the attention of those same insensate guards under whom he was supposed to languish until the arrival of his court date. He did so also without startling to cacophonous attention the adjoining inmates by whom he was to be surrounded. The mechanism of his self-injury was, as the coroner’s autopsy revealed, a bedsheet—a fearful cover if ever I’ve seen one. Woven with so durable and fatal a thread, the sheet is said to have been sufficiently strong to remove from Epstein his breath and his life. One end affixed tightly to a knob of requisite height, the other girdled his neck, Epstein used this sheet as the instrument of his death.

In the process of his descent from that constrained altitude, Epstein fractured, among other things, the diminutive but integral hyoid bone—a small semi-circular bone of whose presence the world is now suspiciously aware. Vital but unrecognizable to any but an anatomist’s eye, the hyoid bone is more often than not fractured as a consequence of strangulation from an external source. That is to say, in many instances, the hyoid is broken when another is doing the killing, and the recipient of the abuse, the dying. The hyoid bone, much like Epstein himself, crumbled under the pressure and failed to survive this breathless episode.

Trained neither in anatomy, autopsy, criminology, nor forensics, the layman’s suspicions—at the hearing of these remarkable events—are surely aroused. As modern American philosophers, we’re all by inclination skeptics—perhaps not in the Greek sense, but in that of our own age. So skeptically equipped, then, what are we to make of this?

In consideration of these macabre intuitions and these startling facts, many are jumping to the conclusion that Epstein was killed by another’s hand. His own death, so goes the overwhelmingly tempting argument, was not a feat for which he’s to be declared solely responsible. Not unreasonably, many people think that an assassin, a henchman, a propitiously-placed killer of a political type took it upon him or herself to execute Epstein while he sat alone in his cell. His solitude, it might be added, was a problem in and of itself.

Having failed already, as mentioned in a foregoing line, to take his own life (if we’re to believe that it was indeed his and not another’s intent to do so), he was supposed always to be in the presence of another inmate. In the absence of continuous oversight, the judicious selection and placement of a discerning inmate can be a reliable, even a mutual check against misconduct. Instead, Epstein was left in isolation, completely alone. Not only that, the cameras that ought to have been tuned in to his cell remained dormant, though perhaps not as much so as the guards by whom he was supposed to be watched. Practicing their own form of salutary neglect, the two guards passed three matutinal, fatal hours in sleep when they should have been checking in on him every fifteen to thirty minutes. Fearful of their gross negligence, or perhaps simply continuing a long-standing practice of which federal employees seem disproportionately to take a part, they then forged the time logs from whose entries we better can understand their whereabouts.

Gross incompetence, as opposed to a very real effectuation of malice, certainly could be enough to explain the peculiarity of Epstein’s death. Indeed, if we’re to take the Medieval church leader Ockham as our guide, we should cleave to the position for whose legitimacy the fewest number of suppositions are required. In most cases, you’ll be greatly advantaged for having done so. But here, I think, we must ignore the theologian, silence the pietist, and embrace the conspiracy theorist. A suspension of Ockham is here needed.

Central is the question of why anyone (excluding Epstein) would desire Epstein’s death? At this juncture, the inquiry—however silly it might sound; who, after all, wouldn’t want him dead?—must be raised. Under these circumstances (he was on the verge of spilling into open court records the penetralia of his ribald and obscure past), not even his erstwhile victims likely wanted him so deposed. Probably, in due time and certainly by the government’s decree, they did; nothing short of the death penalty would be sufficiently just for so savage, soulless, and cruel a man. Certainly, restoration and re-introduction into society wouldn’t be an end for which these women, ravished as children and scarred as adults, would hope. But undoubtedly they didn’t want him silenced before he could, through the appropriate proceedings of the law, incriminate those to whom his sex-slavery empire was extended, and those with whose connivance and patronage it was supported and run.

The reasons by which one might be inspired to murder Epstein would be legion. Although he was a man about whom the public knew little, Epstein, as it turns out, was quite widely-known in those circles of the ascendancy to which we ordinary people haven’t the slightest access. He was something of a parvenu at whose feet the privileged groveled.

The eminence of the names by which his “friends” list is filled can’t be understated. His relationship with former President Clinton was both intimate and international. On no fewer than a dozen occasions, they traveled the world together aboard Epstein’s dysphemistically named plane, the Lolita Express—a homage to the titular, teen-aged character in Nabokov’s great work. Lolita, precocious though she might’ve been, was a mere child, one of whom Humbert Humbert—a man of unmitigated sexual perversion—was enamored from the book’s start till its end. Disquieting though the narrative might be, Nabokov’s Lolita is a work of fiction. Epstein’s Lolita, a work of barbarism.

Further, Epstein’s relationship with the current president was likewise disconcerting, though perhaps mercifully more short-lived. The former was a member of the latter’s exclusive Mar-a-Lago Golf Club in the state of Florida. It’s unclear to what extent President Trump was apprised of Epstein’s vile, obnoxiously youthful predilection, but one can assume that Trump—ever eager to play the part of lecherous audience (recall his Access Hollywood remarks)—was game for the slippages and the indiscretions with which we associate boyish banter. He confessed openly to the knowledge that Epstein preferred his women young. More important than mere preferences, however, we know not what Trump knew about his perversions.

Those relationships with the presidents don’t conclude the tale. Dispiritingly, there are many more. That which he enjoyed with Prince Andrew of Great Britain is of concern to everyone from that side of the Atlantic to this; a victim has identified the now inconspicuous prince as having been present during one of their sordid soirées. Surely, this can’t be the “Special Relationship” upon which our Anglo-American allegiance is based. If it is, we must cleanse and rethink it. Princes and presidents aside, Epstein’s reach, it seems, extended not only to the old elite, but also to the new. With varying degrees of intimacy, he had connections with the comedian Chris Rock, the disgraced dramatist Kevin Spacy, the innovatory Elon Musk, and the sanguinary Mohammed bin Salman. How deeply entrenched he was in the lives of the latter is yet unknown.

And, sadly, it may never be. Especially in consideration of a rather shamelessly murderous man like Mohammed bin Salman (at whose direction, you might remember, the death of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Turkey was carried out), one can imagine Epstein being killed by a very interested third party with wealth and with means. One needn’t stretch too thin his imagination to conceive of it. Alas, the imagination grows dim as the flame of this case flickers away. Dubious and tenebrous, dark and unsure, this case drops into the abyss.

Our response to the situation in Hong Kong mustn’t be reticent; the struggle for liberty hasn’t the time for such hesitant harboring of thoughts. It hasn’t the convenience of the passing of hours, of the muted deliberations during which our sympathies might be cautiously considered and sheepishly sconcealed. Rather than be stifled, these thoughts should be made into words and these sympathies into deeds. Liberty demands—among so many things here unnamed—such things as unity, bravery, alacrity, and at times, yes, temerity. It’s only by that noble and intrepid combination of pressure and purpose, of determination and action, of vocalization and actual support, that freedom might ultimately be gained.

Liberty, you see, isn’t self-perpetuating, nor is it so very robust; liberty is liable to be lost. It doesn’t quietly tolerate neglect, nor does it wait for the attentiveness of a heart more concerned with its survival. It’s not something over which you can pass your attention in search of an excitement more pressing in time and greater in scope—for there is no such thing. To equate it to virginity (as a mind impoverished of analogy might do) wouldn’t be exactly right, but a parallel might be drawn. Though the exuberance of the former often leads to the loss of the latter, the two share a quality. Once voluntarily dismissed, one’s virginity—that chaste accoutrement of youth—can’t biologically be regained. Neither can liberty, from an ideological standpoint, easily be recovered once lost. Ravished of one’s prior freedom, the liberty by which one once was animated is made barren. In so hopeless and fruitless a case, liberty’s retrieval is nearly as difficult a task as when one’s sexual impenetrability has lapsed.

Liberty can’t exist unattended outside the idealist’s womb; its relationship is always symbiotic. That womb, for lack of a better image, is liberty’s nutritive encasement, its philosophical home. Dispossessed of this structural and intellectual scaffold, liberty falls to the earth stillborn. It gasps on the ground and, if unattended, soon dies. It must be supported, cradled, held. The miracle, by extension, is not in its conception—as any ideal, given enough time, can be conceived—nor in its acquisition, though this doubtless submerges us in an initial tide of reverence and awe. The miracle, rather, is to be found in its retention.

The maintenance of liberty is where the real work begins. The man by whom liberty is possessed (and who, reciprocally, is possessed by liberty) must forever safeguard this ethereal and fleeting freedom. Once his hard-earned aim, over which much blood was spilled and toil exerted, it’s now his jealously-defended property. It’s something toward which his indefatigable vigilance must turn. He must always ensure the health of its current state and the future of its viability. Initially earned and now owned in such a way, liberty becomes to all who participate in its possession a grand and daunting responsibility—one from which there should be no running away. To do so would be to adopt the pathetic complaisance of a slave yearning for his prior chains. It would be to embrace the servility of his past and to accept willingly the ornaments of his yoke.

Ironically, freedom itself can be a chain, but it’s also the ultimate key. The retention of this key, the magical and liberal device by whose gentle turn all doors to democracy push themselves ajar, is slipping from the hands of Hong Kong. The small peninsula’s sovereignty, once the liberal bastion of the far East, is now a vulnerability of which the wider world has become acutely aware. Its liberty, enshrined after its detachment from England in 1997, has become an Asian exception upon which the Communist government of China has insatiably desired to infringe. For the Chinese apparatchiks and bureaucrats fuming in Beijing, Hong Kong’s liberty has appeared to them to be not only brazen, but insufferable. Hong Kong can be seen as having flouted Chinese primacy. This was the case even before the events there unraveled over the course of the past twelve weeks.

From that time until this, millions of Hong Kongers, of whom many are young and rightfully disillusioned, have taken to the streets in protestation of the pro-Chinese administration of the state’s chief executive, Carrie Lam. She, by looking favorably upon a piece of legislation that would facilitate the extradition of Hong Kong citizens to the mainland of China for any number of nameless crimes, initiated the unrest. Maladroitly, Lam persisted by campaigning on the salubrious effects of this bill and has only very grudgingly postponed them. The citizens of Hong Kong, however—an enlightened and clearly animated bunch—were unconvinced that this bill was defeated. They sensed in Lam a politician who’d bide her time and impose upon them China’s will.

They were right in thinking as they did. Shamelessly (and quite audaciously, if I might add) China is in the process of taking steps toward the solidification of its totalitarian regime. Contemptuous of all constitutional constraints, President Xi Jinping has effectively made himself president for life (a constitutional amendment, one might add, to which our own president lent his applause). Time will offer no impediment to his power. His position in China henceforth will appear indistinguishable from that of an ancient, hereditary emperor of an oriental type. Visibly in no poor state of health, his reign is likely to last as many years as does he. Excluding the possibility of an assassination, this could amount to a few decades. Thus, there’s little political impetus for him to change his ways with elections being but mere staged annoyances to which he’s safely immune.

To longevity is added inescapability. Bringing to life the Orwellian terror from which that ill-treated Winston Smith had no recourse, the Chinese government is beginning in upcoming years more explicitly and intrusively to spy on its citizens. The objective is to create a database to which government officials can refer in the assessment and judgment of one’s fidelity to the state. Should one prove himself sufficiently loyal to the Communist regime (a measurement about whose formulation I’m admittedly curious), he will be awarded with either pecuniary or honorary gifts, compliments of the insidiously competent Xi Jinping. Should his disloyalty be on display, one can imagine the punitive consequences he’ll be made to suffer. Public disapprobation would be the least of his concerns—physical assault, disappearance, and death, probably the most.

No structure or enactment of government could be more repugnant to the liberal and progressive sentiments of the people of Hong Kong. It’s for this and other reasons that their resilience to this proposal of easier extradition to mainland China spread so fervidly. Ill-disposed toward becoming a subjected, invigilated, and molested people if they have a word on the matter, Hong Kongers have taken to the streets nearly every weekend, and now on most weekdays, to express their frustration and their desperate cry to be free. Equally exasperated is the Chinese government, which is now said to be mobilizing on the border its armed troops. Hitherto, the protests and demonstrations have been considered, albeit speciously, a purely internal affair. The issue now unambiguously girdles the world and bestrides the two states: the diminutive and democratic Hong Kong on the one side, and the corpulent and communistic China on the other.

With whom, then, should our sympathies align? Should we champion the cause of China or that of Hong Kong? Are we supportive of the Leviathan, as monarchical as it is massive and cruel, or the liberal, as democratic as we?

I need not answer that for you here; it would be too obvious and I value too highly your intellect. An image alone will suffice. Imagine, if you will, a group of Hong Kong protestors waving with unflappable resolution the stars and stripes of the American flag. Add to this mental vision the familiar and euphonious sound of music swelling in their lungs as they sing with unabashed pride our own National Anthem. The modern American is slightly chagrined at seeing and hearing such sights and sounds. For us, irreverence for the flag has become the public display du jour. We’re told rather to kneel in spite of it than to give thanks in standing deference because of it. We’re at pains to explain away our earlier, surely juvenile veneration of it. To the Hong Kongers, however, and frankly to all other liberty-loving people around the world, our flag is something quite different. To them, it’s an enduring emblem of liberty—a liberty to which they so indomitably aspire and one past which we so impudently look.

Though our president is a vociferous and necessary advocate for the flag, he hasn’t made explicitly known his sympathies in regard to struggle for Hong Kong’s freedom. This is a problem. Now would be the time for him unequivocally to state his support for Hong Kong as it navigates this intractable and inevitably violent conflict with China. Instead, he seems intent on appeasing both sides.

In any other circumstance, we might applaud as uncharacteristically diplomatic so cautious an approach to so frangible and thorny a foreign issue, but the country is in the tumultuous crux of a trade war. Doubtless, you needn’t my services to remind you that this is a trade war for whose instigation he stands uniquely responsible—indeed, it’s a war of which he’s overtly proud. As it’s been communicated to us, the supposition holds that China (even in the midst of the roguish North Korea) is the primary maleficent actor in the region. We’ve been led to believe that it’s the avaricious Asian beast, imperialistic by birth and communistic by inclination, against whom we should be fighting—not only economically, but ideologically as well. It’s because of their deviant trade practices that our farmers of soy, corn, and beef are beginning to feel the uncomfortable consequences of tariffs and the reason why our automakers and machinists are seeing inflated prices for their procurement of steel.

What better time, then, would there be to emphasize China’s wickedness and, in so doing, to justify the tariffs on which all previously sanguine financial forecasts have now soured? To highlight China’s tyranny—standing, as it does, in stark contrast to the autonomy of which Hong Kong is in desperate pursuit—would give added justification to these tariffs. These are tariffs, one might add, by which the economy lately has been made to feel quite unstable; all the benchmarks by which the economy is measured have come to look rather unpropitious (with an inversion of the Yield Curve and a recession on the horizon). Sure, the tariffs might persist in their insalubrious effects on American consumers and markets, perhaps even to the point of unanticipated economic exacerbation (including more expensive Chinese toys come the holiday season), but that might just be, as John F. Kennedy said, a burden that we’d have to bear. It might be a very literal price we’d have to pay in order, as stated in his immortal words, to “assure the survival and the success of liberty”. But first, before ensuring this liberty of which Hong Kong is deprived, we must make our voices heard. There is no time for reticence when liberty is on the line. We must speak, we must act, we must support the liberal zeitgeist of Hong Kong.

Being of a pacific disposition in possession of a stubbornly gentle soul, I’m not especially well-suited to discuss the topic of mass murder. Harder hearts than mine must pick up where I leave off on this subject, which is, I confess, discouragingly not far along this forbiddingly bumpy road. In the pursuit of chasing and hopefully of grasping this topic, there are too many things that I lack. For one, I haven’t the necessary acumen—the mastery of the infected mind of which our greatest criminal psychologists and clinicians are so fully availed. Yet even they, in many cases, stand bewildered in the shade of so gratuitous an eclipse of pain and death. Their expertise, however, is a vital source of illumination, irrespective of how sparse it might be.

For another, I haven’t the political sagacity needed to appease a majority. Collective opinion and agreement is the foundation upon which this country is built. We are inextricably fated to compromise—however uncordially this might be achieved. Here, we find a problem; excepting perhaps immigration, there is no single issue over which the population is more unwaveringly divided. The control of guns or the liberation of their rights is the fork at which the country splits in two. Surely no expedient within the view of my discernment can gather everyone in agreement in order to solve it. If man is a political animal, I watch him as if in a zoo.

For a third, I haven’t the requisite fortitude—be it intellectual or emotional—to confront this modern American blight. And a blight it is. You might say it’s an affliction, a cancer, indeed a malignancy from which we can’t escape. There is no evident remedy and it responds to medicinal treatment not, nor to that of the spirit. It’s become the source of our national spoliation, the crisis of our moral debasement, and the visible mark of our internal rot. It’s a veritable sickness of which we can’t or won’t be cured. Call it what you will, an epidemic or a pestilence, a blight or a blimp in our historically violent past, the phenomenon of mass murders in America is an obdurate and, so far as I can tell, an ineradicable disease. The past few years attest to its prevalence; the past weekend to its virulence. If it continues as expected, the future will speak to its endurance.

Moribund and dreadful, yet increasingly quotidian and real, it’s a problem at which my naturally delicate inclinations shutter. Yet while I attempt to retreat from the news and to hide, I can’t long persist concealed. Inevitably, it finds me, and I it. In finding it, I see how appalling it is, as do we all (save, perhaps, its fervid perpetrators and those on the internet sites like eight and four “-chan” for whom they seem to perform), but my teary sentiment has a way of clouding the clarity of my judgment and thought. The insobriety, which is a consequence of the sorrow by which I’m continuously filled, prevents me from giving any reasonable insight into how these mass shootings might be reduced or brought to an end. Of course, the presupposition of that foregoing line is that they can be brought to an end.

That is a dubious notion. I’m not so sure that they can be stopped. To be so convinced that they might would be to invite upon oneself a few words of abuse. Such imprecations reserved for those whose minds are entangled in illusion would fall upon him: Quixotic, impractical, unreal, and foolish—all would be proper claimants to the character of so disconnected a person. When one is too hopeful, one is open to contempt. And, if this surfeit of hope persists, one will be ignored as a Pangloss incapable of seeing the truth or as incorrigibly naïve. The former is constituent of his being; the latter, a notion of which he can’t be disabused.

Must we, then, jettison all hope for change? I’ll not yet leap to so despondent a concession. That is a dark and endless pit from which there is no ascent. There might yet be things that we can do—laws that can be legislated, interventions that can be promulgated, and, perhaps most importantly, cultural mores that might be inculcated to reduce the frequency with which these tragedies occur. Though I am, as noted, shockingly unqualified to offer my two-cents as to what these laws, interventions, and cultural intercessions might be, I’ll nevertheless list a few.

From a legislative perspective, the act that would be the most immediately applicable and efficacious would be the so-called “Red Flag” law. Already it’s been instituted in a few states.

In brief, the law would disallow—at the very least, block temporarily—the purchase of a firearm by a person deemed singularly unfit to own so dangerous a device. The figure by whom that decision of the purchaser’s fitness or unfitness is to be made would be of an intimate relation to the potential buyer. A family member, teacher, coach, or priest could interject in the gun purchaser’s behalf and prevent the sale. If there’s any reason to suspect his intentions (I use his, as most gun enthusiasts and mass murderers are of the masculine stock), the sale can be thwarted. A judicial injunction could rescind from the would-be gun owner his right legally to purchase the firearm. He would then, through a dedicated course of clinical and psychological analysis, be deemed by a professional as an appropriate or inappropriate candidate for the future ownership of a gun. If the former, he’d continue to be monitored. If the latter, he’d be completely proscribed. With the retention of all his civil liberties, protected by the solicitous attention of not only the government but those members of his inner-circle by whom he’s surrounded, he’d be made to clear a higher barrier in the purchase of the weapon if there were reasons to suspect his motives.

Of course, this eminently sensible and proactive step does nothing to address the quantity and the types of guns in circulation as we speak. As the figure presently stands, there are nearly five-hundred million guns in America. In contrast, there are roughly two-hundred million fewer citizens by whom they’re owned. The fact that their number is so disproportionately large seems to be a problem beyond which we fundamentally can’t move. I say “fundamentally” because the protection of their ownership is etched in that noblest of all national documents. The Second Amendment to the Constitution—by whose Madisonian verbiage and ambiguity we’re still continually vexed—is equivocally intent on protecting gun ownership rights. The proposed implementation of an Australia-style program of “buying them back”, for example, would be inconceivable on those grounds. Probably, it would be an incitement to resistance and possibly to a second civil war. An amendment to this inviolable Amendment would be needed, but few Republican congressmen would endorse so radical a move.

Alas, short of the usurpation of millions of free Americans’ rights, there appear to be only two logical legislative steps whose path we can follow: to implement the “Red Flag” law as above conceived and to strengthen background checks and mental health screens for those whose goal it is to own a gun. The combination of these two could be done swiftly and universally. All it would require would be Congress’ initiative to act—an exertion to which it’s notoriously averse.

That said, the legislative approach shouldn’t be thought to be the exhaustive one. Laws can only go so far and too often they’re breached. The best-laid plans are destroyed in a moment of lawless fury and, when that results in dead bodies, all those carefully-constructed edicts are for naught. The diminution of gun violence, I believe, calls out not only for the implementation of decrees of the government’s making, but for a reformation of the spirit. The former is a matter of the federal government’s concern. The latter, of personal responsibility and, by extension, the local community in which that person lives.

Too many of the perpetrators of these crimes (be they Islamic jihadist, white supremacist, eco-fascist, far-leftist, or some other “-ist” pledging his dying allegiance some other odious creed) are, whether they acknowledge it or not, frighteningly selfish and nihilistic. The meaning of life and the sanctity of their fellow man or woman are sentiments to which they’ve become dangerously insensate. I hesitate to call them wholly immune to such sentiments, because I think there is no point in life beyond which they can be re-incorporated and enjoyed. But, with haste, they must be introduced and preferably sooner than later in life. Broken and violent families are unconducive to the fostering and development of a stable young adult (a plurality, perhaps even a majority of mass murderers are of this age). The onus, then, falls upon the backs of the parental generation—but it doesn’t fall there exclusively. The environment in which the mother and father raise their child must be unified and salutary in every possible way, but the ultimate burden rests on the young man himself.  

Certain ideas must be embedded and continually stressed. Aside from personal responsibility, sympathy must be essential, respect for life absolutely vital, and communication consistent though not exclusively online. That last part is of absolute import; it’s a thought upon which we might linger for a paragraph. Chat rooms and message boards (the likes of “4chan” and “8chan” of which service providers, freshly aware of their scruples, are now taking note) are not to be a primary escape, but a last refuge of the pathologically unsociable. And even then, those who lack the interlocutor’s art should find in them ready and conversant help. Perhaps this demands they be monitored by some disinterested third party scanning for troublesome souls. So be it. These sites shouldn’t be amalgams of misanthropes and cesspools of malcontents into whose nucleus all sorts of filth can be spilled, stirred, and vomited back into the real world. Man is, by nature, a creature forever in search of society; to be solitary in front of one’s computer in a darkened room is to be the equivalent of a brute. Now a bastion of boyish ostentation and stupidity where noxious memes waft and affected machismo flows, these online worlds are nothing better than realms of artifice and intellectual poverty in which young minds suffocate, etiolate, and quickly wither away.

They must step out into the world, inhale the vigorous breeze, and submerge themselves in the reality of life. By so doing, they’ll interact with people whom they can actually see. They’ll talk not with faceless avatars banging on keys, but with nuanced and enthralling people into whose eyes they can look. They’ll become part of the world, and the world will become part of them. As such, to think injurious thoughts of the one will be tantamount to damaging oneself. Should they remain in their shell, they’ll be rendered callous to their fellow human beings and peripheral to an ever-affable species of which they ought to be grateful to be a part.

With all humility and recognition of the ingenuity I lack, these are my responses to the problem of mass murderers in America. They must be tripartite: legal, personal, and cultural. Some require extraordinary change, others minor tweaking. I’m hopeful, you might even say optimistic, to see these efforts begin.

Upon hearing it said of America that she, longest-lived of all modern states (if democracy is the measure by which we’re to attribute national age), would never become a socialist country, I felt simultaneously contended and relieved. Admittedly, it wasn’t the man by whom this statement was declared (President Trump at his latest State of the Union Address) that was the cause of so rare a combined sentiment of happiness and hope, of felicity and equanimity, but that it was declared at all.

So fervid has the promulgation of socialism become in recent months that I was beginning to think that our country was on the very precipice of its full embrace. Once a flirtation of a utopian and a transitory type, socialism seemed to have become a goal to which every left-leaning politician was dedicated. Undismayed by its failures when tried in the various countries of our recent and distant past (Cuba, Russia, and North Korea to name but a few), they pressed for it as if it might imminently be attained. It appeared to be an idea whose time had come—an idea by whose specious novelty we were all once again besotted.

It’s true, support for socialism among millennials (that oft-derided demographic to which I sheepishly belong) has increased exponentially through the course of the past few years. If not exponentially, it certainly has done so quite vociferously; there’s now very little of the quondam hesitation that once stifled the declaration of one’s socialist druthers. Seemingly every liberal writer and cable news anchor stirs atop his platform and shouts for and races toward its arrival. The politicians aren’t exempt from this clamorous cry. Bernie Sanders, the most recognizable of American Socialists, promotes his view of his quasi-Marxist view of the economy while enjoying wide favorability and public renown, as does his young Puerto Rican protégé, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The irascible octogenarian and the lovable Cortez have managed to paint the face of socialism anew and expound on its guaranteed benefit.  

You can see, then, that the ideology is experiencing a vigorous resurgence—thanks, in no small part, to those two enticing politicians of whom I made mention. At the very least, if only in its imagined and not its implemented form, socialism in America is in a robust and salubrious state. It certainly looks less becoming in places like Venezuela and China, but those unprepossessing examples bother us not. Socialism “the American way” has proven itself, unlike that of those other two states, philosophically healthy, amiably received, and continually increasing in strength. It’s becoming publicly more palatable than it was even ten years ago.

Aside from socialism, there’s another political ideology of which we hear endless mention. That, about which we speak not wishfully as we do of socialism but despairingly and forebodingly, is fascism.

Fascism, doubtless more illusory and ill-defined than any other ideology about which we know, is claimed often to be a pernicious, burgeoning, and above all a frighteningly real force in American politics. Wildly, indeed ubiquitously misunderstood, fascism has become a byword for everything and thus nothing. It’s everything from a minatory lapse of humanity, to a faltering in political decorum, to an ungracious thought, to an uncouth tweet. Being that it’s so ambiguous, it’s a term that’s been applied to all, an epithet of which every side has been charged. There are fascists on the left and fascists on the right. There are fascists unaware of their fledgling fascism and those—typically cursorily dressed in black ski masks and reinforced gloves—who stand athwart the ideology with an intention literally to fight it wherever it lives (these are the fanatical “freedom fighters” upon whom the misnomer “Antifa” is bestowed).

Again, it was said by our now capricious, now sonorous Commander in Chief that America would never be a socialist country. He made no mention, however, of the possibility of it becoming a fascist one. I suppose that in the declaration of the former, one might implicitly deduce the corollary that is the latter, and in some ways, that’s how we might perceive things. With any luck, America won’t become a fascist state. It won’t descend into the wretched oppression and endless brutality of a legitimately fascist regime. But, that of course isn’t to say that she never was in such a state.

To see in America’s past her rather blatant embrace of fascism, one needn’t look to university syllabi, nor to political manifestoes, nor even to governmental decrees. Indeed, one need look not at the obvious manifestations of government as we imagine them, but at the federal mint—that inconspicuous and swelling production facility of dollars and coins. It’s there that fascism, or at least the fasces after which the political ideology was named, was imprinted upon American life.

Between the years 1916 and 1945, an awful quarter of a century during which two World Wars were fought, the United States Mint produced what was charmingly, though misleadingly known as the “Mercury Dime”. As every numismatist worth his bottom dollar will know, the Mercury Dime was an extraordinary piece of pecuniary treasure. Indeed, even till this day it continues to be highly-esteemed by those enraptured by this archaic and specialized hobby. More than that, even for the lay saver and spender and depositor of cash, it’s a coin of which our historical consciousness ought to take further note.

Both sides of the Mercury Dime were remarkable. On its front was pictured an image of the Roman goddess, Libertas. Truly, her presence and her visage require no further explanation from so profligate an expositor as me. Ours, after all, is a vigorous nation enamored of being free and inextricably steeped in liberal ideals. These come to us quite naturally and need little in the way of elucidation. As such, no other matronly mascot than Libertas would suit us and it’s not difficult to see why. During those two great wars of Europe, those continental moments of strife when enslavement, genocide, and oppression were everywhere to be felt and seen, Libertas—to whom we might affix the more familiar names of Columbia or Lady Liberty—was an image of our peculiarly American ideal. She was the paragon of our bounding patriotism and the protectress of our uniquely unfettered soul. She was the exception to the world’s disorder and, like pagans, we adored her.  

Yet, for all the estimable attributes with which she was rightly associated—which were, likewise, those for which our own country was commended by those yearning desperately to be free—our government gave her the wrong name. How could it be so remiss? Apparently, much though we think them to be, mistakes of our government’s making aren’t a new nor especially modern phenomenon of which we now take such keen note; they’ve been since our founding inveterate problems, but they’re the type to which we’ve learned to resign ourselves, grin, and move on. Still, it’s because of a governmental mistake that we know her not as the “Liberty Dime”, as really we ought to, but rather as the “Mercury Dime” as no scholar would’ve permitted. Leave it to a nation illiterate of the classics to toy with and ultimately to corrupt classical themes.

The Roman goddess Liberty, you see, was identifiable by her conical Phrygian cap. It’s the same headpiece that would reappear centuries later atop the restive heads of the Parisian sans-culottes during the Revolution in France (known to that plebeian rabble as the bonnet rogue, or the “red hat”), as well as upon the coats of arms of nearly every South American country in existence today. Though far from American origination—be it North or South—the hat has been a cherished piece of our multicultural appropriation from the east to the west. The cap, as its names implies, was exported from Phrygia, or our modern-day Turkey, whence it was scattered across the world. From Asia Minor, the hat was sent, either symbolically or sartorially, to the rest of the untrammeled world (from which Turkey, sad though I am to say, is presently hopelessly excluded).

But the man upon whom the task was pressed to design this “Mercury Dime”, to envisage Libertas for the country, and to bring to life her noble head was confused with his myth. Though perhaps competent in the art of bas-relief and the nuance of the numismatist’s craft, he was a middling antiquarian and a classicist sorely lacking in the erudition of taste. To Lady Liberty’s Phrygian cap, he added a pair of erroneous wings upon her ear lobes. One needn’t be a bardolator of Homer nor a Sophoclean devotee to recognize the god to whom those wings belong. Of course, they belong to Hermes or, as the Romans called him, Mercury.

Mercury, an ever-vacillating deity, played his part in the Pantheon as the god of cupidity, correspondence, and love or lust. To his credit, or to everyone else’s shared disgrace, this errant attachment to the image of Mercury isn’t exclusive to the printer of coins; many of our medical professionals still wrongly display the avaricious god’s staff coiled bilaterally by snakes over which a pair of telltale wings hangs. The more austere and salutary rod of which they’ve been so neglectful is that of Asclepius—son of Apollo and god of medicine for whose forgiveness we do pray.

And so, what might’ve been the “Liberty Dime” became at once the “Mercury Dime” as the mercurial became the financial and the coin’s circulation got underway. But the misapplication of its name and its inaccurate depiction of its goddess need not reduce the artistic grandeur of this ten-cent piece. It’s still a beautiful little coin upon which the eyes and the soul can profit.

The face of Libertas, ambiguously feminine, was modeled upon that of Elsie Stevens. She escapes history if not for her being the sparsely comely wife of the highly celebrated author by the first name of Wallace. Etched in profile, the face is succinctly handsome and powerfully self-assured. In so constrained a space as is to be found on the surface of a dime, one can’t help but admire her overflowing resolution and her boundless courage. With aquiline nose, paper thin-lips, an insuperable chin, and unblinking eyes, she stares stoically into the commerce of the world. Her hair, the only indication of her femininity—coupled with a slightly softened zygomatic arch—is tussled beneath that confusion of a Hermetic-Phrygian hat (of which I made previous mention). Again, alongside her ear, that amply-feathered wing emerges as if in preparation to alight. We can only hope to imagine that this austere deity is descending to greet us money-changing mortals from the heavens above. Above the wing the Phrygian hat flops over, in what appears an ill-tailored excess of fabric, toward the lady’s stoical brow. This fold, however, has its reason (to which I also earlier alluded), and no metallurgist worth a damn nor a dime would add to his work so superfluous a cap.

Where, you might ask, in the depiction of this inspiring lady is the fascist strain to be found? Was she, in either her mercurial or her liberal form, actually a crypto-fascist concealed from our view? Was she a maiden Mussolini in whom, as the coin’s inscription exhorts us, we ought not to place our trust?

Mrs. Stevens, or Mrs. Mercury, or Mrs. Liberty, for that matter, can have her many names cleared of so scandalous a charge. The fascism, you see, was on the coin’s obverse side. She felt it, but saw it not. Adorning the side of the coin opposite her face is an emblem with which most observers will be unfamiliar. Beautifully and intimidatingly constructed with carefully-spaced vertical lines, the image is that of the fasces.

The fasces, from which our “fascism” derives, was an ancient Roman weapon and symbol of unified strength. Along with unity, it was demonstrative of such manly Roman virtues as glory, martial zeal, virility, and intimidation. As it appears on the Mercury Dime, it’s an ambivalent weapon around which an olive branch is wrapped. It’s at once intimidating and irenic. In Roman times, however, it was all the former and nothing of the latter. The fasces was used by the lictors who were present in both the monarchical and the republican periods of Rome. Few in number but unwavering in oath, these were the men by whom the Roman kings, consuls, and later magistrates were surrounded. They carried in their arms this cumbersome device after which an Italian political movement would be named nearly two millennia hence.

Simply put, though perhaps complexly conceived, the fasces was essentially an ax around which a bundle of durable sticks and rods were tied. Often, the ax protruded from the top of the bundle as if a minatory jack-in-the-box were leaping for a kill. Other times, the ax component would emerge from the middle section of the sticks as if a scathing excrescence. In the event of an assault, this sturdy but ungainly weapon might be used to bludgeon or eviscerate a foe. It seems to the military eye of modernity a rather defensive than offensive threat, but it appears to be the case that in either capacity, it’d be apt to fail. One certainly wouldn’t carry so curious a device into the throes of battle or the desperate tumult of single combat. It was more likely to be used in a unilateral bout—one where the victim was, by the state’s decree, murderously preordained.

Aside from its rather limited utility as a weapon of war (it would shrink in futility in the presence of any other well-crafted Roman sword—the redoubtable type for which the empire would become so internationally famous), the fasces was of deep symbolic import. It was, as noted, a sign of Roman unity, order, and strength. The proximity of the ax to the sticks by which it was supported, and the sticks to one another to which they were collectively bound, described in one device the ethos of an empire. It would be unified and it would be strong. It would be trenchant and it would be swift. It would be homogenous and dangerous, universally recognizable and virtuously bound. It would be redoubtable and shockingly durable through the passage of time.

And durable, and very nearly invisible, it’s remained through many centuries on end. Until this day, it persists undetected before our unseeing eyes. The Mercury Dime, I admit, isn’t the only place it can be seen. To list all of the American icons upon which the fasces appears would be, I fear, an unwise effort on my part; I dare not stretch to exhaustion the good reader’s patience for which I’ve been so grateful thus far. This, I should think, will be a matter of further independent research if you’re so inclined. Suffice it to say, once one is cognizant of it, the fasces leaps out from every corner of our national iconography and clamors with a bit of discord in the ear. Permit me one example, and I’ll refer your attention to the official seal of the U.S. Senate. Expectedly red, white, and blue, the seal is an emblem at whose bottom two fasces cross as if to form an “X”. Additionally, at its top, a Phrygian cap rests. Between these two conflicting symbols a shield of stars and stripes is to be found over which the phrase E Pluribus Unum is found draped and inscribed.  

At least on the one point, the president was correct: America will never be a socialist country. That doesn’t exclude, of course, the possibility of it being a fascist one. And if the Mercury Dime and the U.S. Senate’s seal and the doorway to the Oval Office and the chair upon which Abraham Lincoln at his eponymous memorial sits are to offer us any evidence at all, in its iconography, America has been just that—a symbolically fascist state. One need only look to see.

I think it’s natural, though perhaps it’s merely nominal, that the biblical figure with whom I most associate is Daniel. He’s the man, with the mighty exception of that ageless and relentless Moses, upon whom I look in continual fascination. I do so as I thumb through the dramatis personae of that great and dramatic book atop which he, bearded of face yet bereft of a land once promised, rests. Of course, there are others who likewise compel me. Solomon’s wisdom is a temptation, Adam’s temptation an unwisdom—yet both are an excitement to the literary soul. The commitment of Abraham to filicide is a blind faith the likes of which we might make infrequent good use, and the clemency of Joseph toward his covetous brothers is a mercy that we’d do well always to apply. David, picaresque literary hero and profligate king, equally charms me, but my name is rather Dan than Dave and so I lay bare my bias. David can have his harem and his kingdom. Daniel will continue to possess me.  

At least if I’m to take seriously the pious suggestion of my parents (whose religious devotion tended more toward outward custom than to inner creed), Daniel is the person for whom I’m named—a recognition of which I’ve become quite proud with the accumulation of my days and the softened religious enmity of my youth. Etymologically divine, our shared name means something along the lines of “God is my Judge”, as He is that of everyone, but the immediacy of his judgment is felt by Daniel and by me to be especially acute. While He, if we’re to believe that which we’re told, is omnipotent, the eye by which we Daniels are judged is particularly intimate and powerfully felt. In the simple act of writing out our names, we find no escape. This is the theophoric effect—daunting for he who owns the name, but euphonic to every biblically-tuned ear. We feel as we utter to every cordial passerby our practiced and polite introduction (Hello, my name is…Daniel—the “El” of which is of great significance) the forceful invigilation of His judgmental gaze.

More important than our name, however, is the fact that Daniel is the prophet by whom I’m inspired, the literary character of whom I’m enamored. Rendering into quiescent dormancy a den of ferocious lions, Daniel—availed of God’s animal-taming touch—was able to escape his doom unscathed. Of course, many Babylonians (including women and children) were subsequently made to die the death that he’d evaded, but this sanguinary consequence bothers our hero not. As a Jewish slave-turned-sage, the idea of self-preservation was most vital at a time when he was taken as a captive from his land. He went on to explicate in sagacious and startling detail a bevy of kingly dreams. Combining cosmos and chaos, politics and religion, he foresaw everything from the Diadochi (or the “division”) of Alexander the Great to the great apocalypse that would come preordained at the end of time.

Daniel, you see, is the character with whom I feel the deepest connection—nominal though it might be. And anyone who stands or kneels or supplicates in awe before that same bible has his or her own. In the case of John Milton, the epical English poet and polemicist about whom I’ll now turn to speak, the biblical figure to whom he felt most innately attached was Samson. The title and subject of his final play, Samson Agonistes, makes this manifestly clear.

Yet manifest clarity, in sight though not in mind, was an attribute of which Milton and Samson were cruelly dispossessed. The former, as a result of overly ambitious and precocious study in his youth, hastened upon himself an uninvited blindness. The true cause of his visual affliction is still unknown, but most literary scholars moonlighting as anatomists blame it on his incessant and strenuous reading schedule (which often dove deep into the ill-lit seventeenth-century night). He was already an esteemed classicist and polyglot before the boys with whom he grew up could think. Ultimately, his insatiable reading habit was that from which his brilliance sprung, but his brilliance hastened his blindness. In the absence of his sight and in his elder age, he wrote two of the greatest pieces of literature to be read by English eyes. Samson Agonistes, you probably could guess, was one. The other, Paradise Lost, goes without my mention of it.

Samson, on the contrary (the biblical and not the Miltonic figure), was shorn of his sight in a far more brutal and sanguinary way. He wasn’t exactly the effete intellectual squinting to see a trickle of words from Aristotle or Polybius in the dead of night. That was the injurious path chosen by Milton. Less a man of quiet reason than of violent action, Samson was taken in by a Philistine paramour by whom he was devilishly betrayed. Prior to that, of course, he’d succeeded in wrestling to the ground and divesting of life a rapacious lion—acknowledging but refusing to take a page from Daniel’s slightly less virile book (I, like Daniel, wouldn’t dare approach a feline inhospitably). A herculean Hebrew, or a Hebraic Heracles, Samson didn’t—as did his Greek counterpart—proceed to wear the skin of his victim atop his own. He instead salvaged from a decaying donkey an idle jawbone with which he then used mercilessly to beat a Philistine army.

Seemingly indomitable, there was a catch—not unlike that an Achilles’ heel. Samson’s strength and the perpetuation of his amazing feats were conditional; all of his power resided in his hair. It was, so to speak, a coiffured covenant that he enjoyed with God. Should his famous locks be shorn from his head, he’d lose immediately, though not irretrievably, his army-defying strength.

Delilah, the sweet-sounding Philistine and consummate femme fatale to which there is no biblical equal, made this so. After a cat-and-mouse game of question and deception, she extracted from the robust Samson the tightly-held secret of his strength. With the furious alacrity of a woman scorned, she promptly ordered a servant to shave Samson’s hair while he was asleep. Awakening freshly impotent from a consuming sleep, Samson was now dangerously vulnerable in a hostile land. Sensing his exposure, the Philistines set upon him and gouged out his eyes in a very un-Oedipal way. They then placed fetters upon his wrists and legs and made him a common slave destined forevermore to grind wheat into grain in a mill.

This is the point at which Milton picks up the story in media res. But the protagonist of his only tragedy was very deliberately chosen. As I am Daniel, Samson was Milton and Milton was Samson; the bard and the brute were one. Both blind and laboring in political landscapes unaccommodating to their personal creeds, Samson and Milton shared in their cosmic strife. Milton wrote (or, to be more precise, dictated to an amanuensis) this, his last work, during the inchoate days of the restoration of the previously exiled Stuart monarchy. An avid republican, he was a Cromwellian to the core, a Puritan through and through, and he never learned convincingly how to feign monarchical respect. The days of regicide and interregnum were through and the status quo ante of the Caroline kings had returned. The Philistine government in which Samson was bound reflected that English type from which Milton couldn’t escape. This was an obvious and rueful parallel of which Milton sought to make us aware.

And aware we are. This unusually gripping pathos, both of the biblical character languishing on the stage and the ailing author by whose mind he was re-drawn, is palpable in every scene and it can’t help but be noticed. The persons of which the play are composed are few and, by and large, the titular character of Samson dominates the dialogue. His lamentations and excoriations, respectively of his plight and of his wife, give lugubrious and pitiful momentum to the plot. He holds audience with his father, wife, and captor in that sequence and the tension grows with the order. At the outset, he hasn’t yet earned the agnomen of Agonistes (which means, in Latin, a sort of champion engaged in a struggle—be it internal or external—from which he’s expected victoriously to emerge), but the well-versed auditor of this familiar Jewish tale knows that inevitably, he will. But his victory isn’t fated to be complete, nor one from which he’s destined to emerge alive.

Brought to the temple of the pagan god Dagon for a celebration marking the anniversary of his own captivity, Samson—now known to the Philistines as the “eyeless wretch of Gaza” (a sobriquet, one might add, that would take on new life in a work by the English author Aldous Huxley)—pulled down the pillars between which he was made to stand. Imperceptibly, the hair that once crowned his head began its quiet regrowth. The guards by whom he was daily mistreated seemed, much to their eventual dismay, to have overlooked this subtle human fact. With it, and with the persistent fidelity by which Samson approached his devotion to the Jewish God, his erstwhile strength returned too. With new fuzz atop his head, a constant faith within his soul, and a rekindled fury inciting his heart, Samson rendered into dust the entire edifice under which thousands of happy Philistines were gathered. As a consequence of this murder-suicide pact, Samson, along with countless other inhabitants of that land, were killed in an instant.

With classical reticence (and a disdain for showing anything too gratuitously bloody on the stage), Milton refrained from displaying this final scene of massacre and “self-violence”. So sanguinary an image would be better suited for the eyes of the uncouth rabble; they were, after all, a group in whose crude mental palate little room existed for edification or for taste. Thankfully, the aged poet wasn’t reliant on them for his bread. For Milton, the portrayal of violence on the stage was an indignity, popular with the masses though it may be, but it was one to which he dared not deign. Instead, he concluded Samson Agonistes with a chorus—a fixture so essential to the tragedians of antiquity but lately ignored in the post-Elizabethan age. And it was those very tragedians—the likes of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and the eminent Euripides—to whom Milton in this fantastic work aspired (as he did to Homer, Virgil, and Dante in his far more famous Paradise Lost).

An unabashed classicist of perhaps pedantic ilk, Milton considered the Greek tragic style the best upon which he might hope to model his own. In so doing, he aligned himself with the contemporary dramatic predilections of the French—a people from whose own genius such playwrights and poets as Racine, Corneille, and Boileau would emerge. Though an inveterate geopolitical enemy of the English (and Milton was, at least for the better part of the middle of his life, a thoroughly geopolitical man), the French were a people to whom deviations from the classical construction of tragedy were inimical. They cringed at the thought of Marlowe and Shakespeare manipulating this ancient, Attic heritage into their own “tragic” form. Hamlet might as well have been a heretic and Doctor Faustus a fraud. Milton agreed with them passionately on this point. However progressive he might’ve been in his politics, he was a conservative when it came to the stage.

Milton made explicit his own Franco-Greco predilection in the introduction to Samson Agonistes. More aptly, this “introduction” might better be labeled an education of sorts, for it was Milton’s goal to re-introduce into the heedless post-Elizabethan frenzy among which he lived those concepts of the classics to which his British friends and neighbors had turned their backs. He sought here to enumerate the beautiful, inviolable, timeless, and necessary constraints by which a classical tragedy should be built—and as he hoped again it might be.

He began it by citing the ultimate authority on tragedy—the often overly-prosaic Aristotle. But Aristotle produced more than prose merely throughout the course of his intellectually diverse life. Adding “poetic critic” to his office of peripatetic, this educator of Alexander formulated the standards by which all tragic works were to be judged. Still we employ his criteria to this day, though Hegel (and his protégé Nietzsche) have had no small influence on our thought. On one point or another, each of those aforementioned thinkers diverge, but all held in agreement that unity was to be desired above all else—unity of time, of place, of persons, and of action. No work should exceed in its duration an allotment of twenty-four hours. From one sunrise to its next, this “circumscription of time”, as Milton called it, was deemed amply sufficient for every nightmare of which the tragedian might conceive to transpire. And so it transpired in Samson.

Tragedy aside, Milton viscerally felt himself in Samson—as I fancy myself in Daniel—and the sentiment shines throughout the entirety of his work. I can only hope, perhaps even pray, that this same type of divine permeation courses through mine. After all, Daniel is the hero to whose subtlety, longevity, brilliance, and tact I aspire. No dream, no thought, no portent is too inscrutable for him. Samson, on the other hand, is the demi-god to whom Milton is bound. No affliction, no deficit, no importunacy was unfamiliar to one that wasn’t equally unknown to the other.