The Juntoo

“I do not loathe ideas which go against my own”. So said Montaigne, thus repeat I. He, in typical Gallic fashion, was not only accommodating of that diversity of opinion by which, as a thinking and open man—in an age just beginning to open and think—he’d doubtless be confronted, but positively welcoming of the variegation of its changing hue. He thought of ideas, to which his own might’ve enjoyed but little fraternity, not as alien brigands indiscriminately to be condemned, but as happy guests warmly to be received. His house, into which all comers might’ve gained entry, was as commodious as the breadth of his soul. Both flaunted atria in which limbs might be stretched, both provided rest and stimulation.

Though of a distant origin, uttered in a cadence unfamiliar to his own—which was, to note, a Parisian patois memorably sprinkled with Latin—foreigners arriving in the one or the other would be met there with scrutiny, of course, but not with that alone. Rather, the delights to which they’d soon be treated, the feelings of which they’d now partake, would include the divine graces of hospitality, empathy, and all the embraces of a broad and intellectual life. This was the enticing quality of the Montaignean soul, of the humble man in which so large a presence was embodied.

He saw contrary ideas, those to which his own were opposed, not as a man unaffected by art, but as the most sensitive of sculptors (for, with the lapidary might of his chiseled eloquence, and the marbled strength of his scribbling hand, a sculptor he was). He saw on the canvas of conversation upon which he gazed not blotches to be erased, but special dabs of paint, all deserving of closer inspection and further use. In the perception of his eye, to whose acuity there’s yet been born no equal, every curious and well-considered marking, every accent of touch, was a sparkle by which his own intellect might be better colored. In all thought, there was merit, in all opinion, value. He, a man, was never to be a monochrome. He was too brilliant for the old tedium of “black-and-white”. His palate was too omnivorous, his taste, too exuberant, and like a latter-day Joseph, around whom that refulgent jacket was so fatefully draped, he dressed his philosophy in the colorful ideas of all.  

You can understand, then, why I go about repeating Montaigne’s message without a hint of shame. He is the liberal ideal, the freest and most unconstrained of thinkers, to whom a fettered soul, such as mine, such as ours, can aspire. Thus, that wisest of all Frenchmen, that subtlest of all minds is, before any other, the sage from whom, with little wayward listing, I’ve taken most, if not all of my philosophical instruction. While I might deviate, here and again, to pick from the budding genius of one thinker or another, to taste of their distant satellites and fruits, his is the sun, the universe’s center, to whose flowering radiance I always return. They are but ornaments by which his trail is accented, rest-stops in which one dallies, but never stays.

His is the mind around which—with cosmic and literary devotion, with philosophic and planetary glee—all others, including myself, have gathered in unison to revolve. It is the picture, when stretched sufficiently broadly on a welcoming canvass of sky, of an eloquent and delicious motion, a nimble and contemplative jaunt. It is the dance of those minds unafraid not only of themselves, but of all others, a group, in both cases, of which Montaigne is the leader. He is orchestrating the gait of this troupe, of this exuberant and inquisitive class to whom no exertion of the spirit is found to be detestable. So too, without its knowledge, is he leading the opposition, that party to whom he extends so sympathetic a hand. All are improved by his efforts, whether they know it or not.

It is, in every way, a stelliferous and blinding sight—a most hospitable gathering of thought. It is the place in which, in a liberal and conversational world, in a firmament dominated by variety and ideas, one most certainly wants to be. That is Montaigne, that was America. Both are roads to which countless followers have been attracted, gilded realms upon which many have wished to settle their homes. Thus, his is the path to which, lit by the globes of his enduring brilliance and the guiding attention of his hand, I’ve determined to commit my own. It’s a commitment America will have to earn once again.

In so doing, one must follow Montaigne’s precept, must build himself in the mold of his pure and abiding example. One must not, for the mere sake of their contrariness, “loathe ideas which go against” his own. That would be impotent, blinkered, and coarse. That would be undeserving of the title of “man”, and—more distressingly still—unequal to the sublime heights of the Montaignean spirit. Rather, one must embrace those divergent opinions, must “play gracefully”, in the words of Oscar Wilde—himself an inheritor of the lessons of Montaigne—with those ideas with which his own find no immediate kinship.

One must embrace and consider all ideas. He mustn’t conform, as though overwhelmed by the power of an involuntary response, to the prevailing, chattering class—the complacent bien pensant from which so much bland tripe is regularly disseminated. Instead, one must combat, until the exhalation of his last dying breath, the homogenizing influences by which his ideas become, between his mind and its neighbor’s, indistinguishable. A lack of diversity in thought amounts to a lack of vivacity in life, the former often inducing the latter. It’s a cycle for which, outside of death, there’s yet to have been discovered a remedy. That is the making of a stagnant pool, the sagging of a bushel laden with an ugly crop. One cannot hate that which is contrary, merely. One cannot dispose, without first tasting, that which is foreign to the blunted idleness of his tongue. One must drink the juices of all, and savor their influence as he will.

One mustn’t be hesitant in his approach toward an alternative opinion, a seemingly outlandish idea to which his own, however vehemently held (and however unsusceptible to persuasion) might be fiercely antipodal. There mustn’t be timidity and shyness in discourse—all must be intrepid expositors of their thoughts, must be unabashed orators of their lips. One must be “so far from shying away when others’ judgments clash with mine, so far from making myself unsympathetic to the companionship of men because they hold to other notions or parties, that, on the contrary, just as the most general style followed by nature is variety—even more in minds than in bodies, since minds are of a more malleable substance capable of accepting more forms—I find it much rarer to see our humors and purposes coincide”.

Let them fail to coincide. Let their malleability re-shape us, but let their craftsmanship never leave us wading in the same image twice. Let us, all divergent and all new, join together in unison, on this and this point alone: we are not, nor shall we ever be, the same. This is our shared declaration, our distinctly human plight, a singularity in which, without exception, we all can participate. We are not the same. Our minds, and the opinions of which they are the authors, are so radically different, one from the next. So much the better. Nature, wiser than wisdom and older than age, would not have them be so, and so they shan’t be. Variety, truly, is that vital condiment, that dab of mustard by which the flavors of life are so deliciously spiced. It’s responsible for that sapidity, for that unique tastefulness of which we Americans, constantly hungry, can’t get enough. As such, “In the whole world, there has never been two identical opinions any more than two identical hairs or seeds.” Rather, “Their most universal characteristic is”, Montaigne concluded, “their diversity”.

This is diversity out of which, in the undying words of E pluribus unum, our American unity is to be found. We must neither neglect nor abuse it, as lately we’ve done. We must make, once again, a deity of our diversity, and treat it with the reverence and awe, the supreme gratitude of which it’s so richly deserving.

There is, so far as I can think, not a single person with whom, in the daily course of my interactions, in the genial meetings of which I happily partake, I’d neither rise nor descend to speak. No truer is this sentiment when I tire of talking with myself—that most compelling of all men, that most fascinating subject of our species. But, self-immersed though it may be, my self knows better: An ounce of dialogue, after all, is worth a pound of monologue, the former being far and away the more precious commodity of the two. And yet, that having been said, there’s seldom any other person, outside myself, by whose wit I’m so enamored, by whose genius I’m so convinced.

Nevertheless, I find beauty in conversation with all. I love the diversity of unusual and stimulating ideas, the novelty of personal ambitions and stories of which, in reliance on one’s own mind, he can’t hope to be the author. One must travel outside himself to find such a type. I go about this voluble venture with a hunger to know what might be said, and a dexterity to handle its reception once uttered. I say this not as a gloating profession of my own ease of approach and loquacity, a looseness of tongue with which, as a demure and hopelessly quiet child, I certainly wasn’t born, but of which I’ve come into recent and useful possession, but of my genuine friendliness, my curiosity of character, and my sincerity of good-will. These are traits I try never to conceal, but rather to extend to every person with whom, lucky as I might be from one day to the next, I come into fruitful and talkative contact.

And so, constituted as I am, I offer no hesitation in venturing to converse with any person by whom, in a frank and open manner, I might be confronted. In that sense, and in perhaps no other, I consider myself perfectly, indeed, radically, democratic. There is none to whom I won’t speak, none by whom I won’t be enlightened. I’m determined to be so. There is, in my opinion, no impediment by which I might be bothered that will prevent me from a robust and sturdy brotherhood, no wall separating the gentle and sororal relations for which I yearn. There is, in the course of my engagements, neither measurement of scholarship, attainment, sex, gender, race, nor class. I’m committed to finding the brilliance in all, and all are welcome to me.

Neither intellectual achievement nor sophistication of mien serves, in my eyes, as an impediment to the act of getting together simply to talk. The heaven-scraping summit of one’s prosperity, the soaring altitude of his achievement, aren’t hurdles too high to be cleared, nor mountains too menacing to be climbed. They cast not a shadow under which I’ll be made quietly to plod, accompanied by the chains of my own shortcomings. All boundaries can be cleared with the athleticism of but one verbal leap—the movement of an untrammeled tongue and an eloquent soul.

Alternately, I care little for the lowness of one’s station, quite less for the poverty of the diction by which he announces himself. As Montaigne, that greatest and most empathic of speakers, once said, “I envy those who can come down to the level of the meanest on their staff and make conversation with their own servant.” I listen, with great sympathy and a desire for understanding, to the sound by which such a servant’s trembling lips are breached. None is so unintelligible not to be felt, if not entirely heard and comprehended. Likewise, the ineptitude of one’s bank bothers me not, nor does the hunger of one’s wallet. For me, that which is of greatest profit, that which has an ultimate value of exchange, is not dollars but words, not materials but feelings, not wealth but wit. The former is ephemeral; the latter etches forever its value in stone. The one is a payment, cold and momentary; the other a lively interest continually to be gained.

So happy a spendthrift, so open a vault of discourse and fun, there is no one to whom I haven’t access, and no one lacks access to me. This, as noted by the percipient Tocqueville—and all the subsequent travelers upon whom his insight into a foreign, dynamic country such as ours cast so strong an impression—is the consequence of our American, egalitarian ideal. Tocqueville, it seems, was as sensitive to the environment in which he found himself as was the universal Montaigne, from whom, despite the many centuries by which they’d been separated, so much pure and resonant wisdom had been gleaned.

Tocqueville realized that this, our shared conception of the equality of man, and the scorn by which his heart is animated when viewing the obsolete benefits of caste, combine to form the fundamentally American ethos. They create that uniquely American attribute by which, in contrast to the Europe of old, we’re so favorably distinguished. In more than any other way, it’s through the conversations of which we partake that this democratic ideal, this uniquely American quality, is recognized. The farmer talks with the artisan, the artisan with the merchant, the merchant with the preacher, and the preacher before all without that scintilla of the unearned superiority by which the stratified world of Tocqueville’s France was so tightly bound.

This, in a republican land—despite the unacknowledged fact of its being, in most every literal way, republican—is the one aspect by which we’re made to feel truly democratic. We are democrats not in our governance, but in our discourse, not in our Constitution, but in our daily interactions. Our affability makes us democratic, not our legal history. Electoral procedures, the writing of laws, the issuance of taxes, the declaration of wars—all of these supposedly public concerns, topics over which, with unenlightened defiance and passionate zeal, we feel ourselves to have complete and unbroken agency, laugh in the face of our democratic claims. They lie beyond the reach of our democratic limbs. Not in these concerns, upon which, through a group of often tactless representatives, we’ve only an indirect influence, but in our conversations are we a truly democratic race.

Of course, the best democracy is that in which every man would be an aristocrat, but we embrace what we have for that which it is. An idealized state, one built along those lines of which, with pompous pleasures, I facetiously dream, has never been so composed, yet we are open, above all, to that diversity of opinion to which, though it be modest or brief, we all feel ourselves free to contribute. We love that variability of thought by which, by the mere dint of it being different, we’re all excited and moved. It is, in every way, a mental stimulation. For that reason alone, diversity of opinion is an unconditional good. It need not explain itself, nor offer a defense to its opponents. As Dante exclaimed, while he ascended with Beatrice the numinous heights of the Paradisiacal realm, “Diverse voices make sweet notes”.

Who among us, I ask, likes not euphony and fine music? Who, as if in the presence of sirens, would dare cover the orifice of his ears? Eagerly they remain open—the brain to which they conduct their messages, wanting. They listen for the chord, tautly wound in their souls, to which, by our very nature, we’re all mellifluously attuned. We have, then, before us, an American harmony, a rhythm to which every singing heart can beat.

Though enviably educated, and in possession of our country’s most desirable university degrees, our journalistic class—that group so instrumental in the formation of our national wisdom, that eloquent cadre in whose image we fancy mirroring our own—hasn’t yet come into acquisition of that which Oscar Wilde called the Oxford Temper. Seemingly haughty, prohibitively distant, and, for those reasons, inaccessible to all but the elect and privileged few, this Oxford Temper about which Wilde spoke (and of which, with little competition among the men of his age, he was the most ostentatious and perfect exemplar), is actually not so off-putting as it might first sound.

One need not, as it were, have spent his young adult life in the halls of that antique institution, that palace of learning of which, to the great merit of his native genius, Wilde was but one of a select few Irish alumni. Nor, for that matter, need he have regaled himself in the azure of an Oxonian hue—a color to which, in the life not only of Wilde, but in that of any modern scholar by whom he’s since been followed, so much deference is still to be paid. One need not have spoken with the high affectation of a non-rhotic tongue, a style of speaking of which we Game of Throne-loving, Anglophone-enthused Americans are still so very much enamored. Nor need he have been versed in the tragedies of Greece or the epics of Rome, subjects in which, classicist as he was, Wilde was so uniquely fluent. Nor need he have been the progeny of some ancient and forgotten renown, a family capable of tracing, from the branches of its sprawling tree to the depths of its Norman roots, the pulsing veins of aristocratic blood.

No—none of this was needed in the pursuit of that Oxford Temper, that grand and sophisticated manner of which Wilde was so inimitable a promulgator. And while not everyone could hope to ascend to the heights of Wilde’s peculiar genius, the Oxford Temper ought to have been, and, to my encouragement, conceivably still is, exportable to all. It is a democratization of the aristocrat’s mien, a patrician’s code made for the plebeian’s lot. If not in the financial circumstance in which the latter resides, then it’s certainly to be found in the wealth and elegance of his conversation; if not in the clothes and the jewels in which his body’s attired, then doubtless it rests in the acquired opulence and culture of his mind.

The Temper, the Oxford demeanor, required only that its practitioner play, in Wilde’s own words, “gracefully with ideas”. That’s all. I don’t think this is too demanding an intellectual endeavor—certainly not one from which the majority of us, strivers all, is barred. Anyone with an honest mind and a venturesome spirit can do it, can play gracefully with any assortment of piquant ideas. Yet, in so doing, he must avoid at all costs the arrival at a “violence of opinion” merely. Such a disposition is neither to be permitted, nor sought. It would be intemperate, narrow, and crude, and the Oxford Temper condemns it.

Our commentariat, our journalists, our media pundits and personalities in whom, for so long and unprofitable a length time, we’ve invested so large and valuable a share of our attention, have lost their hold of Wilde, have forsaken their movement toward the Oxford Temper. The former, now long forgotten, would lament the neglect with which the latter’s been treated. They care for neither temper nor man, and, in so doing, they further damage the cracked shell of their own intellectual prestige.

Very few of the aforementioned, if any at all, have the ability to tolerate, much less gracefully to play, with that variety of ideas by which, as a natural consequence of their chosen profession, they’re supposed to be confronted each and every day. Still fewer lament the recognition of this fact. Instead, they’re unwilling to handle the sharp edges of the keen opinions with which, with open palms and nimble dexterity, they ought eagerly to come into contact. They should do so with the bare and supple flesh of their hands. These are the objects over whose surfaces their fingers should gleefully run, the toys by whose unexpected points and turns, by whose smoothed edges and dagger corners, they should be titillated and forever tempted.

Empty of hand, emptier still of mind, they’re careful to step between the open fissures on the ground, the holes above whose smoke-filled depths this gaping culture of ours has begun its dying quake. They choose their paths, with contemptible timidity and slowness of gait, so as to avoid having to chart those many unexamined and unpaved roads. They want nothing better than to elude the rugged instability of those unmarked journeys, those rock-strewn tracts onto which they might unpreparedly turn. Those daunting curves, those passages of gravel, are new and startling thoughts of whose course they’re so uncertain. Pursued with tact and curiosity, inquisitiveness and mirth, they might lead to unexpected places, spots from which they’ll not soon want to return. They might lead to forests of ideas, mountains of knowledge, between whose barb-laden thickets and cloud-scraping summits they might sooner discover themselves oh-so happily lost.

All the better, says I, if they’re not so soon to be found. After all, to be so stationed, in so darkened and perilous a wood, or at so breathless a height, isn’t always so undesirable a condition. I rather like it, but they like it not. They avoid the delights of that intellectual abyss in which I feel interminably comfortable to float. They’ll not risk the dipping of a toe, while I prefer completely to jump in, awash in what’s to come.

They want terra firma. They wantsoil that they know. They want earth atop which, with little fear of molestation and intellectual bother, they can gather and complacently sit. They want to talk amongst themselves about themselves and for themselves, and they want to do so to the exclusion of all others. After all, these “others” for whom they hold such deep and abiding contempt, by whom they’re so shamelessly “triggered”, are, in their opinion, nothing but a disreputable and a faceless mass—an ill-educated group for which they’ve neither respect nor time. It’s certainly not a group with which they’ve any intention to engage. They want intimacy and affirmation, but only with themselves. This leads not to a healthful accouchement, but to an ugly and still-born birth. They want an incestuous cross-pollination of sterile ideas, a thrust of the mind from which, as we know, nothing great is ever really begotten. All is masturbatory, yet all is tidy and clean.

And that’s what they really want—that by which their hygienic thoughts and their enlightened sentiments can be globally espoused. They want that which is anodyne, unpolluted, and inoffensive. They don’t want to feel the dirt whose turning is needed when one proceeds sincerely to dig for the truth. They want purity of opinion, homogeneity, and unblemished agreement. They want that by which, mentally, they can never be sullied, and never hurt.

Yet that’s not the Oxford Temper, not the reason for which we were made. There must be ambiguity. We mustn’t be afraid to get our knees in the dirt, nor stain the porcelain finish of our elbows. Wilde knew this and, while we’ve since forgotten his lesson, we shall be reminded of it again.

We’re far sturdier than that manner of thinking by which our journalists have been so utterly subdued, far more resilient and admirably robust. We were, I’m convinced, made to be intellectual adventurers, a people fearless of the wood before whose impenetrable depth we now stand. We were made to be dialectical warriors, a cohort ever-equipped for the sallies of hostile tongues. We are brave and undismayed in their presence, and we know how to absorb and return their lash. We were crafted, after all, with one part steel in our bones and, with the other, sapience in our hearts. We are adamantine and philosophic, unconquerable and wise. We are tough and contemplative—Spartan and Attic—yet we have in our bodies still more: we possess the unmatched, brilliant creativity of a distinctive American light. It flickers in us still, despite the influences by which it might be darkened.

With it, we see nothing in the supposed “might” and “violence” of conflicting opinions. They diminish in our view. We’re not frightened by the weighty shadows of alternative thoughts. We don’t retreat from them. We don’t cower in their presence. Rather, with them, we play gracefully and we respond eloquently, as Wilde and the Oxford Temper would have us do.

Better no rule than cruel rule—that’s the Aesopian conclusion upon which, in a flurry of passion and a height of despair, many of our brightest minds in politics, journalism, and academia have settled. Despite the emotional circumstances through which they’ve worked, they’re completely well-reasoned in having done so. Though Aesopian in origin, it’s a fundamentally American ideal, a kind of binary choice for which some of our greatest men, like the intrepid Patrick Henry (who enumerated as his only conceivable options to the cruelty of the British monarch to be liberty or death) are so famous. It was a call to which, over the passage of long time, both Greek philosophers and Founding Fathers would jointly respond. Millennia haven’t yet quieted its resonance, and still it echoes in the listening hollows of our searching ears.

It is, I think, an entirely unexceptionable stance to hold, a commendable posture in which any upright and free individual will choose to carry himself. After all, man has an inviolable right to the freedom of which he’s so natural an inheritor, has a claim to that sublime gift over which no one else can declare possession. He has an expectation, from the first stirrings of his heart in the warmth of his cradle to the final breaths sweeping him to the descent to his grave, not to be oppressed, and he’d rather hasten his arrival to the latter if ever that were the case.

As such, thinking myself so erect and unfettered a man, this is a position, that no rule is better than cruel rule, with which I fervidly agree. It’s one to which my deepest sympathy extends. License before malice, screams the pulsating beat of my heart, freedom before tyranny is the cry of my open soul. Predictable law is good, so long as it’s wise in its conception and consistent in its work, but when it’s whimsical and mean, it’s abhorrent in every way. It’s anathema to the spirit of man. Made in the image of something greater than ourselves, there is no human ruler to whom we should think ourselves inferior, none from whom, with outstretched necks, we should meekly receive the weight of a capricious yoke.

On this point, most Americans agree. If they don’t, that’s the malign influence of some foreign, authoritarian belief. It’s the effect of a backward, despotic opinion with which they’ve been infected, an illness marked by a lust of power of which, if they’re to live in a civilized nation, they must be purged. Better no rule than cruel rule, all the rest of us converge to say, yet those of that political or academic persuasion do so with a conviction unsusceptible to nuance. They’ve over-extended the idea and drawn its boundaries far too broad. They’ve misapplied it to a topic to which it’d preferably remain unfamiliar. They’ve done so without a reflection on the lengths to which that precious claim might, and probably will be stretched. They’ve done so in their chastisement of the police.

Aesop’s insight, persistently relevant then as it is, undyingly, today, is a truth at which, thanks to a string of recent police-led atrocities from Minneapolis to Louisville, Baton Rouge to Baltimore, Staten Island and beyond, those in favor of the abolition of the police have unhesitatingly arrived. Anarchy—or, the “no rule” part of that memorable maxim uttered above—heard through the speaker of these terrible events, now carries with it an enticing and melodious ring. Contrasted with is baneful, tyrannical alternative, many intellectuals think it’s finally time to listen to its tune and dismember the police. No police, so their thinking goes, is better than cruel police. It’s the newest mantra to which the elite has begun to dance, but I fear that to which they rhythmically sway is but a siren’s song.

This idea of abolishing the police, shocking though it first might seem, is an argument with which, for no reason other than its growing popularity, we ought to begin entertaining ourselves. It makes for a fascinating, though positively daunting, exercise in the abstract consequences of radical social change and a new approach to penal law.

Of course, in order to accept its logic and the radical conclusion of which it’s so startlingly productive, one must agree to the premise on which it’s based. Unfortunately, that the police are irredeemably cruel is not a truth that’s exactly self-evident. One must approach it not with a set of statistics by which, for what they’re worth, it might be rather convincingly refuted, but with an agenda or a strongly-held bias.

Doubtless, the police forces of America, taken in their collective and variegated whole, have their shortcomings and their faults. Yes, they have their “bad apples”, those by whom, in the eye of the public, the rest of the bunch is irretrievably spoiled, and their fair share of rogues and brutes, but are they, for this reason, totally to be condemned? Are they, as an overwhelmed, under-funded institution, by which our communities of color feel themselves disproportionately hurt, to be damned cap-a-pie? Are there no aspects of their work by which they might be redeemed? Are there no laudable qualities for which they might gain applause? Have they no underlying merits atop which improvements might be built?

I tend to think, overall, that our police departments do serve an invaluable role for the societies for which they’re created, upon which they’re dependent. Generally, they offer an indispensable service, a great benefit to our communities for which they might more gratefully be acknowledged. I tend to think as well that there is no imperceptible rot at their core, no ugly infection by which the rest of their body is to be thought malignantly corrupted. Despite all the fears, no such disease exists. It’s not yet so clear that it can be diagnosed.

The institution, I’m glad to say, hasn’t yet gone completely septic. It hasn’t yet moved from police to pathologic, from law enforcement to public blight. Nor, at this point, do I think that it will. The risk of it doing so is quite low, the prognosis far less than grim. It might be gangrenous here and there and, thus, in need of an occasional excision, but it need not be starved of life and prematurely killed. It might need closer treatment and an inhalation of fresh life, it might even need a bolus of reformation, but it ought not be suffocated of air and left for dead in the precinct.

Still, no rule is better than cruel rule, and no police is better than cruel police—or so goes the current thinking. While I might not grant the invidious and overly-broad tone of the premise, and while I might argue from the minority chair in favor of the police’s continued importance, I’ll admit that my curiosity has been piqued. Let some of these Democrat-run cities implement this idea. Let them demonstrate the courage of their convictions and, contrary to all precedent, actually defund a public program from which, as has been made clear, so few are benefitting. Let them abolish the police. We shall see, in a grand and potentially horrifying experience, if “cruel police” is really so much worse than its alternative.

We might then learn yet another Aesopian lesson—that we often despise that which is most useful to us. We might reconsider the utility, rather than the alleged “cruelty”, of the police.  

Living in a marshy swamp untouched by the law, a boggy but happy land to which free-loving souls are uniquely suited, was a city of frolicking frogs. Imagine such a sight, in the depths of a glen (a moss-laden world to which man hasn’t access!) where frogs, in every direction, were left to leap free. With trees as their buildings, and rivulets as their streets, these frogs enjoyed the sanctity of an unusual terrain—one with which, beyond the dusty pages of bestiaries and hoary old fables, only a select few readers are ever truly acquainted.

Theirs was an environment into which, at their own behest, neither pain nor suffering had yet been introduced. It was a place into which neither enmity nor strife were welcome. It was absolutely peaceful and calm. It was lovable and delicate to the extreme. It was as irenic as the lately storm-tossed sea, an exhausted, now restful body above which the dove once again flies. All the more remarkable was the fact that this frog-covered land was an unsupervised grove, a place over which an oppressive eye dared not watch. It knew neither scepter nor caste, government nor ruler, subject nor king. It knew only of the affinity of one frog to his brother.  

Insouciant were they as they splashed about themselves, playful with their engagements, one with the other, from the dawn of the morning until the close of the day. They were comfortably careless and perfectly free, a sight of which, in consideration of their own cruel stations, many of the other animals by which the forest was populated were understandably envious. Yet these simple and mirthful frogs thought not of those others, those pitiable species for whom they hadn’t a care, but only of the happy luxuries to which they were treated. There was, after all, no natural predator by whom they were bothered, no internal affront against which they needed to stand guard.

Then, one day, the philosophical consciences of a few sober frogs were aroused. Thinking, be it human or amphibian, is always a dangerous pursuit; better is it to live in insipidity and peace.

For far too long, thought this contemplative bunch, this freedom of which they made such wanton use had been abused. Liberty, as always it does, had given way to license, and the morals of the frogs had become anarchistic and loose. There was no law, no higher order by which their fellow frogs were to be constrained, and they seemed, for the improvement of all, to yearn for the salutary arrival of some fetters. Thus, in what might’ve been the world’s first pond-side plebiscite, an amphibian election on a revolutionary scale, a vote was held and the results were fixed: the frogs were to have a proper constitution and to impose for its execution a loyally-backed king.

To effectuate this political volte face, this movement from radical liberty to a despot’s regime, the frogs petitioned the almighty Zeus—father of all, as both pagan and Christian acknowledge, from whom the menacing thunderbolts still rain. “Mighty Jove”, they cried, “send unto us a king that will rule over us and keep us in order”. Their unchecked liberty was a problem of which they were only too keenly aware, to which only divine intervention could be a solution.

Unaccustomed to so peculiar a plea, our royal Zeus, in response, let out an earth-shaking laugh. Once recovered from the tumult of his rib-shaking chuckle, he decided to grant these pious frogs their wish. To appease this new group of proselytes, a species from whom, in the absent devotion of the man upon whom he couldn’t be long reliant, he might receive further supplication, Zeus sent down into the swamp an enormous log. This, with the flash of a divine act, was to be that king of whom those frogs were so sorely desirous.  

It was, at first, an intimidating sight. An addition to their environment by which, with universal trepidation, the frogs were totally frightened, the log quickly became an object of play. After refraining from touching, much less going near it, the frogs adjusted themselves to its copious girth. This wasn’t the type of law-producing king they’d been expecting, the stolid monarch for whom, in their appeals to the Olympian deity, they had fervidly hoped. It was, in every way, quite different. Instead of conforming to its silent rule, they commenced to dance upon it. Jovial as before, and liberal as they’d ever been, they hardly took notice of their new king log.

And so, they petitioned Zeus yet again. “We want a real king”, they proclaimed, “one that will really rule over us”. Disappointed were they of the bobbing wooden idol, the interloping stick for which they hadn’t any respect. They wanted a force, a rule, by whose presence they could be directly affected. They wanted a king and a law whose tangible reality they could feel. And so, Zeus, ever the accommodating deity, quickly obliged. He sent among them a big, insatiable stork, by whom they were all gobbled up.  

Repentance came, but it came too late. None was left to consider the consequences of which, to his great misfortune, he was so unmindful. A lesson for the liberals, the anarchists, and the undaunted, an unrestrained mass for whom this Aesopian tale has any resonance: “Better no rule than cruel rule”—better liberty than its opposite.