Cry Wilderness

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by Frank Capra


  “And that question, ladies and gentlemen, bears directly on your rather sardonic outburst at the outset of this hearing. An outburst that is symptomatic of a nationwide fear that we Americans, even we who live in a far off wilderness, are in the midst of a new kind of revolution. Not over labor and capital, or over race, political systems, or ideologies, but over values and personal attitudes; over fear for our civilization.

  “For one thing, we don’t believe anybody anymore. We don’t believe our president, we don’t believe our news media, and, as you’ve just shown us, you don’t believe your locally elected officials. In fact, my Mono County friends, we have reached that sterile state in which we little believe, or put much trust, in any of our traditional institutions.

  “For example, the reason we are here today is that a certain deputy sheriff declined to obey his chief’s order because he didn’t agree with it. Think of it! Didn’t agree with the order so he said, ‘No, thanks!’

  “Furthermore, when relieved of his duties, he clamored for a public hearing so he could tell the world why he was right and the chief wrong about that order.

  “Now tell me. If every soldier can pick and choose which of the general’s orders he’ll obey, and then demands, and gets, a public hearing to defend his views—well, my friends, we’ll have the kind of chaos that certain highly motivated anti-Americans are working night and day to bring about.

  “We go around saying: ‘America is great, but—our faith is faltering. And when we lose faith in our country, friends, we lose faith in ourselves. And we hate ourselves for it. And when we hate, we fear!’ And as Emerson warned:

  ‘O, friend, never strike sail to a fear!

  Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas.’

  “For fear is what makes us ripe to join mobs, and to riot and burn and demand mindless changes!

  “Why? Because deep, deep down in all of us, we yearn to believe in something. Something certain, secure, incorruptible. And when we find that pearl of great price, that North Star that we can trust in a storm, that honest, trustworthy, incorruptible American to whom we can surrender our hearts and our souls, and to whom we can truthfully say, ‘I believe in you,’ then, my brothers and sisters, we will cease to fear, cease to hate. Then we will believe in ourselves again, and in our God, and in each other, and in the greening of our country.”

  His intense sincerity had completely captivated his audience. Not a cough, not a movement of the head. In the hearing room, in the halls, in the standing room tents, all was silence and rapt attention. So engrossed were the spectators that many in the hearing room, including Tony, overheard Hoppy’s fed-up, irreverent whispered remark meant for only Boatcourt and me, “Why the cheeky son of a bitch! He’s setting himself up as some kind of a messiah!”

  A hot solar wind of dirty looks came wafting Hoppy’s way from Tony Caldwell, a long, cold, contemptuous look. Then, signaling his wife with a nod—she turned down all mikes but his—and speaking with repressed anger, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you didn’t come here to complain about taxes, or to hear Lefty Wakefield plead for understanding, or to hear us hash over the human rights of two worthless, inhuman wretches. No, indeed.

  “You turned out in droves, this cold snowy day, on the outside chance that you might see blood flow, or some heads roll. Well, I can’t promise you blood. But I can assure you that one head will roll. And that head will be mine or Mister Stephen Gorski’s.

  “And you, the citizens of Mono County—like the Soman citizens in the Coliseum—will decide whose head is forfeit.

  “And if, in your good judgment, your verdict is ‘thumbs-down’ for me, I shall hand you my head on a platter, and will immediately retire from public life forever!

  “But if you spare my head, I will commit myself completely—heart, brain, and my beautiful wife—to a lifetime of dedicated public service.

  “You know,” he said, pausing and smiling again. “Al Capp once said that ‘the public is really a piano. You just have to learn what keys to poke.’ Well, before we get on with the unpleasant stuff, I want to poke one key on the piano.”

  Quotations seemed to purl from his lips, gracing the pellucid flow of his English. Hearts aflutter, faces radiant, the enchanted women—be they old, young, white, or Indian—looked up at him with one common reverence: adoration. Had he stirred up visions long quiescent? Of gallantry, romance, passion, flame? Of Camelot knights and maidens fair?

  And was this flair, I thought, this power to make banked urges glow, was this a partial explanation of the unexplainable riddle, “What makes a star?”

  His voice cut into the writer’s vaporings.

  “You know,” said Tony to a hypnotized audience, “I was born in Mono County—on a pig farm. And Mono’s unmatchable beauty is very dear to me. But much, much more important—I love the incredible friendliness of Mono’s people. You. And I can never, never forget the love and forbearance of my devoted teachers and professors who struggled mightily to prepare your little pig boy—that’s me—to study under some of the world’s most learned men: scientists, philosophers, and intellectual giants powerful enough to play world chess using ethnic groups and whole countries as pawns.

  “But strangely enough I couldn’t burn incense to these mighty pundits. They acted as though there was a great gulf between themselves and the rest of us, and that they were the born masters of the huddled masses—us.

  “They rationalized that all that does not shrink into the few cubic centimeters within their heads is trivia. Egomania is the common disease of these great savants. Some leave pyramids, some leave tapes…and Clio, the Muse of History, symbolically offers them a choice between a fanfare of trumpets and the dripping clepsydra.” He put up a hand. “Who knows what a clepsydra is?”

  A young woman’s voice shouted, “A water clock!”

  “Correct! Nice going.” He started applause. “That’s the good news,” he said soberly. “The not-so-good news is that in my argosy among the world’s far-out intellectuals, I sensed an unspoken conspiracy that threatens the very existence of our way of life: an artistic and a scientific crusade against family and State. And that, wittingly or not, a world dictatorship of their own kind is their goal.

  “There is a connection between crime and the extreme activists, not in the sense that the intellectual hires the criminal, but that he condones and encourages crime itself by advocating philosophies that state there is no sin or virtue; no good or evil; no assaulters or Samaritans.

  “Laws are the Ten Commandments expanded into the working blueprints and specifications for the building of a community or of a nation. But some modern thinkers have lost faith in the whole structure of human society. They say there is no design from God because there is no God. And if there ever was a God, he is now dead.

  “They say a rock foundation of absolutes is an archaic myth of the past; that a shifting foundation of swamp or quicksand is more fitting to modern thought.

  “And for the solid, binding beams of social laws, they would substitute nonbinding, non-dimensional, ‘anything goes’ pillars of free thought.

  “The intellectual doesn’t just advocate promiscuous sex. He says sexual love is a romantic figment of the poets. That in reality it is just a biological pleasure of the flesh to be gratified at any time one feels the urge, with members of the opposite sex, or with his own sex, it doesn’t matter which. He says it’s no different from eating. And when you satisfy hunger with a steak, it doesn’t really matter whether the steak came from a cow or an ox.

  “The theme song of ‘Police Brutality,’ which intellectuals wrote, is not for justice against certain rare police actions. What they really mean is ‘Police Abolishment.’

  “Why shouldn’t students riot and guerrillas hijack planes and assassinate innocents when their tutors teach the obsolescence of all laws and governments?

  “Now I would like to poin
t out to you that the end result of ‘individual human rights,’ unchecked by the ‘rights of society,’ must finally be a state of anarchy, in which everybody lives by his own rules.

  “That is why the ‘human rights’ of Bear Bait and Dry Rot, who sought escape from society in the lonely woods and mountains of our county, have become so important for us to discuss and understand. For they touch upon the rights of all of us, as individuals or as nations. They represent the whole gamut of human relations, much as a single blade of grass has within it all the mysteries of biological life itself.

  “There is a philosophical movement with its own priesthood which preaches that there is no evil and no good, no right or wrong, only the unassailable intellect. To them, punishment has created crime. There should be no punishment for anything.

  “There are two main obstacles to their attainment of an earthly paradise where there is no sin and no virtue: Religion and the Law. The Religious and the Lawmen stand between them and the home, the family, and decency.

  “So knock off the church people. A few intellectuals, a very few, were able to convince the Supreme Court that prayers in school were unconstitutional. Children can study socialism, communism, Buddhism; they can read about sexual abuses, they can experiment with hallucinating drugs; but they can’t read the Bible.

  “It is unconstitutional to study the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, the twin lighthouses of justice and mercy, whose beacons pushed back the darkness of ignorance and fear. So knock off the church; snuff out the spiritual light, all in the name of free thought.

  “And knock off that other big obstacle to anarchy: The Lawmen. Yell ‘Police Brutality’ if you’re arrested for breaking any law. And so we have the frightening spectacle of policemen being the targets of rocks, bottles, and snipers’ bullets. Of rioting mobs setting fire to whole city blocks, then shooting at the firemen who risk their lives to put out the fires; all in the name of Police Brutality.

  “And if a lawman catches some slimy character selling pornographic smut to your twelve-year-old children, a whole battery of intellectual lawyers come to his aid; and without pay, they throw legal roadblocks, and appeal, appeal, appeal until they reach the Supreme Court, where likely as not they will get a decision in the smut-seller’s favor. All in the name of ‘human rights.’

  “Laws under which we have protected society for over two hundred years are now suddenly being rewritten or declared unconstitutional, making the arrest and conviction of the killer, the robber, the rapist more and more difficult, if not downright impossible. And always, no matter how long the criminal’s record, no matter how heinous his crime, always there springs up this battery of unpaid lawyers, posing as public defenders, working with unholy zeal to nullify just punishment with trickery and technicalities. And all in the name of ‘human rights.’

  “And are there smart lawyers who will defend, without pay, your home, your family, your community, your church? No. None. Why? Because these are the ‘rights’ of society…the society the extremists are out to destroy; to destroy by weakening and making ineffectual the two great bulwarks of society: Religion and the Law.

  “And ladies and gentlemen, if you do me the honor of electing me, I shall change all this nonsense; I will reverse the breakdown of laws; I promise you peace of mind, and law and order; I promise you that the criminals will suffer and not their victims; I promise to forcibly break up and destroy this cabal of “free thinkers.” That is my pledge. I want to give our country back to the decent, God-fearing people who do all the living, the paying, and the dying. And if we can’t make our voices heard in the halls of government, we’ll make them heard in the streets and in the meeting halls, whence all power comes.

  “You may find it strange, or perhaps even wonderful, that in our insignificant, isolated, and little-known county of primitive wilderness, the great drama of our age is being played out in capsule form. Our stage may be tiny, but here we have the same plot and the same cast of characters that play on the world stage—down to the same bit actors.

  “Here we have the reason for the play: two unfortunates, the ‘downtrodden,’ who of their own volition have cut off all ties with society. Two hermits, Bear Bait and Dry Rot, have been threatened with a harmless brush with the law. And I say ‘threatened’ because not one legal hand has been placed on them, nor has one official word been spoken to them, as yet.

  “Here we have the powerful intellectuals springing up to the defense of their ‘human rights’ even before the law had taken any action whatsoever against Bear Bait and Dry Rot.

  “We have the big-name attorney acting as the public defender at no pay. We have the biggest newspaper publisher, and the only newspaper publisher in the county, throwing in his enormous weight…and we even have star value: a Hollywood motion-picture writer joined in the holy crusade for the ‘human rights’ of the downtrodden.

  “Oh, I know…this ‘holy movement’ is ostensibly to ensure justice and a public hearing for Deputy Sheriff Lefty Wakefield… But they know and I know and you know that Lefty is just a gimmick…a red herring…a legal trick to provide them an open forum in which to broadcast their intellectual philosophy of ‘down with Police Brutality’ and ‘up with human rights,’ ‘up with the downtrodden: Bear Bait and Dry Rot.’

  “And I’m quite certain that Bear Bait and Dry Rot haven’t the slightest notion of all that’s going on in their name and if they did, they’d probably say we’re all nuts. And I’d agree with them.

  “And now,” said Tony into the mike, “I take pleasure in presenting a gentleman known to all of you as the Clarence Darrow of the Eastern Sierra. He is here today, playing what is certainly for him a most unusual and unfamiliar role—a public defender for a humble deputy sheriff. That’s about as far out as lighting your pipe with an atomic bomb…”

  “Mr. Chairman?” Boatcourt spoke into his mike. “If it pleases the chair, and”—pointedly to the district attorney—“if it pleases the pearl of great price, the North Star we can trust in a storm, I’d like permission to proceed with the sole and only purpose of this public hearing: to grant my client an opportunity to publicly explain why he, a humble deputy sheriff, refused to carry out a direct order from his superior, the sheriff of Mono County. I ask that my client testify under oath.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t have to, Boatcourt.”

  “My client insists on it, Mr. Chairman.”

  “Very well. Bailiff! Let the oath be sworn to.”

  The swearing-in over, Boatcourt took the podium.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Stephen Gorski. I have been assigned as public defender for ex-Deputy Sergeant Lefty Wakefield. Now, most of you know or have heard about two hermits who live in our midst.

  “For twenty-five years these two men have accepted the descriptive names of Bear Bait and Dry Rot the community has pinned on them. And for twenty-five years the community has accepted them; yes, some even have learned to love them.

  “Four different sheriffs…and seven different district attorneys have known them, tolerated them, investigated them.

  “Now, after being with us a quarter of a century, they have suddenly become such undesirables that the present sheriff ordered their arrest on vagrancy charges, in order to manufacture a legal motive to run them out of the county.

  “Why? Because a new Caesar has taken over, to whom we must all pay homage—not the intellectual, as Wonder Boy would have you believe, but the almighty Vacation Dollar. And Mono officials must now march to the drum of the new-money city lords; the real estaters, promoters, wheeler-dealers. And they want Dry Rot and Bear Bait and all their ilk run out of the county. Bad publicity. Blah, blah, blah.

  “So cynical and unfair were these trumped-up charges that the best-loved deputy sheriff this county ever had, a man who had served the county faithfully under four different sheriffs without ever so much as a scratch on his record…this man, father of
six children, couldn’t stomach the brutal sham, and, laying his career and his future on the line, he refused to carry out the order to arrest Bear Bait and Dry Rot.” Turning to Lefty, he started his direct examination:

  Boatcourt: “Now, Mr. Wakefield, what was the order you refused to carry out?”

  Lefty: “The order was to pick up those two bums, Dry Rot and Bear Bait, on a vag charge and bring them in…so we can roust them around and get them to leave the county.”

  Boatcourt: “Who gave you that order?”

  Lefty: “My boss, the sheriff.”

  Boatcourt: “And what was your answer to that order?”

  Lefty: “I pleaded with the sheriff against the order. ‘Chief,’ I said, ‘that’s not fair and you know it. I know the heat’s on you to get rid of Dry Rot and Bear Bait because they don’t fit in with the new Vacationland image. But if those hermits are vags, I’m Al Capone. No, Chief,’ I pleaded with him, ‘I can’t pick them up. Even if it means my badge. I can’t.’”

  Boatcourt: “Well, Lefty was dismissed as expected. But what he didn’t expect was the character-assassinating implications in the official county press release, which would forever blacken his career as a peace officer. Mr. Wakefield, will you read the press release to us?”

  Lefty: (Lefty unfolded a clipping and read) “‘As of today, Deputy Sheriff ‘Lefty’ Wakefield has been stripped of his badge and summarily dismissed from the Mono County Sheriff Department because of flagrant insubordination in refusing to carry out a direct order from his Chief, Sheriff Tom McMahon.’

  “Well, I was so hurt by the press release I immediately asked the civil service for a hearing. They said, ‘Forget it, and we’ll get you a job on the highway department at an increase in salary.’ And I said to them, ‘Gentlemen, I didn’t ask for this hearing to get my job back, or for any other job. All right. I disobeyed a direct order and got fired. Fine. The sheriff was right. But the press release wasn’t the truth.’

 

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