Page 22 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • May 5, 2010 the auspices of the Christian moral code and simple property rights, and very little else. The craft guilds were the political parties. Amazingly, people actually got along without an overbearing central government or crushing taxes. The play starts with Tell, a celebrated boatman, being approached by a fellow peasant in desperate need of a boat ride. The other Swiss came home to find an Austrian tax collector planning to rape his wife, and acted appropriately with his woodcutter’s axe. They get away, but rumors start. Meanwhile, Herman Gessler, the Austrian governor, takes over as civil administrator. At one point, Gessler had ventured out on a mountain ledge he couldn’t handle, and Tell, acting on natural impulse, saved Gessler’s life and helped him off the ledge. Gessler never forgave Tell for seeing him in a vulnerable moment. Rather than feeling gratitude for the man who saved his life when he was understandably terrified, Gessler hated Tell. Schiller’s precocious insight into the tyrannical mindset was fascinating and astute: Hitler and Stalin both spent the middle phase of their careers murdering the people who knew them when they were nobodies. There was another reason Gessler could not stand Tell. Although he was a peasant, Tell was an independent land owner whose mountain farm was untouchable and whose own right to live was safe as long as he broke no reasonable laws. Gessler was a civil servant who owned nothing and lived only on his salary, paid by a government that expected him to do exactly as he is told. This social class developed in the later Middle Ages when central authority began to expand over the heads of the barons, knights, free peasants, and serfs. The civil servant had none of the capacity for independence that the feudal barons had. They could not support themselves without blind obedience to rulers who could easily become tyrants through hereditary birth defects or economic need. Tell, who looked poor based on his clothing and the fact that he had to work for a living, was a richer man than Gessler, who owed his clothes, lodging, and horse to the fact that he was “only following orders” when he lorded it over people who didn’t need him and didn’t like him. Gessler obviously had a weak ego, so he put his hat up on a pole and ordered everybody who walked past to bow to his hat when he could not be present. Nobody told Tell about this, and he was arrested because he didn’t bow to the hat. Gessler, who wanted to act like a bold knight in front of the peasantry even though he undoubtedly groveled before the Austrian legal system, made Tell a sporting wager: Shoot the apple off your son’s head and go free, but if you don’t, you go to the dungeon. Tell knew he could probably hit the apple, and he knew that if he went to the dungeon, his wife, children, and his aged father might starve. He accepted the wager and split the apple without clipping the kid. Gessler had seen Tell stick a second bolt, or crossbow arrow, inside his clothes. Why? Tell told Gessler that if he had killed the boy, the second bolt was for Gessler. So Gessler, breaking his sworn word, ordered his underlings to throw Tell in the dungeon anyway. Fortunately for Tell, the dungeon was on the far side of the lake, and the Austrian guards panicked when they got caught in a sudden storm and let Tell take over the boat to save everybody on board. Tell realized the Austrians were in armor. He crashed the boat into the nearest rock and the Austrian hirelings got a great look at the bottom of the lake before they ran out of oxygen. Tell swam to shore. Honest man that he was, Tell realized at this point that it was him or Gessler, so he hid in the rocks. Gessler soon rode by, and was accosted by a starving woman with a starving baby whose husband had been put in the dungeon for some minor offense. Gessler blew off her request for mercy. Tell put a bolt into him. “That was Tell’s shot. God have mercy on my soul,” Gessler said. “See, children, how a tyrant dies,” the mother said. Tell then beat it for home and told his delighted wife and kids he was still alive. Meanwhile, the angry Swiss rebelled and chased away the Austrians, and Switzerland circa 1300 became Europe’s first permanent republic. The coda for this came when the son of the Austrian emperor, who had murdered his own father, showed up and asked Tell for forgiveness. Tell told him to get lost: Killing a legitimate ruler for reasons of personal ambition was despicable. Schiller’s points are pretty clear. Tyrants have to die too and need to think about that. People who have any manhood left will just take so much abuse. But here is the point that is not so obvious. There is an unbreakable link between liberty and private property. People who are self-sufficient do not usually become a burden on the state, and they do not usually sell their honor and dignity to the state for the sake of three square meals and a sack to sleep on. Minimal taxes, not a comprehensive and collectivist government, are the guarantee of liberty. Free people will usually fight wars that mean something – the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II as we understood it at the time – but free people resent being turned into a goon squad for private and special interests. They also get sick and tired of paying taxes to governments that pay people to interfere with their freedom. That is the lesson of “William Tell.” Maybe that’s why they don’t read “William Tell” in schools anymore. As the tax base shrinks, the productive jobs all move to sweatshops in China, and Americans yell for more federal help, but they may be taking the wrong tack. America is not about escape vacations and the ability to condescend to half-starved foreigners. America is about political freedom. Have you ever read Friedrich Schiller’s play “Wilhelm Tell” (“William Tell” in English)? You will have a tough time finding a copy unless you understand German, and even then it won’t be easy. Hitler banned the play, previously a classic of German literature as “Hamlet” and “Julius Caesar” are classics of English literature, for a very practical reason. The play portrayed the assassination of tyrants not just as a right, but as a responsibility of all free men. “What a shame that Schiller, of all people, should glorify this Swiss hedge-shooter!” Hitler observed after a Swiss was one of the 15 people who tried to kill him. The year was 1941, and “Wilhelm Tell” was not performed again in Germany for the duration of World War II. My first contact with “William Tell” was in a Classic Comic when I was just old enough to read. Much later, my son and I read the text, side by side and in the fraktur text published when the German Empire was still a reality. “Wilhelm Tell” goes far beyond assassination in its analysis of political freedom and I have a hunch that is why Hitler banned the book. Most of us have qualms about assassination – I certainly do – but the economic resistance to tyrants and tyranny is also part of the message. Taken in any way seriously, “William Tell” is a literary death warrant for all tyrants – Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Chiang, Hirohito, Pot Pol – take your pick. It is also a license to question the amount of money responsible taxpayers waste on a social structure they do not need or want. I have a hunch that it is not popular in contemporary American schools for the same reason. I find that scary. “William Tell” is known to most people who still recognize the name – most kids today do not -- as the story of a man who shoots an apple off his son’s head with a crossbow. That was the cover of the Classic Comic and that is about as far as most people got after World War I destroyed the German-language program and the study of German literature in whatever language in the American school system. I note here parenthetically that William McGuffey’s Readers often offered translations of Schiller’s poems, along with Shakespeare and Byron, in the days before America’s foreign policy was established by outside interests, and to good effect. Tell is a Swiss peasant land-owner in the days of the Interrregnum – known in German as the time of Faustrecht, or “Right of the Fist” – when the Hohenstaufen Dynasty of the High Middle Ages had crumbled and the empire, once the greatest power on the continent, had become secondrate compared to France and the French holdings of England. This was an era of rampant civil war. The Guelfs and Ghibellines mentioned in Dante and elsewhere were German dynasts, actually called Welf and Waiblingen in German, who also had their adherents in the rival Italian city-states which functioned essentially as republics under The lesson of ‘William Tell’ Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: Having recently read an article regarding the upcoming council election in Ho-Ho-Kus, we are both concerned after reading the comments from Councilman Lee Flemming. As a Ho-Ho-Kus Council “family” (Allen served the borough for 21 years) it is very discouraging that Mr. Flemming believes he is “not in alignment with the other council members.” There are frequently differing opinions on one subject or another for every borough council, but differences have always been shared and discussed at the council work sessions or public meetings. To frequently abstain from voting on a particular issue (which Mr. Flemming has done often) because “I have not been fully informed” can only mean that Mr. Flemming hasn’t done his homework in preparation for the meetings. Support for Rorty & Shea Instead of running “off the line,” Mr. Flemming should do us all a favor and run “off the council.” Our town has been cared for so well over so many years that we hope others will think long and hard before they support this incumbent. Congratulations to Councilman Gordon Hamm and his family for the many hours they have given to Ho-Ho-Kus and we wish him well in his new ventures. Philip Rorty and Kevin Shea have our support, and we hope many of our neighbors will come to this conclusion also. These two gentlemen have the vision that we share for our town and their involvement in the community speaks highly of their love for Ho-Ho-Kus. We continue to support the mayor and council in their future endeavors and wish all of them well. Allen H. and Barbara B. Wahlberg Ho-Ho-Kus