Around 2,000 years ago Cicero, the Roman lawyer and statesman, called justice “the crowning glory of the virtues.”  If so, how do we determine a just judgment between overlapping human frailties like shenanigans, tomfooleries, monkeyshines, idiocy, meanness, and outright illegality?  In his book “De Legibus” (“On the Laws”) Cicero wrote, “Let the punishment fit the crime,” and my dad cited that phrase to reduce my expulsion from high school for accidentally running over (literally) the vice principal in the hallway on a two-person bicycle.  I classify this as more along the lines of simple youthful idiocy rather than a shenanigan, a term originating in California around 1855 which the Online Etymology Dictionary traces back to the Spanish “charanada” which meant “trick, deceit.”  It was the very first Earth Day and my friend Rick and I rode his parent’s long bike to school to celebrate.  Our homeroom teacher was so amused when we rode it into her class that she asked us to show it to another teacher.  Coming around a hallway corner we encountered the vice principal.  We cleared that irate but unhurt impediment and would have escaped if a third classmate riding the handlebars hadn’t twisted them as he jumped and ran off.  Rick and I were left entangled in the bike, and the wrathful vice principal expelled us on the spot.  The school principal was out of the building, and when my dad arrived to straighten things out, he walked into the principal’s office and sat at his desk, refusing to speak to the purple-faced vice principal or leave until the principal returned to discuss Cicero’s legal interpretation of justice.  My expulsion was expunged and the punishment reduced to the five-foot-two-inch principal giving me three licks with a paddle half his size with which I swear he lifted me clear off the floor.  

In. the Middle English of 1200 CE, “crime” meant “sinfulness, infraction of the laws of God,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, and a century later it evolved into “offense punishable by law, act or omission which the law punishes in the name of the state.”  Webster’s defines “crime” as “an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government.” Rather than a criminal act, our cycling misadventure was tomfoolery, which Webster’s defines as “playful or foolish behavior,” and adds that the term comes from Thome Fole, a Durham Abby jester in the 1300s.  “Thome Fole eventually evolved into tomfool, which was in use as a noun referring to any notable fool by the early 17th century .… Tomfoolery as a term for playful or foolish behavior didn’t come into use until the early 19th century, but it’s proven to be of far more use to English speakers than tomfool.”  An extreme example of real crime, book thievery, comes from Nicholas Basbanes’ book “A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.”  “Historians agree that one of the most egregious episodes of book plunder in recent times occurred in the 1840s …. Remembered today as ‘l’affaire Libri’.”  An Italian count named Guglielmo Libri-Carucci was a respected mathematics professor at the Sorbonne in France when he was named the secretary of a new “commission charged with cataloging historical manuscripts deposited in the nation’s public libraries.  But instead of conducting a responsible inventory of the documents entrusted to his care, he spent the next six years systematically stealing them.  The man’s motive, it appears, was pure greed.”  He sold hundreds of ancient manuscripts at auctions and to individual collectors, and when the jig was up, he fled to England, with yet another large cache of rare documents, and never served the ten years of solitary confinement to which French courts sentenced him to in absentia.  Hopefully he was inflicted by one or more of the ancient book curses which sometimes were included by wary scribes, such as one in a 1502 Book of Hours: “Whoever steals this Book of Prayer, May he be ripped apart by swine, His heart splintered, this I swear, And his body dragged along the Rhine.”   

            Shortly after arriving at Noel Wien Library, an airman from Eielson AFB who was a falconry enthusiast visited me to report that a fellow airman and falcon fancier had borrowed a rare and very expensive first edition book on the sport from our library and had bragged about keeping it when he mustered out.  I called the intended thief on base who said he’d return it, but he left the state instead, thereby committing a felony that justice never served.  So, here’s a translation of an old German scribe’s translated curse for him: “To steal this book, if you should try, It’s by the throat you’ll hang high.  And ravens then will gather ‘bout To find your eyes and pull them out, And when you’re crying ‘oh, oh, oh!’ Remember you deserved this woe.”  Other local library book thieves are driven by hatred for a particular book or subject, thinking they’ll protect the community by stealing from the library’s collection.  During my tenure our general policy in such cases was to replace the lost items with two more copies.

            Individual censoring pales in comparison to governmental censorship, an example of which is described in “New College of Florida Tosses Hundreds of Library Books, Empties Gender Diversity Library,” a Sarasota Herald-Times article by Stephen Walker.  He wrote that the mass book destruction, which included titles like “Nine and Counting: The Women of the Senate” and “War of the Worlds,” was done covertly, catching even the faculty representative on the board of trustees by surprise, and she has since resigned.  The public college used to be a liberal arts school but was revamped by Governor Ron DeSantis to teach only conservative values as part of his vaunted “war on woke,” and he forced enaction of a bill requiring public universities and colleges to not use state or federal funding for diversity programs.  A statement from the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida said “These actions are nothing short of a cultural purge, reminiscent of some of history’s darkest times, where regimes sought to control thought by burning books and erasing knowledge.  The fact that these books … were discarded in the dead of night, without transparency, and without giving students the opportunity to preserve them, should outrage every Floridian and every American who values democracy and free thought.”

            An equally terrible misuse of governmental power is examined in an AP News article by Hillel Italie, “Librarians Fear New Penalties, Even Prison, as Activists Challenge Books.”  Italie described how a suburban St. Louis high school added a graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed “The Handmaid’s Tale,” to help “reach teens who struggle with words …. But after Missouri legislators passed a law in 2022 subjecting librarians to fines and possible imprisonment for allowing sexually explicit materials on bookshelves,” they removed it.  “Increasingly, lawmakers are considering new punishments — crippling lawsuits, hefty fines, and even imprisonment — for distributing books some regard as inappropriate.”  The key phrase is “some regard as inappropriate.”  Not “all” or “most,” but some, even one; most recent efforts to ban books nationally come from individuals who often submit lists of dozens of titles they want other peoples’ kids to not see.  Italie added “Already this year, lawmakers in more than 15 states have introduced bills to impose harsh penalties on libraries or librarians ….   Awaiting Idaho Gov. Brad Little’s signature is a bill that empowers local prosecutors to bring charges against public and school libraries if they don’t move ‘harmful’ materials away from children.”  And in Indiana “school librarians and educators charged with giving minors ‘obscene’ or ‘harmful’ material” can be punished by up to 2½ years in jail and $10,000 in fines. Since the 1960s institutions including schools, libraries and museums — as well as educators, librarians and other staffers who distribute materials to children — have largely been exempt from expensive lawsuits or potential criminal charges.  These protections began showing up in states as America grappled with standards surrounding obscenity.”  To be obscene something must meet all three parts of the Supreme Court’s “three-prong obscenity test”: “Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law, and Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

            I find obscene the vicious attacks modern librarians are undergoing.  Like their Lower 48 counterparts Alaska librarians are regularly receiving harassing phone calls and messages and even threats of physical threats against them and their families.  I experienced that as library director right here in the Golden Heart City, but such things were rare back when my fellow citizens were much more civil and thoughtful of each other.  Today some of our neighbors are innately mean as well as foolish, and don’t mind displaying it in public.  That’s not just, and as Cicero pointed out,, “Nothing that lacks justice can be morally right … It is the function of justice not to wrong one’s fellow men.”