Connections

Sam is really big into making connections between her life and the books we read, as well as between books. It’s really exciting. For example, this morning, Grand-mère was reading Choo Choo (by Virginia Lee Burton) to Sam, and when they got to the part where the train escapes, Sam exclaimed:

“Just like Camus does!”

I had to explain to Grand-mère that Camus does indeed often escape out of our backyard if I leave the alley door open.

But another recent connection had me making connections of my own.

Before Sam’s nap on Friday, we read Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Harold is trying to find/draw his way home.

Me: “He decided to ask a policeman.”

Sam: “Just like Pigling Bland!”

Dang if she isn’t right. Well, partially. Beatrix Potter does have Pigling Bland and his brother Alexander run into a policeman. But they do not ask him for help. Rather, the policeman accosts them and demands to see their papers. When Alexander cannot produce his, the cop hauls him back to the farm, and Pigling Bland must continue his journey alone, a journey which turns quite perilous. Sammy’s comment made me realize that Potter’s tales are never kind to the police, or to the state in general. In Ginger and Pickles, animal licensing enforced by the state contributes to the failure of the cat and dog’s store.

And so the Johnson-Potter connection made me think of this passage in Rothbard’s For a New Liberty:

But one instructive exer­cise is to try to abandon the habitual ways of seeing things, and to consider the argument for the State de novo. Let us try to transcend the fact that for as long as we can remember, the State has monopolized police and judicial services in society. Suppose that we were all starting completely from scratch, and that millions of us had been dropped down upon the earth, fully grown and developed, from some other planet. Debate begins as to how protection (police and judicial services) will be provided. Someone says: “Let’s all give all of our weapons to Joe Jones over there, and to his relatives. And let Jones and his family decide all disputes among us. In that way, the Joneses will be able to protect all of us from any aggression or fraud that anyone else may commit. With all the power and all the ability to make ultimate decisions on disputes in the hands of Jones, we will all be protected from one another. And then let us allow the Joneses to obtain their income from this great service by using their weapons, and by exacting as much revenue by coercion as they shall desire.” Surely in that sort of situation, no one would treat this proposal with anything but ridicule. For it would be starkly evident that there would be no way, in that case, for any of us to protect ourselves from the aggressions, or the depredations, of the Joneses themselves. No one would then have the total folly to respond to that long-standing and most perceptive query: “Who shall guard the guardians?” by answering with Professor Black’s blithe: “Who controls the temperate?” It is only because we have become accustomed over thousands of years to the existence of the State that we now give precisely this kind of absurd answer to the problem of social protection and defense (84-85).

Yes, the old “who guards the guardians?” “Who watches the watchers?” Pertinent questions in children’s fiction and in contemporary American life, where the state continues to grant itself more and more power to interfere in our lives, all in the name of “freedom.”