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Elective English–II

Notes In poor health in the 1980s, Abbey was at one point given a terminal cancer diagnosis and told
he had six months to live. The diagnosis proved erroneous, however, and Abbey lived to
complete several more books—essay collections and several novels, including the autobiographical
The Fool’s Progress and the posthumously published Hayduke Lives! (1990, featuring characters
from The Monkey Wrench Gang). Abbey’s journals and essays provided material for a steady
stream of publications that appeared after his death. Suffering from increasingly serious esophageal
bleeding, Abbey laid plans to die in the open, under the desert skies. He and several friends
went out into the desert in early March of 1989, but he rallied and was brought back to his
cabin in Oracle, Arizona, near Tucson, where he died on March 14, 1989. His friends buried
him, illegally, at an unspecified location said to be on federal land, and the legend of his
burial, together with the outlaw mystique and the philosophical vigour of his writings, continued
to strengthen his reputation in the years after he passed away.

10.1 The Right to Arms

Meaning weapons. The right to own, keep, and bear arms. A sword and a lance, or a bow and
a quiverful of arrows. A crossbow and darts. Or in our time, a rifle and a handgun and a cache
of ammunition. Firearms.
In medieval England a peasant caught with a sword in his possession would be strung up on
a gibbet and left there for the crows. Swords were for gentlemen only. (Gentlemen!) Only
members of the ruling class were entitled to own and bear weapons. For obvious reasons.
Even bows and arrows were outlawed—see Robin Hood. When the peasants attempted to
rebel, as they did in England and Germany and other European countries from time to time,
they had to fight with sickles, bog hoes, clubs—no match for the sword-wielding armored
cavalry of the nobility.
In Nazi Germany the possession of firearms by a private citizen of the Third Reich was
considered a crime against the state; the statutory penalty was death—by hanging. Or beheading.
In the Soviet Union, as in Czarist Russia, the manufacture, distribution, and ownership of
firearms have always been monopolies of the state, strictly controlled and supervised. Any
unauthorized citizen found with guns in his home by the OGPU or the KGB is automatically
suspected of subversive intentions and subject to severe penalties. Except for the landowning
aristocracy, who alone among the population were allowed the privilege of owning firearms,
for only they were privileged to hunt, the ownership of weapons never did become a widespread
tradition in Russia. And Russia has always been an autocracy—or at best, as today, an oligarchy.
In Uganda, Brazil, Iran, Paraguay, South Africa—wherever a few rule many—the possession
of weapons is restricted to the ruling class and to their supporting apparatus: the military, the
police, the secret police. In Chile and Argentina at this very hour men and women are being
tortured by the most up-to-date CIA methods in the effort to force them to reveal the location
of their hidden weapons. Their guns, their rifles. Their arms. And we can be certain that the
Communist masters of modern China will never pass out firearms to their 800 million subjects.
Only in Cuba, among dictatorships, where Fidel’s revolution apparently still enjoys popular
support, does there seem to exist a true citizen’s militia.

There must be a moral in all this. When I try to think of a nation that has maintained its
independence over centuries, and where the citizens still retain their rights as free and independent
people; not many come to mind. I think of Switzerland. Of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland.
The British Commonwealth. France, Italy. And of our United States.
When Tell shot the apple from his son’s head, he reserved in hand a second arrow, it may be
remembered, for the Austrian tyrant Gessler. And got him too, shortly afterward. Switzerland
has been a free country since 1390. In Switzerland basic, national decisions are made by

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