That’s Latin for “Who guards the guardians themselves, ” a quaint Roman rhetorical question. In addition to its disquieting portent, it leads on to a series of equally disturbing questions, viz.: “Who guards the guardians who guard the guardians?” And “Who guards the guardians who guard the guardians who guard the guardians?” etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum. Well, maybe not infinitum. Eventually you run out of people to do the guarding, or anything else, for that matter; there are only about six billion people on the planet, including people incompetent to guard anyone, such as children under eighteen months and Libertarians. And long before you hit the magic six billion figure, almost everybody is watching somebody else, sort of like in Nazi Germany, or Soviet Russia, or the United States since the passage of the Patriot Act.

It might be possible to break this infinite series if there were one level of guardians in this hierarchy who didn’t need watching. Who might that be?

I know, I know, teacher, the FBI! Remember J. Edgar Hoover who started the whole thing? Remember Elliot Ness, who got Alphonse (call me Al) Capone? Wrong answer. The FBI agent assigned to get Whitey Bulger ended up in the slammer himself for authorizing Whitey to make several hits on inconvenient individuals. And just this week, The Telegraph (a British newspaper that serves the same furnction in Merrie Olde England as do The New York Post and the National Enquirer in the United States) got hold of some internal disciplinary files from the FBI’s Bureau of Professional Reponsibility indicating that various agents were dating drug dealers, sending nude pictures to an ex-boyfriend’s wife, sending dirty texts to fellow agents, collecting child pornography, and shooting a neighbor’s dog. Looks like these folks definitely need some custodes to custode them.

Well, who’s higher than the FBI? How about the Secret Service? They guard the President, for God’s sake! Who could be purer? It turns out that that is not the question. The question is: who could be less pure? These guys (pardon me, people – the distaff side is also in the Service) appear to spend their time while on European and Caribbean assignments in the pursuit not of assassins, but of women and gents of the evening.

How about the ATF? Nah, they smuggle guns to the Mexican drug cartels.

How about the Border patrol? Nah, they smuggle in illegal immigrants.

OK, this general approach isn’t going to work. Let’s try something else. I have it! Let’s not guard anybody. We will rely on the basic honesty and decency of all human beings, their innate altruism, their love of all fellow creatures great and small. And if anybody is discovered doing anything bad, we tell them to stop. If they don’t, we ask them to stop again. And if they still don’t, we shoot them.