The Long Tong Of The Law Fixed Today

Because an arm grabs your body, but a tongue grabs your legacy. A fugitive can run from the long arm. He can cut off an ankle monitor. He can flee to a country without extradition.

Or think of the Nuremberg Trials (1945-46). The Allied powers could have simply shot the Nazi leadership. Instead, they used the long tongue of the law: months of testimony, documents read aloud, and a final judgment that called the Holocaust "the most horrible crime in human history." The tongue labeled them, shamed them, and wrote their infamy into eternity. Of course, the long tongue is not infallible. Sometimes it stutters. Sometimes it is bribed into silence. the long tong of the law

That is the long tongue of the law.

But he cannot outrun the long tongue.

Consider the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895. The "arm" of the law merely sentenced him to two years of hard labor. But the tongue —the brutal cross-examination regarding his "the love that dare not speak its name"—destroyed his soul and his art forever. The words spoken in that courtroom ruined him more than the prison walls. Because an arm grabs your body, but a

We have all heard of the "long arm of the law"—that metaphorical limb that can reach around corners, across state lines, and into the darkest hiding places to drag a fugitive back to the dock. He can flee to a country without extradition