Tommy Denton

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For five years running, the lesser lights in the General Assembly sought to "free" motorcycle riders from the tyranny of safety helmets.

Despite efforts to preserve one of nature's essential prerequisites for life -- clean air to breathe -- certain forces in Virginia society and their elected representatives continue, as ostensible sons and daughters of liberty, to fight what they regard as oppressive legislation that would ban the fouling of the air by exhaling tobacco smoke in public places.

Fortunately, the powers of reason have largely prevailed, and the misplaced advocacy of "freedom" has generally been exposed as the spasm of libertarian zealotry it is.

Americans cherish their freedom and at times are inclined to exercise it with cantankerous enthusiasm, even when the line between liberty and license is not so clear.

The late poet James Dickey once told of a severe scolding he received before the kickoff of a college football game many years ago in his native Georgia. Dickey and a friend, spirits soaring after imbibing liberally from their shared flask, had been laughing, talking and generally carrying on during the pregame playing of the national anthem.

As the roar of the crowd swallowed the last strains of the music, a matron standing in the row before them turned and scolded them for their boorish, unpatriotic conduct.

A wounded veteran in both World War II and Korea, the unfazed Dickey leaned toward her and said, "Madam, I shed more blood in two wars than courses through your feeble little body, and if I want to talk through the national anthem, I will damn well talk through the national anthem!"

Studied exercise of freedom is an American tradition, even though interpretations of its reasonable limits have been debated since the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

The Confederacy was the bloodiest example yet of how disputes over liberty, taken to extremes, can yield bitter tragedy.

In another context, the nation even now is pushing back against a presidential administration's insistence on warrantless interception of private communications, which many sober, thoughtful patriots rightly resist as a violation of the Bill of Rights.

Even so, freedom to choose -- voting, sex, abortion, a school, a cigarette, a firearm -- has become not just an article of faith but, too often, an inflexible dogma within the civil religion. Some sensitive people now demand the freedom not to have their feelings hurt, or they insist on being indemnified against the risks of nature and human foibles.

That tendency toward radical individualism at the expense of the social compact was the malady that most concerned Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1835 classic, "Democracy in America," yet here we are.

Thomas Jefferson for a time heralded the sovereignty of the self, even at the expense of the body politic. Irish author Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote that Jefferson, from 1787 to 1793, "was in the grip of a fanatical cult of liberty, which was seen as an absolute to which it would be blasphemous to assign limits."

Fortunately for the republic, Jefferson's radical notions -- he even condoned the carnage of the French Revolution -- were negated by the sounder reason and vision of the men who established the Constitution under "ordered liberty," which he came to acknowledge more during his presidency.

Across the Atlantic, contemporary British statesman Edmund Burke found much to admire in the American experiment, with liberty being a "strong principle" but also a "wild gas," which he thought required a sort of constant vigilance.

"The effect of liberty to individuals," Burke wrote, "is that they may do what they please. We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints."

Freedom is not the flower. Properly tended, it's the soil in which the seeds of just human aspirations are most likely to flourish. Poison the common soil with the acid of license or the opiate of indifference, and true liberty will slowly leach away.

In its place will be left only sterile dust -- and a sad affirmation of Kris Kristofferson's cynical refrain: "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose. Nothin' ain't worth nothin', but it's free."

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.