A Tally of Treason

Ta-da! Tonight we take the tally. Truth told, I am a tired teller of tales, a tenacious tabulator of treacheries, but this testimony is no trifle: it is a tally of treason, timestamped and true. Take the telephone, a tyrant tersely telling a tremulous tally-keeper to tease out a tidy total. Take thirty-odd tailor-made electors, titled by no tribunal. Take the throng, taunted and turned loose, trampling the temple of the republic while the tyrant tracked it on the tube, then tendered terms of pardon to the trespassers the instant he retook the throne. Take the top-secret treasures, tossed in a toilet, treated as trinkets. Take the toast to a foreign tyrant over the testimony of his own top spies, the taunting entreaty to a hostile state to track down a rival's tranche of letters, the tariffs and threats trained on trusted allies while antagonists are treated to tea. Take the trove he trumpeted on the trail and then tucked away: the trafficker's tapes and testimony, the tally of the trusted and titled, tagged "transparency" at the stump and "trivial" at the throne. That was the trailer. The sequel tells the true tale: a thoughtless, thankless attack, taken up at a foreign throne's tempting, that tore through our treasury and our troops; truthful tellers tarred as traitors for tallying the toll; tribunals threatened against detractors, typists, and the attorneys who once tried him; entire newsrooms turned out of the people's house for transcribing his tantrums; and, most terrible, a tyrant telling his own towns they are targets, and terming their torching a tolerable trade. (This tirade, I'll admit, has tipped toward the theatrical. The T's are tedious; the tally is not.) Should the tyrant term this a tissue of tales, take note: talking it away is a tired tactic; it is the next tick on the tally. The trick, you'll detect, is tired but tenacious: toss "treason" at every target until the term is threadbare, so that when true treason takes the town square, there is no term left to tag it. Tonight we take the term back. Treason is not only trading with a foreign throne. It is twisting the trust of a nation into a tool against the trusting: the treasury as a till, the troops as a toy, the truth as a threat, the people as a tiresome technicality. So to the tyrant, and to every timid, tractable attendant who tiptoed along: the tally is kept. Tribunals take their time. Testimony is tenacious. Truth, trampled, tends to stand tall again. Tremble, then, at the tally: the testimony, the tribunals, the tedious, tireless, ultimately triumphant turning of the tables. ...and if this tempest of T's has grown tiresome, take it as a token of a tongue that has at last found its target.