Rules are rules

Life is full of irritating little rules and regulations. We’ve all got to deal with them sooner or later, so I suppose there’s not much point in complaining about them.
If we can take any comfort from it, history tells us that it has always been thus. Or, at least it has been since we started bothering to record history.
Way back when, in the time of ancient Rome (yes, gentle readers, we’re back in Rome again), there was this really exasperating fellow named Cicero. He was a member of the Roman Senate, which was a lot like our U.S. Senate except that the senators didn’t even bother to pretend they were men of the people. Roman senators were “better” than the common folks, and they didn’t hesitate to tell you so, either. In fact, if you weren’t born into the upper tier of Roman society, you weren’t even eligible to become a senator.
Anyway, this Cicero character was so stuck up he made all the other senators look like Abe Lincoln by comparison, although I doubt any of them was born in a log cabin. Cicero was an absolute maniac when it came to going by the rules. As far as he was concerned, rules were rules and if you didn’t follow them to the letter, well, you were just no better than all those commoners out there who (as all the best people knew) weren’t worthy to spit shine a senator’s sandals.
To make matters worse, Cicero was a great talker. In fact, he is recognized even today (by people who give a hang about such things) as one of the greatest orators of all time. Tortured high school Latin students used to have to study, translate and memorize some of his more famous speeches in Latin and English, as your humble correspondent can attest.
Cicero knew he was a bang-up speech maker, too, so he rarely missed an opportunity to display his talent. All the other senators would groan out loud when Cicero got up to make a speech because they knew that, eventually, he’d get around to chastising each and everyone of them for some little infraction or other.
One of his favorite catch-phrases was, “Who is watching the watchers? Who is guarding the guardians?” What he meant was, “Who is making sure the guys who are supposed to enforce the rules, are going by the rules themselves?” Not as catchy as “Can you smell what The Rock is cooking” I’ll grant you, but then it comes across better in Latin.
I mean, the guy was just a pain in the posterior and that’s all there was to it. What good was it to be a senator, a member of the ruling class, if you couldn’t bend the rules for your own convenience now and then? After all, that’s the way things had always been, so why should it ever be any different?
About the time when Julius Caesar’s nephew, Augustus, became the big cheese of the Roman Empire, everybody’d had about all of Cicero they could take. Honestly, who did this joker think he was? Insisting that the really important people follow the rules (okay, okay, call them laws if you want to) just like all the rabble in the streets had to do. The very idea!
So they all got together and had him killed. They had a neat way of doing it, too. The rest of the senators voted to issue what they called a proscription. Notice, I said PRO-scription, not PRE-scription. Physicians and pharmacists had nothing to do with it.
When you were proscribed, anybody who felt like it could stick a knife in your ribs any time they wanted to. The senators got rid of the annoying little goody-two-shoes and never had to get their hands dirty.
Anyway, it served him right.