[Headmaster Trask drives into the Baird School driveway in his brand-new Jaguar. He gets out, to hear a voice on a loudspeaker]
Jimmy Jameson:
[on loudspeaker, but unidentified] Mister Trask is our fearless leader. [students hear this and gather, looking on at Trask]
Jimmy Jameson:
A man of learning, a voracious reader. He can recite "The Iliad" in ancient Greek, while fishing for trout in a rippling creek.
Trent Potter:
[Trask grins slightly, trying to figure out where the voice is coming from] Endowed with wisdom, of judgement sound, nevertheless about him, the questions abound. [We now see the same three Baird guys who set up this prank the night before; Harry opens the valve to an oxygen tank connected to a large balloon on a lamppost as Trent passes the microphone to him]
Harry Havemeyer:
How does Mister Trask make such wonderful deals? Why did the trustees buy him Jaguar wheels? He wasn't conniving, he wasn't crass... he merely puckered his lips... and kissed their ass! [balloon spins around to reveal a cartoon bearing the words being spoken; the students laugh and mock Trask]
Harry Havemeyer:
[Trask pulls out his car keys and opens the Jaguar door, then jumps up to try to pop the balloon with the key. He misses on the first try. On the second try, he succeeds, and a flood of white paint splashes down onto him and all over the car. The students applaud loudly and shout obscenities at him as this catastrophe concludes with Trask kicking the car door closed and attempting to dry his face with handkerchief]
The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube. indecisiveness
