At the last Council meeting, there was an interesting exchange during a debate about whether or not to cap Village employee salaries at $105,000.

Betty Sime, who advocates the "trust your duly elected officials or vote them out of office" philosophy of political accountability, contended that a salary cap was unnecessary because the Village government has continually shown fiscal responsibility throughout its ancient five-year existence. And, with the possible exception of a $2,000 (give or take) outlay for a newsletter urging citizens to vote against what Mrs. Sime (and others) saw as an equally unnecessary debt cap, I would basically agree with her assessment. Of course, I, myself, am about as fiscally-responsible as the federal government in that neither of us has had a balanced budget in decades but plan to have one sometime in the next millennium.

Sitting a few seats to Mrs. Sime's left (ironically), was the ever-eloquent Hugh O'Reilly, a Councilman who never met a cap he didn't like. In stating his position to establish a salary cap, Mr. O'Reilly cited Benjamin Franklin in saying:

"We must put our faith in a government of laws and not men. If people put in place wise laws to prevent misconduct, then there is no need to worry about trust."

Of course, Ben Franklin never mentioned anything about putting faith in women, but we can assume that's because gender-neutral language hadn't been invented yet, and he was too busy doing things like framing the Constitution, discovering electricity, publishing an almanac, founding a fire department and chasing French girls to take the time to reinvent the English language.

To me, Hugh O'Reilly's argument seemed both well-stated and sound in principle. A hundred and five grand should be enough for most public servants to scrape by on, especially with annual cost of living increases, a potential housing allowance and all of the free candy he or she can eat at the Village Council meetings. And although Betty Sime's trust in the current members of the Village Council and staff may be well-founded, can you ever really be assured that you won't someday end up with one or more Village officials from the Cesar Odio School of City Mismanagement?

Anyway, with battle lines drawn in the sand, the vote split evenly and the salary cap died an inglorious death, unlike the victims of Duncan McCloud, the Highlander, who tend to die in a shower of sparks, lightning bolts and music from the rock group Queen when he cuts off their heads.

Hold it! What's a TV show have to do with salary caps, especially one in which people have their heads cut off and thus have no need for a salary cap, or any other type of cap, for that matter?

I'm glad you asked. For those of you unfamiliar with The Highlander, it's a series about an immortal Scot who gallivants around righting wrongs and generally winds up lopping off heads of mostly evil fellow immortals, which is the only way they can die, unless they wind up as tourists in Miami and make a wrong turn trying to get from the airport to South Beach.

In last Thursday's episode, Duncan McCloud came up against an immortal bounty hunter who, like Hugh O'Reilly and Ben Franklin, trusted the law more than men, or in this particular episode, women.

The young lady in question was an abused wife who found solace by plunging a butcher's knife deep into her husband's heart, then ran from the law because she knew she wouldn't be able to get a fair trial in the small town where her bereaved and vengeful father-in-law was the richest and most powerful citizen. Duncan McCloud and his immortal sidekick, Richie, shield her from the relentless bounty hunter, who really isn't a bad guy except for the fact that he's a stickler for the rules and has about as much compassion as a tree stump.

Of course, the bounty hunter was just doing his job. Then again, so too were Nazi concentration camp guards who used Jews, Gypsies and other undesirables for target practice or herded them into gas chambers.

The bounty hunter's tragic flaw was that his judgment of right and wrong was based solely on the inflexible letter of the law and not on the individual circumstances of the situation. Ultimately, he loses his head over this conviction, thus forfeiting all chances for a return appearance on the show, a potential loss of tens of thousands of dollars in salary and residuals.

So for the no-longer-immortal bounty hunter, trusting the law above people didn't pay off. And it shouldn't because the letter of the law is written in black and white, but the world is a million shades of gray. No set of laws will work for everyone all of the time, or else we never would have had to amend the Ten Commandments.

(Example: Pursuant Section 06 of the Ten (10) Commandments, THOU SHALL NOT KILL, amendment to include the following exemptions: 1) Self-defense, 2) Combat situations, 3) Execution of justice, 4) Any non-human entity including but not limited to fish, fowl, domesticated or wild animals and 'immortal' bounty hunters; providing for severability; inclusion in the code and an effective date.)

I suspect that the good Lord in His wisdom kept His laws to a terse minimum because a) He realized that they should be general guidelines dependent on man's interpretation to accommodate a wide variety of cultural and sociological factors and b) He didn't want to give Moses a hernia.

Blind faith in the law is a dangerous thing, especially in a society whose laws can be unjust and/or inane. Not so very long ago in the good old all-men-are-created-equal U.S.A., it was against the law for black people to sit in the front of a bus, or eat in the same restaurants as whites, or even drink from the same water fountain. More recently, I saw doctors prescribe poisons bordering on toxic waste to treat my father's cancer, but it was illegal for them to prescribe comparatively harmless marijuana to relieve the chemotherapy symptoms. In another recent case, we all saw on the evening news how laws made it easier for a foreign tourist to get an automatic pistol than driver's license in Florida so he could shoot up a crowd atop the Empire State Building in New York.

So with all due respect to Hugh O'Reilly and Benjamin Franklin, I beg to differ when it comes to putting faith in laws above people. Laws are merely deaf, dumb and blind executioners that perceive little or no difference between you and me and Mother Theresa and Charlie Manson. The law is an immortal bounty hunter who doesn't even need a head to ride through history dispensing "justice," and it's important that we not trust him so much as each other.