A meme flickered across feeds this week: South Carolina stacked up against California like a balance sheet for how well you can cage chaos. Homicide rates, GDP, life expectancy — by each measure California shines as the model: safer, wealthier, longer-lived. South Carolina looks rougher, poorer, more violent, a reminder that for some Americans, freedom means a shorter, riskier life. Beneath the numbers, the line: “Don’t California my South Carolina.” It’s more than a bumper sticker. It’s the oldest American choice: Would you rather live longer, safer, and curated in a soft enclosure — or live free enough to fail, starve, and fight at the forest’s edge?

A good zoo is not a trick. It extends lives. It keeps predators out, or in. It offers illusions of wilderness while carefully curating the risk. California has spent a century mastering this balance. Its early Progressive roots laid out protections for labor, housing, and the urban poor. By the mid-century boom, it perfected suburbia: highways, lawns, hidden fences. Today it pilots universal basic income and climate protections. It works — statistically. But the hidden cost is that freedom to claw your way out shrinks until the animals forget there ever was a gate.

South Carolina and places like it — the Mountain West, the rural South, the high plains — carry an older instinct. The frontier mind knows the wilderness is dangerous but would rather risk the claw than hand it over. It’s not about wanting chaos; it’s about accepting that a life worth living is mortal, unpredictable, never fully occupied by guardians. When settlers crossed into the forests, they feared the wilderness more than the king they left behind. Puritans wrote of the moral abyss in the trees, the space where you stood alone before God with no wall between you and failure. Out of that dread came the rugged individualist, the one who keeps the bear gun or the revolver not to kill but to remember the gate is not locked.

In 1965, French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard captured this tension in Alphaville, a bleak sci-fi noir about a city run by Alpha 60, a sentient computer that abolishes contradiction and poetry. The city is orderly, safe, perfectly contained. Citizens live behind doors marked occupé — occupied — or libre — free. But freedom is an illusion; the guardians hold all the real weapons. Into this system drifts Lemmy Caution, a detective from the wild “Outer Nations.” He smuggles in a revolver and outlaw poems, proof that the wild spark always tries to slip the fence. Godard’s generation feared that postwar France’s technocratic planners would engineer a zoo so perfect the people would choose it themselves.

When France sent America the Statue of Liberty, they gave us a flame, not a fence. The poem “Give me your tired, your poor…” is an American footnote; the torch stands as a dare: keep this wild spark alive if you can. For all our talk of British roots, America’s spiritual lineage is French — the Enlightenment bet that real freedom demands risk. That legacy lives today in the states that embrace constitutional carry, stand by the “Live Free or Die” motto, and bristle at any new enclosure that feels too neat to be true.

The tension is permanent. California’s better zoo is a real achievement. But the meme reminds us that some people will trade longer, safer lives for the raw edge of the trees. A caged bird may live twice as long as one in the forest, but its song is the only thing that knows the truth. Godard understood this: the guardians do not always kill the wild spark — the animals do, when they forget how to find the gate marked libre. A perfect cage is still a cage. The flame stands for those who keep the claw, and the choice.

Live Free or Zoo. America’s Alphaville choice.