The President swears an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. The people are domestic, therefore always potential enemies. Enemy is a foreign state, both meanings herein applicable. The people are domestic and foreign at once, doubly suspicious. The President, in his sworn oath to protect and defend the Constitution, must look at all citizens as potential enemies of the Constitution. Of course not nearly to the degree our contemporary Supreme Court has been, a lot more this time around than at any other in the last fifty years or so.
The Chief Executive is the Chief Enforcer of the Law making him the Chief Cop. You and I are not innocent in the potential we have to become enemies of the State, of the Law. Suspicion must rule some of his sense of order the President must keep. Don’t forget that outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968 was about order; Kent State was about order, beating up on Occupy Wall Street demonstrators has also been about order.
The Presidents notions of order may be mediated individually, but they are also formed by the protocols of the Office itself. And police are in the market of suspicion. They must always look with suspicion, or at least with a unique suspension of disbelief. They must always suspend disbelief in a persons guilt. The possibility of guilt must always loom. There are always grades of suspicion, good and bad suspects determined by how much a person fits the motive and ability to have committed the crime. Unless some evidence countermands all clues pointing toward the possibility of guilt, any belief in a suspects innocence must be questioned. This is the nature of police work.
Mencken reminded us about a century ago, a police officer is given a truncheon for only one reason; police today, in any capacity, are given guns for no other reason but to use them. Whenever police officers shoot at people we should not ask why they have done so, but why they do not do so more often. It is a wonder that more of the people are not shot by the police. Nonetheless, the people would always need some threat to relinquish the will to be at liberty, to transform from being one of the people to being a publican, a full member of the public who serves, the State, who defers his humanity as one of the people for a more lucrative role as one of the public, always less than a person. Do not forget that the president is the chief cop of America. He is no less a cop than Bull Connor was a cop in Selma.
Innocence in America is a presumption, the latter never a good thing. Not-guilty always carries some of its presumed opposite, guilty. Not guilty cannot be defined except as contingent with guilt.
The Falling Leaf Review 