VOLUME V, CHAPTER 8
Guilt, the People, and a Way of Seeing the Law
This chapter walks on from the last, from how the law treats an ordinary person to several hotter words. Whom does "the people" actually include. Can an ordinary person change a thing without spilling blood. And once these are seen clearly, where should a person stand. The previous chapter dug down to output, the root under everything. This chapter takes the several truest things that grow out of that root and sets them out, one by one. It is the second chapter of Part Three, and also the chapter that closes it. The first two sections each tell one sample, the opening line of a constitution and an identification photo, and the third section draws the whole part into one web.
The first section is "we the people," never truly all the people. At the Philadelphia convention of 1787, the enslaved were counted as three-fifths of a person in the population, and women, native peoples, and propertyless white men did not count as the people at all, so those who could actually vote on the constitution were under one tenth. That under-one-tenth made the law that decided how all the rest would live. Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal while himself holding more than six hundred slaves, and Madison spoke openly of guarding against a majority shaking those who held property. This is not to reproach anyone. However high the word a person sets up, he cannot climb past the position he himself is seated on. The ending of slavery in 1865 took a civil war that killed more than six hundred thousand. Women did not have the vote until 1920, and the native peoples did not gain citizenship until 1924. Over more than two hundred years the people widened from under one tenth to a surface everyone, and yet every step was paid for in blood by the excluded themselves, not given of itself by the constitution. This section sets the twenty-third layer.
The second section is the photograph at a forty-five degree angle. Before the nineteen nineties, green card applicants were required to shoot their photo with the face turned forty-five degrees to the side. A full face is the angle for photographing a person, a full profile the angle for photographing a criminal, and forty-five degrees sits exactly at the half-person, half-criminal midpoint. It does not say aloud "you are not a person," and it does not say aloud "you are a criminal." It hides the heaviest of verdicts inside the lightest of motions. A man who understood this layer of Wei told it to anyone who would listen, and a young woman of Chinese descent said only one line, America really has wronged you, and vanished into the crowd. She did not say this rule is unreasonable. She said it has wronged you, and in her own heart she had already completed a trading of places. It is guessed that she was a low-ranking clerk in the immigration bureau, who went back and quietly had the requirement changed to a full face. The people who benefited were many, and of those who knew there was anyone to thank, there was not one. Confucius speaks of being slow in words and quick in deeds, Laozi speaks of the sage who does not hoard, and what she did stands higher than most struggles paid for in blood. This section sets the twenty-fourth layer. But this section also honestly sets out the other side. The photograph was changed, and green card holders still cannot vote and cannot run for office, because the position never left them a place to begin with.
The third section caps the part, choosing with clear eyes, defending neither power nor crime. It draws five layers into one web, the direction of proof, guilt as a position, law dead and a person alive, we the people, and the hero who vanished. It sees clearly the side of power that leans toward presuming guilt and compressing the range of the people, and sees clearly too the other side, that the pressure of survival cannot explain away the harm done to an innocent person. Seeing this web clearly, a person is prone to slide toward one of two extremes. One end takes harsh law and heavy punishment for justice itself. The other end romanticizes every transgression into "resistance." The two ends are in fact the same, both handing the judgment over to a ready-made emotion. To stand at neither end is not to smooth things over. Whatever "takes from what has not enough to offer up to what has more than enough" is to be named. The same ruler held to both ends is do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. The lines of Confucius, Laozi, Mencius, Xunzi, and the Book of Documents together form the root of this whole part. This section sets the twenty-fifth layer.
These three sections build from the twenty-third layer to the twenty-fifth, and Part Three closes here. This chapter has a heavy side and a warm one, seeing through the Wei of "the people," and seeing the road in an ordinary person's hands that spills no blood. What the reader carries away is not any one conclusion but an eye for seeing the law. From now on, meeting a law, an act of enforcement, a verdict, he can ask a few things for himself. Onto whom did it press the load. In whose position does the "guilt" it names actually stand. Whom does its endless "we" actually include. The stance of this chapter has not shifted. It takes neither end, only lays out the positions, and hands the judgment and the choice both back into the reader's own hands. The next part, law and scarcity, digs down along the root of output, to see how the strong use the law to fence land, opportunity, and learning, one by one, into their own hands.
Contents
Section One. We the People Was Never Truly All the People.
Section Two. The Photograph at a Forty-Five Degree Angle, a Hero Who Vanished into the Crowd.
Section Three. Choosing with Clear Eyes, Defending Neither Power Nor Crime.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.