A Well-Respected Leader

He was a well-respected leader in his field with memorable accomplishments and due notice. But he had done something; the news said so. There were certain allegations, not yet proven, by any means, but alleged by well-respected news conglomerates. The acts suspected were less than felonies but more than misdemeanors, and beyond comprehension as involving economics or cricket. (This niche was never adequately defined for the general nosy onlooker, like any traffic accident.)

In West Side coffee shops, the consensus was that a plethora of charges was buckshot, hoping with sufficent specifications to bring the bird to ground. In East End pubs, it was by approximately the same plurality determined the number of counts was telling, as he must have committed some of the offenses at least, just as you would expect a certain percentage of any crowd to be gay, or Baptists, or not wearing underclothes. 

As no offenses had as yet been brought before a DA or Grand Jury, the Esteemed Leader saw no purpose in responding to idle gossip. But his wife did. 

She was a recent immigrant who has married into all the esteem - at least, that which was native to us. No honor won beyond our shores mattered, of course, although the lady had scored myriads of awards and been feted in her native land, which was reputed to be New Zealand or Zanzibar or Zaire, one of the Zs. Her plea for fairness and a decent respect for the full measure by which truth was made manifest certainly sounded alien as well. 

It was unanimously reported by the news business that her editorial, widely carried and much commented on, was most profound and extremely eloquent, referring as it did to Seneca and Aeschylus and the 1,001 Nights. But in the pubs, it was seen that much skulduggery must be hiding behind such a vast curtain of prose, and, like in the cop shows, if a suspect is rumored to be in a house, then you approach said dwelling as if he definitely is. 

For us, the law is a game played by elite specialists, like golf, and only concerns us if we are hit by a ball. The premise, often repeated, of innocence until proven guilty, is ludicrous, like Schrödinger's Cat*. Guilt or death dates precisely from the event, and not when it is revealed by honorable observers. 

When so much logical error  goes into establishing the past, it's no wonder we're so often gobsmacked by the future, like crazed drivers obsessed with our rearview mirrors. 

*Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, in which a cat in a box who might have died both did and didn't. A lot of funding goes into physics. 

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