Mamet:
“The stoics wrote that the excellent king can walk through the streets unguarded. Our contemporary Secret Service spends tens of millions of dollars every time the president and his retinue venture forth.
Mythologically, the money and the effort are spent not to protect the president’s life—all our lives are fragile—but to protect the body politic against the perception that his job is ceremonial, and that for all our attempts to invest it with real power—the Monroe Doctrine, the war powers act, the “button”—there’s no one there but us.”
Mamet: “The stoics wrote that the excellent king can walk through the streets unguarded. Our contemporary Secret Service spends tens of millions of dollars every time the president and his retinue venture forth.
Mythologically, the money and the effort are spent not to protect the president’s life—all our lives are fragile—but to protect the body politic against the perception that his job is ceremonial, and that for all our attempts to invest it with real power—the Monroe Doctrine, the war powers act, the “button”—there’s no one there but us.”