Somehow, like a hormonal pimple on the
nose of naivete, the convenient emergence and imminence of our security
establishment’s discovery of “the most credible terrorist threat in years”, is more predictable than surprising, coming as
it does on the heels of the troubling revelation of the NSA’s steadily mounting
litany of abrogation of our Constitutional Rights. Their typical defense is
they were only dutifully acting to save us from freedom’s unintended mischief
to “security”. Even if one is inclined to put the best possible spin on this
bureaucratic malfeasance, it is required of mature citizens to remember that manufactured
fear has historically been the bulwark justifying fascist conveniences, which
always include revised premises of unalienable rights. And history also shows
that when clever, industrial-scale propaganda, in service of war (real or illusory), induces the
trance in which civil rights are inimical to victory, you can in the end, only
have victory that is inimical to civil rights.
It may be the transference of cultural
hegemony to the Millennials who in utero psychologically ingested technological
intrusion into formally private and sacrosanct realms beginning with ultrasound
examinations that revealed them even before ‘legal’ personhood, and who have
subsequently even relinquished interior privacy by way of vacuous “Tweets” and
“Selfies”, which informs the government of a new, faux sophistication among the
populace that devalues and diminishes the ancient temenos of privacy. But, even
if the lascivious temptations of technology loosen restraints individuals
should impose upon themselves, the proper, official, legal use of technology is the duty,
responsibility and vicarious liability of a constitutionally constrained
government.
Being an unreconstructed 9/11 Truther and a
Warren Report/Vietnam era American, my impelled conception of intellectual
honesty and self-respect prevents me from denying blatant anomalies in the
fabric of physical and moral reality our government often weaves to advance its
agenda or quell controversy; even to the point of the “big lie”. The “big lie”,
Hitler noted, is a scenario that is beyond the capacity of “the simple minds of
the people to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and
infamous misrepresentation… yes, even when enlightened on the subject”. For example, no amount of reference to the
laws of physics, the Conservation of Energy, basic engineering and architecture
etc. will sway our supposedly educated population from acceptance of the
ludicrous “official” explanation of building collapses on 9/11. The Fuehrer’s
observation is seemingly further reinforced when the mere prophesy of events,
rather than concrete occurrences, is enough to cause pliant, unquestioning
surrender of percentages of personal freedom, thought, and privacy that would make
modern America so distinctly unrecognizable to previous generations, that those
infected with the psychosis of power have no compelling incentive to re-burden
the unopposed exercise of Orwellian authority with the sheepishly abandoned
whimsy of unalienable constitutional rights.
The
newly received cultural narrative is that owing to some bizarre metaphysical
equation, the citizens of the most powerful nation on earth cannot be
simultaneously ‘free’ and ‘safe’. We’re given to believe the existence of some
nebulous über-threat necessitates both a large, magnificently equipped standing
military force AND a supplemental ‘domestic army’, Homeland Security, which
recently supplied itself with 1.5 billion rounds of ammunition. Nonetheless,
behind this bristling armed barrier whose raison d’être is protection of our
freedom, we are obliged us to reposit our still insecure and inconvenient
freedoms with a paternal government until some future decade or century when
the apparatus of “security”, all its technologies and processes, including such
constitutionally dubious applications as
“Parallel Construction”, will be dismantled and our manifestly ‘alienable’
civil rights will then supposedly revert to their Constitutional defaults. Considering the statistic that terrorism has
endangered ordinary Americans to the same degree as one may be prey to
furniture falling from high rise buildings, it may be questioned if such a prophylactic
abrogation of the people’s protections in the Bill of Rights, together with the
establishment of the Praetorian Guard of Homeland Security, indicates that the
government, for some reason, fears its citizens as much or more than offshore
enemies, and has come to consider the protection of itself and imperial policies,
and not the freedom of the people, as its primary duty.
Government, in the course of its public
duties assumes, no, takes an absolute entitlement to secrecy. But, when one of those
secrets is the abridging of supposedly unalienable rights, THAT illegal behavior
offers validation of the primordial fear that for entities of government, even
ours, “rights” are only aleatory
analects, and will ever be treated as such unless given incontrovertible
substance by perpetual vigorous attention and forceful, and if necessary
violent demand of the people.
If it becomes acceptable in a society experiencing
largely unrent day to day normalcy that unalienable rights are in fact provisional,
and statutory parameters may be redefined and/or disrespected by government ‘in secret’, then it must be concluded
that the people tacitly authorize the dismantling of even the façade of freedom
and government by the people. Then it may be expected that tyranny will ascend
the throne as it most often does – by way of demotic acquiescence or
indifference to the “gradual and silent usurpation” of once believed
indefeasible civil rights.
Where once I would have considered this
opinion I now possess ’fantastic’, the litany of illegal wars, The Patriot Act,
the NDAA, torture, rendition, the drone killings of American citizens without
any publicly scrutinized ‘due process’, indefinite imprisonment of un-indicted
individuals, Congressional rubber stamping of every call to war, and of course
the massive warrantless spying on the citizenry, forces me into a sort of
paranoia regarding the true nature of the society I inhabit. Too many things, once
propagandized as the provinces of autocratic foreign despots and fascist dictators,
are practices now justified domestically under the old reliable rubrics of
‘safety and security’, where the 'more' valuable product ‘security’ can only be
purchased with the deflated coin of ‘freedom’.
I only hope my fear is wanton and this
communication is just the excess of an uninhibited and ludicrous keyboard
operated by too small an understanding of the complexities of the modern
geo-political world. And I hope to be
argued back to a more comfortable sensibility by those who expect to be ‘more
free’ in the coming decades.
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