Your Big Brother Government’s Brother
© 2013, UrbisMedia
Just when you thought it was safe to check out that porn site, or if you are just curious that there are formulas for making pipe bombs freely available on the Internet, or chance an email to your old girlfriend Linda who popped up as someone to “like in your Facebook account, or submit your credit card number to buy some knock off Cialis from an online pharmaceutical company in Tijuana, or any number of other clicks to search, open, send, submit on your computer, just when you thought it was safe it’s not.
Just when you thought isn’t it great that were not back in those early telephone days of party lines when your neighbor listened in on your conversation, and now we have these wonderful personal cell phones, and we don’t have to find a public wall phone, or a phone in a phone booth that was just used by the wino with gum disease also used the booth as a urinal. Isn’t it great that we can have our own list of numbers, text people if we like, even take Anthony Weiner photos and send them to old girlfriends or that hot Russian girl who sent you her photo with a message that you’re just her kind of guy, or we can phone up that friend who lives in Kazakhstan, or in Chongqing that you met in your travels? No need to worry that all this stuff is lodged in that chip and is accessible through your service provider that can be bullied by your government to provide access to all that information. Just when you thought all that stuff was convenient, safe and inaccessible, it’s not.
Maybe it never was. Maybe it was just an illusion that this new putatively liberating (and it certainly is in a number of respects) technology that links us with a world of people, institutions, databases and much else around the world does not have a sinister downside that makes Orwell’s “big brother” look like the kid next door with binoculars trying to get a glimpse of your sister undressing. Maybe you would prefer to go back to the days when nosy Mrs. Snodgrass who shared your party line eavesdropped on that conversation with your first girlfriend. Those were the days.
Oh, but those aren’t the days anymore. These are the days of the post-bin Laden era, the days when those nice next-door neighbor Chechen boys might be building bombs in the basement, when those Muslims going to the mosque might be hatching dreams of forcing you to live under sharia law. These are perilous days, and we need protection far more sophisticated than Officer Krupke walking his beat and keeping the Sharks and the Jets out of mischief. It’s all more complicated now, and maybe we have to give up some of our freedoms and liberty and privacy in order to remain safe. Maybe we need to accept the necessity and inevitability of a big brother government.
But isn’t it curious that all of this breaking news about PRISM, the government’s access to private citizens phone logs, and all the espionage “legalized” by government to spy on its own citizens comes on the heels of news reports by the US government that its own computers, as well as the computers of American corporations, are being accessed by a battalions of cyber warriors of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Doesn’t that make your scratch your head?
Because, isn’t there a frightening syllogism in all of this:
IF our government can collect almost any kind of information it chooses about us, without our knowledge or permission, under the aegis of Homeland Security . . .
AND, the Chinese government can obtain what it chooses from our government, with or without its knowledge or without its permission . . .
THEN, our government is acting as a middleman in enabling a foreign power to spy upon us . . .
ERGO, while all the spying by our government is putatively justified on the basis of protecting us, it is in fact making us more vulnerable to spying by foreign powers.
Certainly, what I like to call the “bin Laden Effect”— the ongoing insidious paranoia planted in the minds of many Americans, and in the minds of many American public officials who spread, elaborate, perpetuate, and exploit the events of 9/11, and that seems, given its perpetuation by the Obama administration, to continue its invasion into the rights of citizens—has become a form of “cultural madness” that not only destabilizes our social institutions, threatens our economy, and makes a mockery of our constitutional guarantees, but also leads to a permanent state of self-perpetuating warfare that regards even its own citizenry as a potential enemy. Obama may have killed bin Laden the man, but bin Laden the bogeyman haunts America like a virus that is destroying us from the very cellular structure of our society.
Consider Osama’s record. He managed to turn a cowardly dolt like Bush into thinking himself a “war president” who came out swinging like a drunk (of course) in a bar at any Middle Eastern country that he could hit. His relatively small army of Al Qaeda managed to find ways to get America to sacrifice tens of thousands of its expensively-equipped soldiers to death and dismemberment in wars it cannot win or extricate itself. It resulted in two wars, financed “off-the-books” that contributed a big hunk to the triple-whammy that America’s economy got in 2008. It is a gift of laughter to bin Laden that keeps on giving. Osama managed to get American to indenture and indebt itself to China and Japan, and allow its economy to be ruined by a cabal of corporations, banks and greedy Wall Street bastards. Some of the veterans they like to call “heroes” are jobless and homeless. At this rate they won’t be able to keep their 800 military bases all over the world. That hypocrisy is a belly laugh that will last for years.
One of Osama’sa greatest accomplishments was to get those silly Americans to allow their government to spy on each other, and accuse one another of being weak on terrorism, but also throw their own principles and allegiance to the Geneva Accords out with the water from their waterboarding, extraordinary renditions, and other forms of torture. And then there was Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and Barack Obama’s killing innocents with his drones to keep Americans paying for Al Qaeda recruiting. What a guffaw!
America has made itself not only the enemy of the entire Muslim world, but the laughing stock of the rest of the world. Who would have guessed that it would be this easy. That’s the essence of terrorism—the complicity of the fearful. Some Americans are fearful of invasions of Al Qaeda and imposition of sharia law, when the supposed enemy barely have enough guys to have a pick up soccer game. And now, paradoxically, like some pycho/political auto-immune disease in metastasis, America has (and have not so many prior political systems come to grief in the same manner?) turned on itself–its own worst enemy.
Just when you thought America was special, exceptional . . . it’s not.
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©2013, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.7.2013)