(Album cover of the most widely sold record in history: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.)
You might be under a rock, and if so, I apologize for turning it over. Things are much more comforting in the dark sometimes, which is where we were until the latest pair of revelations hit. The twin programs that were revealed are called PRISM/BLARNEY, and they represent the collection effort of the National Security Agency against the phone and Internet communications webs.
They have brought the Most Transparent Administration Ever into a perfect storm of controversy. It is not entirely of their making, but certainly the one they have earned. It is a prism of policy- some of it begun by the Bush Administration, but certainly placed on steroids since the election of Barack Obama.
Consider the President’s remarks at Ohio’s State’s Commencement just weeks ago, that there is “no reason to fear the Government,” and that “the war against al Qaida has essentially been won.”
If so, then what? The first assertion, in the wake of the IRS Scandal (really a family of scandals, most of which have not been topics of conversation; i.e., alias communications by Executive Branch Administrators to avoid FOIA, harassment of political and policy foes by those self-same agencies, etc., etc.) has brought even the progressive pages of the New York Times to full alert.
So, what will all this do to the next painful three-and-a-half years, and nearer term, what will it mean for the 2014 election cycle?
We had a chance to change course, albeit with a Big Government technocrat versus the Obama Chicago Machine last November, but we chose not to. Had we known what we know now, I wonder if the results would have been any different?
What about the surveillance programs? The 157 meetings at the White House with the IRS Commissioner? The tangled denials of the Attorney General that he knew anything at all about targeting the free press for criminal prosecution?
I am not sure it would have made a difference. Given the way people access information these days, it is entirely possible that it would not have, since right and left have assumed a posture where “never the twain shall meet.”
If you believe one thing or another, there is an entire and complete information stream that supports your pre-existing position. But these latest disclosures have a resonance across the spectrum.
A pal wrote to say that his 87-year-old Aunt was in tears over the IRS matter, and he was mad as hell. Now, I understand that his very email service from AOL with which I am writing you is cooperating with the Government to analyze this email, and perhaps your response.
There is something going on here that law-abiding taxpaying citizens do not understand, whether they are left, right or in the middle.
My concern is that the generation that is rising behind Gen X and Y just doesn’t care about how things are supposed to work in a Constitutional Republic. At the same time, technology has enabled the creation of the most breathtakingly intrusive government surveillance of its own citizens since the demise of the GDR’s Stasi.
The kids expect bread and circuses, apparently, and the substitution of The State for the family is natural, a la that weird “Julia” slide show from the late campaign, where a young woman is helped at every stage of life by a benevolent government. It is all many of them have ever known.
My suspicion is that we are well and truly screwed. Still, this will be an interesting period in the national life.
I remember well the Last Election in Detroit- the last time there was a real choice for the voters of that once-grand city. It resulted in the1973 Mayor-For-Life Coleman Young’s victory over former sheriff John Nichols. Please, please, don’t consider this an observation on race, though of course that is the prism through which all our American social issues are focused, and the one that pains me to distance myself from today.
This is about what happened when there is only one party in complete control. Pick your poison: the revelations this morning should demonstrate that neither of them are to be trusted.
Based on the best (or worst) of intentions, policies have been put in place that have systematically undermined social institutions like family, and church, and small business.
These in turn have been replaced in the Motor City by the instruments of the government, and I shudder to think it is a microcosm for what we are now witnessing in the nation at large.
There may have been hope to turn things around after that tectonic change, but it faded. Now, Detroit is a husk. Visiting the place is a bit like a trip to the Forum in Rome, to see the fragments of what once was.
(Detroit’s iconic Penn Central Terminal. Photo Larry Wilkinson)
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com