Police State Porn

The NSA story seems like old news now, having come out last week, but I can't seem to get it off my mind. For a while, I was merely indignant, but then I realized that this latest revelation was echoing in my mind because it was also a reverberation of so many other moments in this administration's history. The story also reminded me of the state of our country, not only politically, but also socially. What kind of community allows this to happen? I am not--I don't think--a naive fool who thinks we should be one happy family, but I do believe that our nation has the possibility of better communicating a few national aspirations to each other and perhaps even fulfilling them.

Currently, we Americans have the illusion that watching our neighbors is the same thing as living with and taking care of them. We seem to think that keeping an eye on each other leads to protection, that surveillance is the same as guardianship, that knowing ourselves through voyeurism can somehow replace real community. This is tragic--but not necessarily inevitable as some historians would have us believe.

A real community watches out for itself, but it does not cast narcisisstic, domineering glares. Its members know each other and not merely of them. A community has institutions that reflect it such as health care and schools and libraries. Of course, not only do Americans often lack this sense of civic community, the Bush administration is actively undermining our ability to create such a thing. And that is perverse.

The current administration's obsession with controlling, gathering (and possibly abusing) surveillance is nothing more than a form of voyeuristic pornography for an elite for whom even the illusion of domination, of total information (and sensory) knowledge brings pleasure--and certainly gathering it all, all the information, all the records brings merely over-stimulation, not true understanding, interaction or follow-through. And perhaps follow-through and arrests are not really the intent.

Indeed, today on CNN when Bill Frist refused to say (citing secrecy) whether the NSA's culling had delivered even a single arrest, it is highly likely that he didn't name an arrest because there haven't been many, if any at all. In fact, the program probably does not deter terrorism or catch terrorists. But this lack of anti-crime effectiveness in no way diminishes the effect such a program has on the American psyche as an intimidating information-gathering practice. Nor does it diminish the feeling of power it confers upon those who control it. And that is why I call it pornographic and voyeuristic, because consummation (in this case, criminal convictions) need only be a distant dream as long as the power feeds those who find use in this technology. Our leaders seem addicted to this feeling and, for them, dealing with the FISA court is like looking the adult store clerk in the eye. It diminishes power. It ruins the effect.

Of course, all of this parallels (in form and sometimes function) the "legalization" of torture, the previous NSA wiretapping revelations, the perverse use of language in things like the Clear Skies Act (Initiative?) and Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL), the strangeness (cruelty) of appointing a racist judge on MLK's birthday, and the countless acts of disrespect and imposed indignity documented over Bush's already interminably long tenure in the White House. As Lambert at Corrente noted (according to FDL), Bush explained the NSA program right in front of a large graphic detailing the NSA's "choke points" where they do their information gleaning. That is called rubbing your nose in it. It is a form of humiliation that brings pleasure to some.

So forget for a moment, if you will, that we have laws in the form of a constitution. Forget that we have a congress. Forget that we have a FISA court. Instead, think of community and all of the above as iterations of a form of community that protects itself from outside threats, from inside threats, and all the while protects the weakest members within that community from its predators. It is from that sense of community that the laws, the constitution and the courts originally arose. Now, regardless of their implementations and interpretations through history, we should strive for that sense of natural law and common good. And that is why the predation and voyeurism are dangerous: they are not merely prone to abuse, they abuse, demean, demoralize and eventually weaken the very community they supposedly serve.

So when the cries of incompetence, stupidity, hubris and greed are more or less forgotten, one defining description of the the GW Bush presidency will remain, must remain: that of the predator, of overwhelming and inexorable predation that gets off on power, that gets off on peeking, prying and on the effect such acts have. Predation of labor. Predation of markets. Predation of public lands. Predation of foreign lands. Predation of public discourse. Predation of our "unalienable" rights to privacy in our bodies, our homes and in our communities. We have been violated.