CSotD: ‘They envy our freedom’ and so do I
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There are any number of strips and, particularly, political panels today noting the apparent disconnect between surveillance and freedom, but I think Wiley caught it best in Non Sequitur.
The big Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall now involves enough scrutiny that it's ripe for positioning as an ironic symbol of where things stand, and Boston's iconic Pops Concert is no less so.
Which is to say, it's easy to defend the searches, given the prominence of the event and the ease with which a couple of apparently freewheeling political screwballs were able to disrupt the Boston Marathon, but it's also sad and not just a little scary.
When you think about the inept screwballs who have managed to slip through the net — the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, the guy in Time Square with the fizzler — the fact that the Boston bombers were able to make something actually explode is a chilling foreshadowing of things yet to come.
Not that four dead and a large number maimed isn't a sufficient toll in itself, but it does suggest that we ain't seen nothing yet.
So, when security people go before Congress and report on the number of attacks they've prevented through surveillance, you have to take it seriously, even if the bulk of the thwarted terrorists were goofballs and screw-ups and wannabes, and regardless of how many were entrapped by undercover agents rather than discovered in actual mid-plot.
Lee Harvey Oswald, after all, was a goofball, which is why the entire JFK Conspiracy industry generates such profits: People cannot believe that a goofball could actually accomplish his goal. Despite the fact that another goofball, Sirhan Sirhan, did much the same thing a few years later, and another, Arthur Bremer, nearly succeeded shortly after that, as did John Hinckley after that.
Were they all part of some elaborate Trilateral Freemason Tralfamadorian plot?
And, if they were, what the heck difference would that make anyway?
I mean, the Viet Cong, though they were local Minute-Man-style operatives in the South, were under orders from the North.
If carpet-bombing everything above the DMZ, mining Hanoi Harbor and sacrificing over 50,000 American lives didn't stop them, what are we going to drop on Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan that will stop somebody from stuffing a pressure cooker with black powder?
As for the cost of living under scrutiny, it's not a question of what we want. It's a question of where we're at.
People love to quote and misquote and paraphrase Benjamin Franklin's "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety," but lemme ask you this: If the Russians, with their long tradition of intrusive, oppressive oversight, can't stop every Chechen terrorist attack, how on earth do you expect to achieve security without, well, "security"?
I mean, we'd all like to be able to go see Barry Manilow without having to be searched, but is it worth having a bomb or two or three go off mid-concert?
My point — and I think it's also at least part of Wiley's point — is that all this talk of "Freedom" is weird, given that we've worked ourselves into a place where freedom isn't just another word for nothing else to lose but is one of the things that we've already lost.
Now, when you're lost something, the first thing you should do is think back: Where did you last have it?
If you last had your wallet when you were juggling an armload of building supplies, you can probably go back to the hardware store and they'll have it behind the counter for you.
If you last had your wallet at whatever hazily-remembered bar it must have been where you last bought a round while you and your idiot friends were out on an epic drunk, it may be a little harder to get it back.
And, even if you do get it back, it may not be as full as you remembered it being. Moreover, even if you never find it, the bills will still arrive anyway, and VISA doesn't accept "I was drunk" as a reason to cancel flamboyant expenditures.
So, okay, I know we had it on the deck of the Missouri, and I'm pretty sure it was still in our pocket at Jan Masaryk's funeral, but, after that … oh, geez …
And, as Bob Gorrell suggests, it's pointless to ask your drunken idiot friends.
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