Maybe we do.
Here’s a confluence of several conversations I’ve been having with various people, mostly not started by me:
- Free speech zones. People usually can’t stage a protest any more if it’s near the object of the protest. Instead, they are herded into tiny “free speech zones,” far from where they need to be seen, guaranteeing the media will not record the event; and for further incentive to ignore them, the media are threatened with “lack of access” if they displease the government. Between the two, protests don’t get a lot of coverage, and in the modern world, if it’s not on TV news, it didn’t happen. I thought the free speech zone extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with a couple of outliers. Didn’t we fight a war about that once?
- Full body scanners at airports. These basically strip-search you with video imaging, without the hassle of actually removing your clothes. It took approximately twelve minutes for the government to start capitalizing on the recent terror attempt, beginning a PR push for these machines. Never mind that the average risk per passenger mile of terrorist attacks under the current system, inept as it is, is still roughly equivalent to 0.5 attempts per round trip to Neptune. (That’s a real figure, by the way, not my usual sarcastic hyperbole.) I thought Article Four of the Constitution guaranteed freedom of movement; when did we get to the point where innocent citizens not suspected of any crime can be strip searched by government agents as a condition of perfectly lawful travel? And what’s next?
- Police “reality” shows on TV. The best you can say about them is that they appeal to vile base instincts – schadenfreude and holier-than-thou superiority, giving even the coarsest slob with a La-Z-Boy and a double-wide someone to watch and feel better than. But I think they have a far worse effect; they condition viewers to accept constant police supervision and believe it’s a good thing to want police looking at everything, all the time. Everyone the police stop in these shows is a criminal. You never see them make a mistake and arrest the wrong guy, never see them hassling someone just because they don’t like his looks, and the underlying message is that if the police think someone did it, then by golly they must be guilty. Is this deliberate? Maybe not at first, but it’d be hard to convince me it isn’t by now.
- Authoritarian cheerleaders in the general public. One of the most consistently depressing experiences in my daily webreading is the web comments section of our local newspaper, the Daily Herald. They’re heavy on crime reporting, light on details most of the time, but that doesn’t stop a core crowd of sentence-first, trial-afterward-if-we-feel-like-it pinheads from weighing in on every crime story to make snide comments about the mug shots, recommend severe punishment (life in prison for passing a $300 bad check, in one recent typical example), and/or blame it on Obama. As an experiment, I occasionally offer the opinion that perhaps we should wait for a trial and a verdict before getting out the pitchforks and torches, which invariably results in my being hysterically accused of wishing to commit the same crime, whatever it happens to be. No surprise that the same people are willing to submit not only to strip searches but also blood tests, warrantless FBI investigations, and retina scans to board a plane. I wish I were kidding.
The strangest thing about this is the spectacle of right-wing protesters massing with hand-lettered misspelled signs to demand even more authoritarian government, on the grounds that this constitutes more freedom. It’s so bizarre that contemplating it makes my head hurt. Please take away our civil rights, they’re far too dangerous. Once we’re all safe from that menace, then we can live in “freedom” – under the watchful eye of the government, of course, or maybe Jesus. Not that those would be much different in that inverted utopia.
We like to congratulate ourselves for being the model of liberty for the world, and it’s true that our constitution was once the template for freedom and liberty the world over, to greater or lesser effect depending on how well it was understood. But now we’ve become something entirely different. Once we showed the world how to enact liberty; now we’re showing the world exactly how to subvert it while still paying lip service to the guarantees that supposedly safeguard it, imperceptibly sliding it past the people who should be objecting, and making jackbooted Barney Fifes out of the ones who wouldn’t.
How else would we have come to the point where you need to choose between peeing your pants on an airplane or being arrested as a terrorist by a stewardess?
One of the things I have noticed from listening to conservatives is that they have no idea how a police state, that is, the countries they themselves stigmatise as police states, actually operates. They seem to imagine such governments acting like an upfront Dr. Evil, with cackling and so forth. But no man is a villain to himself, and no regime either. In fact the communist states, to take one example, called themselves democracies and even had some democratic institutions; it was just that they had controlled mass media and were regretfully obliged to take extraordinary measures to prevent counter-revolution and sabotage, which is what “terrorism” was called in those days. The threat was not, by the way, made-up; the Western intelligence agencies were busy destabilising the infant Soviet Union by terrorist methods, just like with the Contras. Same goes for Saddam; when CIA-financed car-bombs were going off in Baghdad, he got medieval on people’s asses in order to find out who was doing it and when the next one was. For some peculiar reason we didn’t read about the poor guy’s predicament on the front pages……..
In such a threatened state, therefore, everyone was constantly exhorted to be vigilant against the sinister foreign-based forces who were conspiring to deprive the people of its precious liberties. It went without saying that sacrifices had to be made when the Motherland and the socialist way of life were under attack. I’m sure that if you’d polled Soviet citizens on the street in the late Twenties, they would mostly agree that this was how it had to be. Who wants to be a traitor? In the next decade they learned what comes next.
If I were advising your Deep State on the transition to a police state, I would say, “Carry on lads, you’ve got it all right so far. Just one thing: it’s time to revive Bush’ TIPS programme. Get an informer onto every street, every residential building, every workplace, with legal powers to supervise, monitor, mid people’s business for them and report back. The Nazis did it, the Soviets did it, the Chinese and North Koreans are still doing it. What’s keeping you?” Bush couldn’t get this past old-school Republicans, but Obama, being such a nice guy, could probably sell it, especially as the mouth-breathers could hardly object.
> The strangest thing about this is the spectacle of right-wing protesters massing with hand-lettered misspelled signs to demand even more authoritarian government, on the grounds that this constitutes more freedom.
The signs in Idaho (usually spelled correctly) have been coming out in support of limited government more often recently, quite the opposite.
I too see what Brock describes, but I have seen plenty of the reverse as well. Coherence is not required for ideology to work its psychological magic.
9/11 was the totalitarian mind’s wildest dream come true, the “Pearl Harbor” Cheney spoke of the conservative movement needing, well before the actual event. The fascist right has used terror well to get us used to their control agenda being implemented one methodical step at a time, moves we might object to were we not afraid. The terrorist won on all sides. The main objective of the hijackers was to bankrupt this country by drawing us into expensive and fruitless wars which would make it easier for them to recruit. Check. Mission accomplished. The main objective of the American terrorists was to cow us into accepting that dissent is un-American. Check. It’s a win/win!
Do we live in a police state? Well, all the pieces are in place! They didn’t build all those black-site concentration camps for no reason. How much of it one sees depends on where one lives and frequents. As a perpetually hand-to-mouth musician I depend on cheap rent and necessarily live in a neighborhood where it is easy to see both rampant police crime and the capricious jackboot.
Some of you know about this, but I was involved in a near miss with the police state a couple months back. As an effective strategy to cut down on smoking I generally leave my tobacco in the car and sit on the driver’s seat to roll a cigarette, a perfectly reasonable and completely legal activity. One day as I was rolling, an unmarked police car blew through the stop sign driving on the wrong side of the street at irresponsible speed and skidded to a screeching stop a couple feet from my car. Two officers dressed like commandos jumped out and aggressively approached my car. They were pumped up, looking to kick some ass.
One demanded I roll down the window. Well, I couldn’t do that because the keys were in my pocket. Damn power windows. How convenient! I didn’t dare reach into my pocket or I would likely get shot. Shoot first is the norm. They know there will be no consequence to them if they’re wrong. “I was afraid. I thought he had a gun.” Works every time.
Since I couldn’t communicate that to him I opened the door a crack so he could hear me better. This infuriated him. He had told me to roll down the window, not to open the door! He jerked it open and was about to grab me when his partner said, “He’s cool”. They jumped back in the car and sped off. I was a split second away from being beaten to a pulp and then charged with assaulting a police officer. For rolling a cigarette….in my car….in front of my house? What?
Ten years ago that would never have happened to a white guy in his mid 50s, so the pool of those that it is acceptable to abuse with impunity has gotten larger. Those with money and power probably don’t see it yet, but that’s the way such things are phased in. By the time people who matter start seeing the police state, it’s too late to stop it. There are many testimonials from Germany in the 30s to that effect.
That’s not a complete answer to your question, Dwasifar. I know it’s more complicated than that. But my experience is suggestive, don’t you think?
I knew this would stimulate you to post again, Urban.
Yes, your experience is certainly suggestive, and it’s also a good observation that white guys in their 50s are now fair game.
I think America has always had a sort of love-hate relationship with its own freedom. Certainly the rights of free citizens are damned inconvenient for government in general and law enforcement in particular, which is why you always see proposals to abridge or eliminate rights explained in terms of how much easier it will make the policeman’s job, as if this is self-evidently a good enough reason to do it. The policeman’s job would be still easier if he could just come into your house any time he wanted without fear of legal reprisal; shall we have that, too?
Local courts and cops have always been sort of a kangaroo affair, whereby you can prove yourself as innocent as a baby of a minor offense and still be convicted and fined on the basis of the cop’s testimony, facts and evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. But we seem to be taking that national now, and that’s a Very Bad Thing, because it leaves nowhere to kick it upstairs to when fairness and transparency are really needed. You can live with being fleeced out of a hundred bucks for a bogus speeding ticket, but if they’re about to put you away for a while, it’s worth it to chase down a fair trial.
It’s easy to forget that legal rights and regulation weren’t always there. Both sets of protections were put in place, if a long time ago, to rein in rampant abuses of power. The right likes to think of government regulation as a lynch pin in the master plan of control freak Marxists, but it just ain’t so. Regulation is not a model of efficiency or efficacy, and as government piles new regulation on top of a layer cake of previous regulation the unintended consequences can be bizarre, but most of it was designed, if badly, in response to very real problems.
It would indeed be very convenient for the police if that pesky Constitution and all those annoying statutes granting Habeas Corpus petitions and rights to representation by legal counsel, etc., could just be revoked. Indeed real criminals and their shady lawyers do exploit the law to keep the guilty from being punished. And yet it seems like an awful lot of innocent people still go to prison and to the gallows. I could easily have ended up doing hard time for the incident I mentioned in my last post. At great cost to the taxpayers, not to mention personal inconvenience.
The current system isn’t working very well, but I shudder to think what the likely replacement would be. I’d like more protection, not less, thank you!
I live in the proudly Socialist China. I see first hand what it’s like to live in “one of those” countries. The denial of freedom comes gradually. they just kinda sneak it in slowly. the next thing you know, simple communication networks such as facebook aren’t available here. Youtube, twitter, and countless other sites just don’t open here. Now, these are simple things.. no biggie, right? Well, let’s go one step further. How about travel? You have to pass a checkpoint to get in or out of ANY city in China, no matter your method of travel. Airports, highways, train stations, bus lines…ALL require you have your travel papers with you at all times, approved by whatever agency is charged with making sure you’re where you’re supposed to be, and not stray from the path. To leave City Center in Shenzhen, China, there are 17 checkpoints. Do you know how many checkpoints there are an the WHOLE USA? NONE. Not a one. You can’t imagine how free the USA really is until you live in my world. Oh! and.. thank a vet for that.
Surely it can’t have been THAT long since you’ve been to a US airport.
To expand on my flippant reply to McKeown and examine it more seriously:
I’m not quite sure how to take that comment, actually. It seems to start out with agreement and end on quite a different note; “Yes, you have a budding police state, and the US is still free.” So I’m not quite sure I understand his point. But it is certainly not true that we have no checkpoints in the USA. There are multiple checkpoints in every airport, where you must show travel documents and state-issued identification to a government agent, and submit to a search, before you may travel. There are checkpoints in New York City subway stations where passengers must submit to bag searches. Amtrak also has such screening, and while it is not (yet) conducted on every passenger, those who are selected and refuse are not allowed to travel.
Does all this mean that the US is no freer than China? Obviously not. We have a long way to slide before that is so. But the question posed by the article is, “Do we live in a police state?” and not, “Do we live in the worst police state?” There can be varying degrees of freedom in otherwise repressive or coercive regimes, and we can still call them police states. If it were otherwise, then only the world’s most repressive regime at any given moment would earn the title “police state,” and all other nations, no matter how draconian, would escape that description on the grounds that they’re still freer than some.
Although China as a whole is less free than the USA, there are certain ways in which China is freer. For example, China mostly doesn’t observe what we call “Intellectual Property” law. You won’t go to jail in China for selling pirated copies of movie DVDs or Microsoft Windows. Whereas in China network traffic is restricted if it is destined for social networking sites, in the USA you can find your net access stifled (and face prosecution) if your network traffic contains file-sharing packets. These restrictions are applied with a heavy hand when they come down; legal file-sharing gets quashed along with pirate traffic, and the penalties are ludicrously severe. (Technically, if you were prosecuted to the full extent of the law, possession of ten copied DVDs could get you $2.5 million dollars in fines and 50 years in prison.)
The point is not that we should be free to copy and file-share (although I think we probably should be, within reason), but rather that this relatively minor and widespread offense is such an obsession for law enforcement that warrantless spying on (and blocking of) people’s net traffic is considered justified. It’s as if the US post office took it upon themselves to open people’s mail, trying to catch you mailing unauthorized photocopies. Is this the same as the Great Firewall of China? Not exactly, but it certainly has the same mindset and justification behind it.
More like a private police state, infested with [legally] armed lawyers. Think Blackwater in the courtroom using ACTA to shut you down and cut you off without a trial or hearing. And if you did get a trial, you’d better be rich, because the corporation is going to ruin you financially before they’re done.
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@dwasifar — What a wonderful and critically honest blog on many levels. Thank you for defending atheism. And your thoughts on software are true to my experience. Found you via Linux hashmarks on twitter, by the way.
Thank you for saying so. It’s especially nice to hear after last week’s fustercluck with the two Windows software posts and the nascent flame war that followed. Sometimes when that happens I feel like just shutting the thing down. So thanks for the endorsement.
Sorry it took so long for your comment to show up. My spam filter flagged it as spam for some reason and I don’t check its catch every day. Shouldn’t be a problem if you comment again, I hope.
At least they “massed” in Massachusetts. Seems the left have left in masses. And you talk about “police state and free speech”. I remember the day I ran into Teddy the “pussy foot” who left to save his own ass and career instead of rescuing Mary Jo Kopechne, as she took her last dying breaths. All I did to upset Teddy and his thugs was hold up a “correctly spelled” sign at an airport as he departed his personal pimped-out jet. My sign said, “He loves you This much,” the “T” looking as if it were a cross. They dragged me and my “free speech,” handcuffed, to a warehouse where they kept screaming, “What are you doing? Who do you think you are?” I guess they didn’t like me screaming the same questions back to them. As soon as “The Great Purveyor of Human and Civil Rights for ALL,” except Christians, “left the building,” I was un-cuffed. Their greatest fear had been “taken care of” without any media notice or intervention. Rose Kennedy would have been so proud of her little boy. So much for tolerance. Pull that same act with a Muslim. I remember helping shut down Ohio University during the Vietnam War protests. I was the one with the bull horn, “Kill the pigs!” When the tear gas hit, ALL the liberals ran. Now a radical for change through a new birth in Christ, I’ve been turned off by the entire political system. Both sides of the aisle need to confess their hypocrisy and power grabbing and clean their own house before pointing any fingers. A middle one to both!
I agree you had the right to protest at Kennedy, unmolested by security. If we don’t have the right to voice our disapproval of our political figures, we don’t really have free speech at all. I still don’t agree with your message, but you should not have been silenced.
I’m concerned at your call for “change through a new birth in christ.” Should I take this to mean that you would like to replace our current political system with a Jesus-based one?
Regarding the tear gas, running is what it’s supposed to make you do. I’m pretty sure everyone runs away from tear gas – liberals and conservatives alike. The alternative, lying on the ground choking, is not very productive. Here’s a video of a guy who was there – a “student marshal” Vietnam vet, there to help control the protesters – and he says at the end of the video that he left the scene rather than be gassed too.