And Smile!
Lately I am making an effort to speak loudly and clearly into the telephone, and also into the place settings, the plants, ball point pens (you never know), and making sure my voice carries anywhere and everywhere; I also take better care with my emails, writing in complete sentences and trying not to misuse words. Regardless of how one feels about surveillance, when one knows that the government is taking the time to pay attention to us, we may as well show ourselves at our best by speaking well and looking sharp.
Camera are proliferating at intersections. In Beverly Hills, they are popular enough that some neighborhood activists (Mayor Steve Webb) want to add photographic radar on residential streets. San Jose is already doing it. Since this is the trend, along with more cameras in other public places, I try to spruce up a bit any time I take a drive. At the very least, I shave. Keeping the car clean and vacuumed on the inside, and putting on a nice shirt, feels better knowing one may be photographed. If I were to try defending myself against a traffic ticket, I would hate to point to photographic evidence showing me bristly, hurtling around in a car full of receipts and coffee cups. No, it is much better to wear a tie and have your hair combed at all times.
Yesterday’s hot news on the creeping surveillance culture was that the government was using its "data mining" of phone records to check out whom reporters were speaking to in government - a way of identifying confidential sources (i.e. whistleblowers). The bloggers wrote indignant things, but thus far I see no evidence of mass outrage spreading like a wildfire. Nor will there be, we can suspect, about this morning’s breaking news that the Senate has blocked any definitive ruling on the legality of the warrantless eavesdropping - looks like they are simply going to legalize it without saying it was illegal in the first place.
If I breed, my children will grow up in a world with cameras in public places checking them out as they walk on the street or drive, where law enforcement could be listening to their calls or at least noting whom they are calling, where their internet traffic and their emails might be intercepted. I will not only beseech my children to wear clean underwear at all times in case they get into an accident; I will insist that they speak eloquently and look sharp at all times. Drive safely, look clean, think correctly. Someone from the government is watching. If we bear this in mind, we will have a beautiful country.
May 17th, 2006 at 8:14 am
Sad isn’t it? We’re giving up our freedoms so others won’t take them away. I suppose as long as enough folks can afford SUV’s and iPods, there won’t be much outcry. One day, we may turn around to learn that outcry itself is illegal. Welcome to the Secure States of Amerika.
May 21st, 2006 at 4:37 pm
This weekend on retreat I had three dreams about– exactly this. Of course I imagined them to be metaphorical, but perhaps not…
June 21st, 2006 at 3:46 pm
Another provocative and eloquent post, from the Master. Thanks, Algernon.
Confucian Chinese values and maternal guilt have burdened me with the programming to watch my posture, conduct, speech, diet, dress and thought and deed at all times for a half-century now.
The dope slaps have conditioned me to the point where the reflex now originates somewhere at the base of my spinal column, a reptilian response.
I have close friends of Semitic and Mediterranean extraction who have reportedly felt similar cultural and societal pressure.
When we strive to think and act in ethical and sustainable ways (I know nothing of the ways of Zen, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam as practiced by their majority proponents to contradict the concept of this end as a fundamental common tenet), what is it that we wish to hide?
I’m getting too old to try to “act right” because of others. I’ve kind of gotten into the habit over time.
If I remember my Analects, Confucius say, “Ever behave correctly, even in your most secret chamber.”
I have been in the telescopic sights of the El Al corporate snipers, and have sat in the penalty box in immigration coming and going from the US.
I think of the alternatives.
I personally am willing to compromise my personal putative “right to privacy” (something my Mommy and my Mrs. might assert is an abstraction) for what I feel may be for a potential greater societal good.
If the consequences of my compliance are abused or misused, my conscience is clear.
This is my personal interpretation of the Zen Mean.
I am a citizen, I am not the USA’s Mommy.
To deny to others their choice to take the opportunity to excel or to sin, to me is an experiment that Qin Xi Huang Ti, Zhang Xian Zhong, the National Socialists, the Soviets have tried.
I am unaware of any attempt to govern by repression that has persisted as long as the United States of America.
If one is equating electronic surveillance to the Pax Romana, the decimatio, the Inquisition, I respectfully demur.
Unless one counts Timothy McVeigh, those cameras have not killed a lot of people.
The places I’ve been, there have been conspicuous military police armed with automatic weapons in open sight since before the 1950s.
The IRA, Basque Separatists, Tamil Separatists have enjoyed a long and storied history and continue their struggle. I say with some pride that I would pit our American nuts against theirs any day.
I am hard pressed to agree that the soldiers I see in Times Square after 2001 are there for the same reasons as the ones formerly on guard in the late lamented Soviet Union during its lifetime.
Is there some place better? I have not yet found it. I am not anxious to find one.