My irregular musings on city life, politics, baseball, roller derby, and whatever happens to be getting my goat today.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

war pigs

I’ve never spent much time around livestock, but I’m told that hogs in a pen become vicious animals. Wound one, in fact, and the others will smell its blood and weakness and devour it. Or so I’m told. When I lived in Ohio, I worked for a while with a woman whose grandparents had been bootleggers. I learned a lot from her, among other things how to make fried green tomatoes. I had some fantastic co-workers in those days... Anyway her grandparents raised hogs in addition to their extra-legal whisky business, and on at least one occasion a government “revenuer” ended up getting fed to the foul creatures, erasing the evidence of whatever it was that had led to the sudden death of a Federal agent on private property. I have no idea whether the story was true, but she sure liked to tell it.

Such folk legends of resistance against government authority are a part of people’s identity in many parts of the country – antisocial, yes, but quintessentially American. I used to look on these loony libertarians with a certain amount of skepticism and despair, but recent events have me coming around. What with the government claiming the right to spy on Americans, detain them without evidence, torture them, and hold them incommunicado for the rest of their lives, these folks are starting to make a lot more sense to me.

Common sense arguments seem to fall on deaf ears. Torture doesn’t work as an intelligence gathering tool. It produces compliance, not information. Spying on everybody just wastes scarce resources like agents’ time and leads mostly to dead ends and useless information. The good stuff the NSA can get the old fashioned way, with warrants, the way the FBI does when it’s surveilling the same people.

These arguments don’t convince anyone because the White House is bent on expanding power for its own sake, not because they want to defend the country. They think the American people are so dumb stupid that they can justify anything just by shouting terrorism! 9/11! Look, bin Laden! So if the whole point of this exercise was to push some old school liberals like me into the arms of the Libertarians in wanting to restrict the scope and power of the Federal Government, then congratulations. You win.

It makes me so mad, these people should by happy there’s not enough room in my postage stamp back yard to raise hogs.

Sometime soon I'm gonna edit this guy and put the links back in, but I just can't be bothered this morning.

3 comments:

Bob said...

If I could make a suggestion, I would ask that you do a post about WHY warrantless, illegal spying is a bad thing. I have a general sense of why, because I read 1984, but in the mean time, we need better arguments for dumb hicks who shrug and say, "I don't have anything to hide..."

I feel like there are plenty of people saying that it is bad, and sure, it is illegal, but I need a deeper discussion of why - what are the impacts? Why should people REALLY care.

I have some ideas, but I'm having trouble thinking through them.

E-mail if you want. Thanks.

Trope said...

Well, the dumb hicks are not gonna like my reasons anyway, so I'm not sure if I should engage the debate. But lots of my friends have things to hide; little things, mostly, like nonprofit recreational gardening, a fake address to hide their non-city residency, or a second job that they're not supposed to have. I don't currently have anything to hide, but in a few years I well might. Posts like these on abortion-related topics are obviously not going to stay legal long, and not being able to discuss those topics over the phone would certainly be a barrier to access. Plus, phone tapping is not materially different from bugging a house, which is not that different from installing video cameras. Just leash us all and be done with it.

Bob said...

Thanks for the responses, everyone. The point that we don't know what the government is doing (or could do) with any collected information is the one that hit home the most. Stuff I do online (yes, THAT) and e-mails to ex-girlfriends could come back to haunt me. I guess I've always known that, except that I never figured anyone was watching (until a few months ago). I don't mind being judged, but I certainly don't want anyone in this administration judging me!