January 20, 2003
John Le Carré in the London Times last week: The United States of America has gone mad.
The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.
The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world?s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.
But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet.
To follow up on a point in that first paragraph, something I meant to point to last week. A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union, "Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society", tries to connect the dots between the disparate stories of just how our freedoms are being eroded (actively attacked, more like). Small stories about will appear in the mainstream press but not framed in the larger sense in which they really need to be seen.
One major hurdle is, of course, that the very people who most need to read this report are the ones least likely to see it. Many will disregard it solely because it comes from the ACLU, which has the unfortunate reputation of being just a bunch of whining commies. As if concern for civil liberty were not among the highest of American values.
Oh wait. That's right. The idea of valuing civil liberty went out the door a long, long time ago. Silly me.
On the slightly geekier side, I thought it was pretty nifty how they have separate links to download the report and to display it in the browser — it's available only as a PDF. I cannot tell you how often I have fielded questions from users panicking because they're not getting whatever behavior they expect from a PDF, just because their browser either does or does not have the Acrobat Reader plugin. The ACLU's solution — to use different Content-Type headers — is not perfect, but it's an interesting idea.
