The Weekly Screed (#633)

Big Hoover has always been watching
By David Benjamin

PARIS — Oh my God! The government is spying on Americans?

Wait, wait, no. That’s not quite accurate, or at least not quite newsworthy. Let’s see if we can phrase this more alarmingly.

Oh my God! The head nigger in the White House (HNWH) is spying on white people! In America!

Sounds a lot scarier that way.

Prodded by the John Birch/Tea Party/Fox News right wing, the ever-alert media have discovered something that John Dillinger figured out in 1934 and Dalton Trumbo defied in 1947. It made Herbert “I Led Three Lives” Philbrick into a 1950’s TV hero, haunted Rev. Martin Luther King., Jr. ‘til his death and it killed Fred Hampton in a hail of bullets in a Chicago apartment in 1969.

America’s national security establishment (or NSE) sees no limit to its God-given privilege to invade the privacy and pry into the lives of the American people. The latest travesty is just as normal as blueberry pie. When you have a multi-tentacled security network buried in the bowels of government, shielded by a dozen escalating categories of secrecy, showered with unlimited funding and glorified by prime-time TV, you really can’t blame it for doing its job (especially when nobody has any idea what its job really is). Plus, the competition, among the FBI, CIA, NSA, NSC, DHS, ICE, DSS, NCIS, USASA, USAFSS, BDS, Secret Service, and God knows how many other spooknests there are out there, must be fierce!

So, the government is intercepting our phone calls?

Well, big hairy deal. What else is new?

Ever since I resisted the draft in 1969, I’ve known that “somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white” of me and my treachery against America. I take it as a fact of life that Big Brother — with the assistance of a dozen data farms, three major credit-rating corporations, a couple of insurance companies, twenty different polling organizations and the marketing department at Amazon.com — is not just watching me but can dig up details of my life history that haven’t occurred to me in 25 years. If I want to recall the long-forgotten name of that girl I almost slept with in my North End apartment in the fall of 1969, I know where to go.

The latest dust-up over government curtain-peeping is new and fresh in one respect. The NSE has always been the darling of conservatives. I’m not sure why people obsessed with personal freedom are so tolerant of government programs that hide cameras in bedrooms and bug every Italian Workingmen’s Club from Flatbush to Greenbush. I suspect the right-wing passion for domestic spying reflects a vision of geopolitics as a clash of mighty paired opposites, with the “free world” pitted constantly against a shifting cast of Evil Empires trying to infiltrate us with sneaky little fifth columnists who corrupt out teachers, indoctrinate our kids, sap our moral fiber with fluoride and inveigle us all into neighborhood cells of naïve sedition.

The best place to look for the conspiracies we love to hate seems to follow a simple rule: Look for the sort of people whom former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like. I know. This covers a lot of ground. Anyone who grew up in Hoover’s America — until the beady-eyed cross-dressing son of a bitch died in 1972 — knows that the only people J. Edgar ever liked were white men who new what he could do, and they were scared shitless of him.

Hoover was a bigot who suspected anyone remotely foreign or slightly brown of being some sort of spy and probably a Commie. The line from his ruthless pursuit of Depression-era bank robbers to today’s mirthless avengers in the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc., with their black sites and thumb screws, is direct and unbroken.

Today’s outcry against NSE overreach is unique because — besides the usual crocodile tears from liberal senators like Diane Feinstein — there are actual conservatives, the erstwhile acolytes of J. Edgar, who are raising a ruckus over the government’s accumulation of meta-data from Americans’ phone records.

I choose the simple explanation for this plot twist. Since J. Edgar, the White House has been the province of white men, each haunted by Hoover’s specter and beholden to the National Security Establishment. The HNWH appears to be just as chicken as all those who went before. But Washington’s cozy club of scared white men recoils at Barack Obama’s admission. Since his re-election, he can’t be blackballed. However, if he’s plagued by “controversies” for three more years, he might just hear the ghostly message, from Hoover’s grave, that he never belonged. 

Still, even though all this telephone turmoil is stained with racism, I’m having a hard time getting upset. I don’t see much difference between my dusty, 44-year-old FBI file and the trillion gigabytes of tweets, texts, pizza orders and Facebook “likes” that are currently piling up uselessly on several acres of servers in some nuke-proof underground server farm somewhere in darkest Nebraska, or Guam.

I grew up with J. Edgar. I knew he was watching. I knew that some paranoid fascist like him would always be watching. I’ve kept my nose pretty clean, but not so much because I fear the NSE. My serenity derives from a) a basic faith in the Constitution, b) the understanding that I can’t do anything to shut down the sneaky bastards anyhow, and c) the American people’s “fed up” threshold.

There’s a cycle that constantly turns in America. Just when we all seem to be head-over-heels in love, forever, with national security, some snoop in an off-the-rack suit — emboldened by our affection — barges into the kitchen and shoves a microphone right up Grandma’s ass. At which we all say, “Wait a minute, Edgar!”

And this time, the snoop with the microphone is black.

Seems like we might be coming around to one of those “Wait a minute!” moments.