Being Way Beyond Orwell, and Not Minding, Or, Perchance, Minding

THE MADNESS BEGAN IN EARNEST when President Richard M. Nixon needed enemies, and selected from a long list of candidates American teenagers who smoked marijuana and opposed the Viet Nam war. The war against young Americans intensified when Nancy Reagan, modestly endowed but brighter than her afflicted second husband, articulated her famous last thought: "just say no". Gee, how brilliant. From that rare moment of limited insight derived the great conservative crusade against nonconformity. It eventually swelled to include a two billion phone call database on primitive Drug Enforcement Agency computers, which the National Security Council, never inclined to miss out on any surreptitious fun, joined the game. Combined with the FBI's wiretaps of Dr. Martin Luther King making love to his wife, and the mutual office bugging of Robert F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, and the sheer amount of data our beloved American government has on us, what you have here is a regular science fiction novel, come to life. America is now way beyond anything George Orwell or Aldous Huxley dreamed of. Both writers are now venerated as prophets. We don't seem to mind.-----------but do we mind? Take, say, the most liberal, intelligent man in America, Noam Chomsky. Then, take one of your generic conservative presidential candidates, say, Ted Cruz. Polar opposites, in all ways, if ever there were such. Does either one of these gents want to live in a surveillance state, a police state, especially then they themselves are among the surveilled, just like, so it would seem, the rest of us? Probably not. What liberals or conservatives among us Americans really want to have everything there is to know about us known to the National Security Agency, or The F.B.I., or Experion, Equifax, The First Chucrh of God Almighty, AARP, or the dad blasted ACLU? I mean, hell. Don't we want, regardless of race, creed, gender, religiosity or policical viewpoint, want a certain basic freedom of privacy? To be left alone, if we should so choose? Hello? The right to be, if you will, forgotten? Maybe this is a good place to start, in terms of unifying America, the poor, the world. If we are living in Brave New World and 1984, or something even beyond that, and we are, are we not all of us the more poor, and should we not all fight against this apparent tyranny, all seven point two two billion of us??? Surely, with those numbers, we can compete with and ultimately bring to ruin that far away yet ubiquitous omniscient computer, which, after all, is only set on automatic.