Masses Consent to Their Exile

Freedom doesn't exist as an absolute condition....does it? There is freedom from and freedom to. A long list of actions embody these freedoms in the U.S: shopping, business owning, standing in long lines outside of Apple retail stores, voting, etc None of these actions pose a threat to the power elites. But, history shows that in the Land of the Free that a police state hovers, monitoring voices of dissent who develop an audience.

Our institutions and media assure us that police-type actions if done properly ensure our freedom and safety rather than making us subjects of a police state. The scope and reach of such powers is only proportional to the size of the perceived threat. The truth of this statement when measured against the state's actual surveillance patterns confirm the objections of cynics and "conspiracy theorists" alike. At this point in a discussion like this apologists for the surveillance state can insert their predictable meme about civil libertarians wearing "tin foil hats." Except, examples of the surveillance state abusing its power are plentiful.

For example, the FBI created a 12-page file on the late comedian George Carlin. In this file we discover that the FBI learned that Carlin in 1969 "had referred to the Bureau and the Director in a satirical vein," and "it was obvious that he-Carlin-was using the prestige (sic) of the Bureau and Mr. Hoover to enhance his performance." Should we be relieved the FBI was functioning as an undeclared ministry of propaganda? Otherwise, the gullible public stood vulnerable to being corrupted by the opportunistic and subversive comedy of Carlin.   

The FBI's efforts to monitor entertainment content to assess its subversive potential warrants fears that we stand to serve as involuntary subjects of surveillance. They casts this surveillance net from entertainment to activists, showing a ubiquitous reach demonstrating a fully operational police state. Thus, despite the progress of democracy these police state operations remind us that elites never cease monitoring the public. Sure the public can vote. But such surveillance suggests that the masses possess little power from voting. John Dewey expressed his view that elections in the U.S. are "the shadow cast by big business over society." Dewey's words are true today.

On MLK Day each year, Americans should review the FBI's dossier created on that subversive communist, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. This dossier consists of 17,000 pages. I possess no skills to serve as an FBI spokesman, but I ask wasn't 17,000 pages slightly excessive? The FBI didn't think so. The FBI demonstrated their commitment to wretched excess by their sending to King during his lifetime a letter wherein they summarized their judgement of his character culled from the voluminous 17,000 page dossier.

Regardless of any King's "misdeeds," no amount of infidelity justifies the FBI's voyeuristic surveillance of his life. The technological means used to to create this excessive surveillance seem primitive compared to the NSA's current digital panopticon recording our movements and communications. I text therefore I am. But how free am I?

Former U.S. President George W. Bush once told us that "they hate us for our freedom." Do the "they" in his statement apply to those who (i.e. the FBI) monitored the non-violent King and Carlin? If not, that infers that
King, Carlin and other critics of the elites are not included in Bush's view of the "Us." Rather those expressing dissent are exiled from the grand "Us."

Ed Snowden is condemned to exile. Will Snowden ever return triumphantly like Solzhenitsyn? Or, at least return at all if even in the most anti-climatic setting? Given the Republican-Democrat consensus of faith in the sanctity of the NSA, it looks doubtful for now. Yes the former Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. analyst turned whistle blower will probably never receive any Nobel prizes in the future. But as long as the NSA mocks us by implying that we cannot be entrusted with managing our own freedom, we have consented to our own state of exile as well.