The Restless Chronicles

Where Intelligence Meets News Analysis.

Paranoia State? 9/11 and Our Evolving Sanity

It is fascinating to think, if James Madison, the putative father of the United States Constitution, were to be alive in these turbulent times, would he still have a head full of hair.  Or, overwhelmed with exasperation and helplessness, he is on his way to pulling out the very last strand.

It’s been a decade since that fateful Tuesday, and somehow, no matter how much turbulence we experienced in our world pre-9/11, all that turbulence, through retrospective lens, now seem a distant paradise.

Not to be misunderstood, humanity has never lived without its evils, but to a greater extent, our evils have been quantifiable.  Invariably, we always had answers to them, except the times we willfully chose to ignore them.  Still, to confront our problems, we never really had to sell our souls, become a chapter in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, to make sure airplanes were not falling out of the sky like raindrops.

9/11 represents a chasm between a “prehistoric modernity” and present modernity. What Osama bin Laden and his Terror, Inc took from us, among many things, might just as well be our values and the state we seek.

For so long, we have enjoyed the civil liberties and freedoms which James Madison and other co-authors of the Bill of Rights found indispensable to a free and just society.  After all the majestic arrogance and insolence paraded by King George III at the time of the founding of the republic, the Founding Fathers thought it paramount to declare that government cannot be the beginning and end of all things: “All men are created equal,” they wrote, “…they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

But in the period immediately after 9/11, we eagerly surrendered most of those rights to government. That line which separated us from repressive states such as Russia suddenly became blurred.  Warrantless wiretapping, provisions of the Patriot Act such as “unsupervisable” search and seizure of property in the name of terror investigation, indefinite detention of immigrants, extraordinary rendition (where, for example, the U.S. picks up “suspected” citizens and transfers them into the custody of torture states like Libya to be interrogated on behalf of the U.S. — all cemented our status as the paranoia state.

All right, our fears have not been without reason. Our preoccupation has not being without cause. But somewhere in the midst of all the anxiety, the individual rights that defined the American state became a pariah that dared not show its face.

For a decade now, government has usurped individual rights and liberties in the name of communal good. That such usurpation has occurred is not the principal tension in this argument, but more so, the length of such usurpation.  After all, Abraham Lincoln, in fighting the Civil War that threatened to tear America apart, suspended habeas corpus – a defendant’s right to a speedy trial before a jury of his peers.  But the Civil War lasted 5 years and the quest for a constitutional state rapidly begun there afterward.

But in 2011, we are not even close to the end of such abrogation of individual rights by government, and it is beginning to take a toll. The de facto state is now the new normal, habit perpetuated for as long as we have been at “war” since 9/11 becomes the character and identity of a nation.

Now, rarely do we bat an eye when a federal agency such as the CIA or FBI wields sweeping power that hitherto we would have considered unconstitutional and provocative.  So far as it is in the name of terror, our concerns and anxieties about whatever civil rights may have been breached are suddenly allayed.  We are now in such a grey area that the only entity that polices government is government, as we have surrendered the rights that make government fearful of detaining innocent citizens based on flimsy or incoherent premises.

With no end in sight to the war on terror, our sanity has gradually evolved.  The previously insane has come to be sane and acceptable.  Heck, we chose to invade a Muslim country, Iraq, because of our fears and sensibilities. Understandably, it is indeed hard to juggle our fear of terror and our need of protection from terror.  But is there a way we get our sanity back; get back some of these individual rights and freedoms that are “inalienable”.

What Osama did was open the door to hell, and now we constantly have to devise means to close it.  Since the aftermath of 9/11, we’ve had the shoe-bomber, the underwear-bomber, and many other ingenious means of terror.  We are always reminded they need only be lucky once, whilst we need be right every time. And on this front, the executive branch, the men and women of our national intelligence, and our military have done a remarkable job.

But still, we are no military state nor do we seek a kangaroo republic.  We must note, Al Qaeda wins every time we wholesomely abdicate our centuries-old values in the name of fear. Our values are the antithesis of Al Qaeda, the very reason for which we were attacked.  Our fears are not going to go away, and rightly should not.  But our fear must not create a state where we become puppets to an alpha-and-omega government. It is indeed true, power corrupts, and absolute power, as we hereto have granted, corrupts absolutely.  Well-meaning men in government, unrestrained by the burden and fear of an alert and dutiful public, are bound to behave inappropriately at some point.  It’s been ten years, you do the math.

Government will always feel it needs to arrogate more and more power to itself to do its job efficiently.  But, it is high time we had a national parley on which of these individual rights we have forfeited for too long; which we should forfeit some more; or whether these rights, by and large, to the everlasting horror of our Founding Fathers, are forever forfeited.

September 10, 2011 Posted by | Domestic/U.S., Terrorism | , , , , , , | Leave a Comment

What Shall We Tell The Children?

It is the year 2111, and somewhere thousands of miles on the other side of the globe, a 12-year-old boy in urban China picks up his textbook to learn about a certain empire that once lived in the West and dominated much of the known world.

He opens the first few pages, and it begins to read thus:

“She was a city on a hill. A template for humanity when most men struggled and longed for a symbol of freedom. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ she pleaded, ‘the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-lost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’ 

Her name was America.

And so, for several decades, men, women, and children migrated from far and near to partake in the American Dream. She prospered immensely and built many a military bases across the seven seas.

She pioneered a thousand and one inventions, and also overcame a thousand and one challenges, amongst which was the harrowing Great Depression. 

But then, as often befalls most great civilizations, over-reliant on prowess and success, she became complacent.  She planned awfully for wars which she could not readily afford no matter how good-intentioned, abandoning the fiscal discipline and rules of moral justice that made her an indispensable thought in human life. The rich got richer at the expense of the poor; and ethnic minorities became preys to vultures in her corporate offices.  And because her politicians needed these same vultures to sustain their campaigns, they ingloriously turned the blind eye as the foxes raided the hen house.   

And so came The Great Recession of 2008. Millions of her denizens lost their jobs as the economy hung in the balance and stared into the abyss. Thence, families in Middle America began to scrap bits and pieces together to survive. The elderly saw their retirement savings and investments devastated in one fell swoop; while the rich might have felt a pinch, the general population groaned under the brunt of a deafening blow. The top 400 Americans now had a combined income greater than the bottom 150 million Americans.

But as no nation is ever conquered from without unless it has first destroyed itself from within, the summer of 2011 became a chance for America to mend her wrongs. That is, get back on the righteous path of fiscal discipline and social justice by closing tax loopholes for big corporations, millionaires, and billionaires who don’t need them; easing the burden of healthcare on distressed middle-class and poor Americans; investing in crucial infrastructures and public works (as China was doing); promoting funding for cutting-edge research and scholarships to needy families; and many others.

Alas, it was not to be so. In a bid to raise her debt limit, alarmingly, she was kidnapped by a few of her children who didn’t care whether she defaulted on her debts or not.  These sons and daughters, Tea Party Republicans they were called, stalled and stunted every attempt to make relative progress in her welfare. Believing they knew best what she needed, they fought unyieldingly for the rights of millionaires and billionaires to exploit common citizens and promoted ruinous cuts in programs that hitherto had stabilized the millions of lives living in the bottom half of the American society. 

They had a divine mandate, they believed, and they would be damned if they compromised on anything – if the heart and soul of America had to be gutted so the richest 1 percent of Americans could keep a few extra pennies in their pockets, so be it!

But through some clever cajoling in the final hours, a default on her debts was averted, albeit with little room for anything else.  An opportunity to fix her ballooning federal deficit, which was now a point of national insecurity, had slipped away like a thief into the dark night. The Tea Partiers had successfully barricaded themselves, with America their hostage, into a room where no physicians could dream of getting to her.

And thusly, in the decades that followed, credit markets, spooked by such gross irresponsibility, made a hurried run for more stable and responsible shelters. Her credit worthiness, now questionable, was downgraded by the rating agencies, leading to increased interest rates for businesses and individuals. The anemic recovery from the recession of 2008 was made worse, precipitating an even more calamitous recession.  Her erstwhile irrefutable extolments of democracy’s virtues now seem her eventual undoing.  Subsequently, the almighty Dollar, once the global currency,  soon became a vestige of an empire that was; as nations gradually drifted toward the Chinese renminbi.  For the masses trapped within her shores, the American Dream slowly turned into the American Nightmare.

By this point, everyone wanted the heads of the Tea Partiers … but alas, it was too late.  They were nowhere to be found. The Great American Decay had begun.”

July 28, 2011 Posted by | Domestic/U.S., Economy, Politico-Economics, Politics | , , , , , , | Leave a Comment

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