Obama's Brave New World

Dear Mr. President,

The American Propaganda Machine is in full throttle forward. Snowden is a “defector,” a “traitor,” an “aider and abettor of the enemy”—called that and worse by blowhards in Congress and liars in your administration. You even got UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to denounce Snowden, saying he “misused data” —no mention of the misuse of data by the NSA or the rest of the American Security apparatus. Feinstein, faithful spearchucker that she is, without a shred of evidence claims Russian intelligence went through all Snowden’s computers and sucked up everything on his hard drives. Snowden denies it, Russia denies it, and given a choice between Snowden and Feinstein, my money’s on Snowden. Today’s NY Times had another hit piece on him, calling him, among other things, a hacker, a high school dropout, and a lone wolf; not one mention of the illegality of what he exposed or the lies told Congress and the American public. What bothers me most, however, is that Americans are not out in the streets protesting the Big Brother state of the nation. The news that the USPS photographs the front and back of every piece of mail sent—100 billion pieces a year—that law enforcement, federal, state and local government agencies are given copies without a court order or any oversight, barely made a ripple. The notion of privacy has become a quaint anachronism. Welcome to George Orwell’s 1984 and George Lucas’s THX-1138, worlds where the government knows everything about everybody—every movement, every conversation, every thought—and controls and programs its citizens through propaganda and punishment that teaches them not to question authority, not to dissent and not to rebel. It’s a dystopian vision of the future that seems to have arrived while we weren’t looking, that snuck up on us when we thought we were shucking the bad old regime of Bush and his neocons for the new enlightened Obama democracy of Hope, Change, Freedom, Equality and Justice. Instead, we got a smoother, slicker, more polished and far more effective version of Bush, a president who orders assassinations without qualm, who detains indefinitely and calls it national security and who won’t allow illegally imprisoned men in Guantanamo to either be released or die with dignity. Welcome to the Brave New World of Obama’s Amerika, where truth and transparency is the enemy, where We the People are guilty till proven innocent, and where whistleblower are called traitors. How did we let this happen?