Reality Swaps
Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, China, June 10, 2013
Salaroche

Perception becomes reality, some people say, meaning that whenever any unproven notion goes uncontested and thereby accepted for a good period of time, it may end up replacing reality in the minds of the people exposed to it. Just ask anybody who has toed the line in any groupthink situation and you’ll know what I mean.

But illusion-reality swaps can happen to people at the massive level as well. Remember the WMD hoax that most Republicans fell for in the wake of 9/11? Condoleezza’s Mushroom smoking gun scared at least half the nation badly enough to have them bite that deceitful bait without hesitation.

Many people fell for that hoax so deep that, to this day, they still believe Saddam really had WMDs but managed to hide them well. They just cannot bring themselves to admit that Bush and his gang took them for the ride of the century.

Waking up can be a hard thing to do, particularly when we have seriously taken the dream for reality, but the moment of reckoning always comes around, regardless of how long and winding the road that finally takes us there may be. Once we get there, however, it’s all a matter of whether we want to wake up or not.

“The dream is over”, sang John Lennon back in 1970 in his song “God”, decrying the end of The Beatles and along with it the end of whatever illusions they might have generated in our minds and in those of the band members as well.

In an overarching way, he was like saying “wake up folks, the sixties were just a mirage, a passing fancy, a massive collective daydream”. And so it might have been, except for some deeper existential notions that circulated in the popular literature of the day, which are basically timeless, irrespective of country and philosophical background. Existential matters of the transcendental kind didn’t end with the sixties and they never will.

Perception becomes reality, goes the saying, and although in our day and age there aren’t too many collective dreams left to wake up from, there still remain more than a few stones to be turned. One of them is the notion that personal telephone privacy is a sacrosanct right in America. Did anybody ever really believe that such was the case?

From the days of the manual phone switchboard, roughly from the late 1800s up to the 1960s, all telephone operators could tell who was calling who and at what time of day, and could even listen in if they so wished. Such informal eavesdropping later became legal under special circumstances when Justice Blackmun, in Smith v. Maryland, 1979, wrote that telephone users may not “harbor any general expectation that the numbers they dial will remain secret”. In so doing, Blackmun actually handed carte blanche to FISA and the NSA to mine Verizon’s metadata, or that of any other telephone company operating in the US.

The Patriot Act of 2001 and the provisions of it that Congress approved in 2011 made Blackmun’s soft ruling much harder still. But go tell Edward Snowden that the NSA actions he squealed to the press about are not illegal and go figure what kind of response you would elicit from him. Snowden says he doesn’t “want to live in a society that does these things”; but he might as well be saying he doesn’t want to live in a world that does these things, as it is the whole world which is under the constant threat of terrorism. Is he at all aware of how disconnected his idealistic notion of the American society is from the real America of the twenty-first century?

Snowden simply refuses to give up his 1950s comic-book super-hero morality. He enlisted to go to Iraq most likely under the spell of Bush’s hoax, believing he was going to save the world from Armageddon. He seems to be the kind of guy that may never wake up to the historical moment the world is presently living. His illusion-reality swap seems to be of the deepest irreversible kind. How could a guy like that ever come to hold such sensitive position in the NSA?

You cannot have your cake and eat it too, Edward. The days when the illusion of privacy prevailed in American society are gone for good. We are now living in a post-9/11 world. There is a necessary tradeoff in guaranteeing the highest possible level of security against terrorism in America and it is that the American people be more tolerant of government surveillance at the national level.

Snowden and his ilk want to hold on tight to their comic-book super-hero idealism while at the same time making sure that no other American building is brought down to rubble in the hands of any other criminal religious lunatic. It’s time to wake up, Edward Snowden, your misguided well-intentioned delusion has brought you to do much more harm than good to the country you profess to love.

For starters, your leaks only made it much harder for President Obama to deal with Xi Jinping regarding the cyber-warfare that the Chinese government is currently waging against the US. I’ve read you’re presently living in Hong Kong, but Hong Kong is paradise compared to mainland China in more than a few aspects. Maybe you should come up north for a visit to see what is happening around here and maybe then you would start to appreciate how lucky you have been to live and work back in the US of A.

The perception of America that propelled you to squeal on your government had already been invalidated for some time now. It is not the America of today which you’re trying to help with your mistaken deeds; it is the vision of America that you forged in your own imagination, perhaps during your childhood even. Maybe you have forgotten this, but super heroes only exist in comic books and in movie versions of them. Doing what you did doesn’t transform you into one of them.

You cannot have your cake and eat it too, Edward. Either you have it or you eat it. Similarly, you cannot have full anti-terrorism security in America and have full communications privacy as well. The two of them are no longer compatible. Your misguided idealistic perception of America will never become reality. The more people like you commit similar acts to promote such erroneous perception, the less chances the country will have to put forward the best of its ideals.

Salaroche