I’ve been away from the blog most of the day, as holiday socializing ratchets up for us this week. (Today it was annual Rainbow Families/DC holiday party.) Sitting down to the computer this evening, it’s interesting to see the reaction to the story about the Dartmouth boy and the Little Red Book. Boing Boing has picked it up, after “ten gajillion other fellow travelers” recommended the item.
It’s interesting to me, because I’ve been following stories like these since right after 9/11, before I even started this blog. At the time, they got dismissed as isolated incidents, not worth mentioned because the people involved were merely questioned. It’s not like they were disappeared or anything, ya know? Besides, we were a nation at war and it “wasn’t the time” for certain behaviors, speech or reading material. Now stories like this apparently get more attention and rouse more people than they used to.
Maybe they aren’t drowned out so effectively by the drumbeat of war as they used to be, because people aren’t as afraid as they were a few years ago. (Thus the president’s speech tonight.) Maybe more people are waking up. But what took them so long? And is it soon enough?
Right after 9/11, back when I had a static website instead of a blog, I posted a list of links to peace groups and alternative news sources. One of those sources was The Progressive magazine’s McCarthyism Watchh. I can’t remember if that’s where I saw the first story or not, but I soon found it compiled there with other stories. It was the story of a 19 year old student whose anti-Bush poster (spotted by a policeman who responded to a noise complaint and came by to tell her to turn the music down) resulted in a knock at the door.
Knock, knock … unexpected guests at Brown’s Duke Manor apartment. Opening the door, she found a casually dressed man, and a man and woman in what appeared to be business attire. Her first thought, she says, was, “Are these people going to sell me something?”
But then the man in the suit introduced himself and the woman as agents from the Raleigh office of the U.S. Secret Service. The other man was an investigator from the Durham Police Department.
“Ma’am, we’ve gotten a report that you have anti-American material,” the male agent said, according to Brown. Could they come in to have a look around?
“Do you have a warrant?” Brown asked. They did not. “Then you’re not coming in my apartment,” she said. And indeed, they stayed outside her doorway. But they stayed a while–40 minutes, Brown estimates–and gave her a taste of how dissenters can come under scrutiny in wartime.
And all because of a poster on her wall.
Then there was the guy who learned that mouthing off at the gym can get you a knock on the door.
Barry’s encounter with law enforcement began roughly a month after Sept. 11. He and six or eight others were talking politics at the 24-Hour Fitness health club in downtown San Francisco. Somebody said, “that Osama bin Laden is an …hole.” Barry agreed, and said that what happened Sept. 11 was horrific. However, he added, “Bush is a bigger …hole than bin Laden will ever be because he bombs people all over the world for oil profits.”
…A few days later, Barry was sitting in his apartment near Lake Merritt in Oakland when he heard the buzzer. “Who’s there?” he asked. “The FBI,” came the answer.
Barry was spooked. His wife was at work and he wanted witnesses. There were none to be had, however, and he decided to hear his visitors out. As Barry describes them, they were clean cut, well groomed men in their 20s – a Central Casting version of FBI agents.
“We’ve heard,” they told him “that you’ve been discussing President Bush, oil, Osama bin Laden” and other political matters. Barry was dumbfounded. “A lot of people have,” he pointed out, and as far as he knew that was still allowed.“You do, of course, have freedom of speech,” one of the agents reassured him. “Thank you for reminding me,” Barry replied. “This discussion is over.”
And while Reingold wasn’t dragged away, never to be seen again, he did learn a lesson; specifically that he had to be “a little more careful” and “sound out people” before braving the first amendment.
There’ve been other cases, of course, showing that having the wrong reading material under your arm at the coffee shop, displaying the wrong sort of artwork, or teaching your child “anti-American values” can also get you a knock at the door.
There are far more of these than I can document myself. Those are just few that jumped out at me over the last few years. There’s more than 100 documented over at McCarthyism Watch. What most of them have in common is the same factor that made them easy to dismissed, one by one, as they occurred. They all seemed to be initiated by petrified “patridiots” who were sufficiently whipped into a lather that any hint of dissent made them go all twitchy and send them reaching for the phone. The refrain I heard was usually “blame the idiots that called the authorities, not the agents who simply showed up to do their job.”
Well. Maybe. I do wonder, though, whether and why judgement wasn’t applied in considering whether every hysterical call of treason needed to be checked out. Chances are the great majority didn’t, but to take a pass on the door-knocking excises would have been to skip a chance to reinforce a message intoned by the White House’s own spokesman at the time.
MR. FLEISCHER: [In response to a question about Bill Maher being yanked off television for some unfortunate remarks.] I’m aware of the press reports about what he said. I have not seen the actual transcript of the show itself. But assuming the press reports are right, it’s a terrible thing to say, and it unfortunate. And that’s why — there was an earlier question about has the President said anything to people in his own party — they’re reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.
Watch indeed, because your fellow citizens are watching, scared, and they’ve got Homeland Security on speed dial.
Except that maybe they aren’t so much anymore. The difference between the Dartmouth story and the others is that apparently it wasn’t other alarmed Americans who alerted authorities this time. It was the feds own system that brought them a-knockin’. (By the way, they brought the guy his book, but didn’t leave it with him.) And while it’s comforting that more Americans are appalled by this story than are ringing the Fed’s phones over library books, it’s cold comfort.
It’s cold comfort because the reality that fails to appall too many more Americans is that in America there is now a “watch” list of supposedly dangerous books and that if you try to get your hands on one the feds may come knocking on your door. Couple that with the reality that the government — in the persons of the president and attorney general so far — now claims to power to arrest citizens, detain them without access to family or legal council, indefinitely, and without charges and it’s not hard to see how it can all add up. It’s simple math, but many Americans don’t bother to do it, taking comfort instead in the notion that it hasn’t happened yet and it can’t happen here because it hasn’t happened here. Nevermind that waiting until it does happen here to care about it probably means waiting until it’s too late to do much about it. At this point, they still think Guantanamo is a great joke.
Anyway, the feds don’t need ‘em anymore, precisely because the system now works pretty effectively. Plus, the mass of other Americans who couldn’t care less that some smart-assed college kid couldn’t check out his commie book more than balance out rest of us.
If I can return to the frog in the pot analogy again, it’s a mistake to think that things are cooling off because people are less hysterical than they were in the days after 9/11. Civil liberties have been on a slow boil since then, and people have acclimated. If anything, the temperature’s gone up a few degrees since then. It’s just that people have gotten used to it, and think the water is just fine. Most aren’t about to jump out of the pot because some college kid got questioned about a communist book, or because the president actually used the powers their rattled representatives granted as they quivered in the face of their constituents’ belligerent fear.
The temperature just went up again. That’s all.
