Come Walk with Me in the Sun all Ye Weary Jesters
During the Nixon years I had to go through an extensive FBI background check for a job at Federal Reserve Bank with everything you can imagine behind its huge gates, including guards with the biggest weapons I'd ever seen, and a look on their face that convinced me they were accustomed to shooting people, presumably in wartime. The FBI asked the doctor who delivered me and my elementary school teachers if they remembered me and if I was crazy or crooked. Guess I wasn’t too crazy or crooked because I got the job. A year or so later I returned to my chosen profession of journalism and my phone was tapped off and on all the way through Bush, Sr. It ticked me off at first but I also happen to come from a long line of world class practical jokers, something the NSA will probably look for in my DNA sample. During the Reagan years the mail surveillance got so obvious that I began to send myself fake letters from non-existent friends and relatives. It was wonderful exercise in creativity. (I still wonder sometimes why the letter containing the recipe for Mule Headcheese never arrived. {Sic.}) During the Bush, Sr., years in particular the phone taps must have been carried out by the NSA Junior College. Or it may have been a couple of acid-dropping engineering students I used to know who were actually approached by the NSA with job offers.
The data collecting during the period was so clumsy the military was even putting consumer surveys in the Sunday newspaper inserts. You’ve seen the standard, legitimate ones. In exchange for some personal information a marketing company will send back coupons and product samples. The return address in this case was a military base in the Upper Midwest with a long and curious history, and the survey was suspiciously long and personal. So were the next ones and next ones. Naturally I used them to create a whole new person. That Pro-Choice Korean War veteran with the strange nickname was in their system for two or three years until, I think, they figured out it had become a regional practical joke involving hundreds or even thousands of people.
Remember the time Dubya ordered library surveillance in case a terrorist checked out a fishy book? People around town were lined up to check out suspicious books and keep them just long to make it appear they actually read them. But despite having one of the nation’s most liberal libraries I personally never found any books that looked terrorist-enough to bother checking out. I dunno, maybe Dubya was worried about those bound collections of Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy.” Incredibly, at that time, paramilitary magazines with covers advertising recipes for the so-called “Kitchen Nuke” and all sorts of mayhem were on the shelves of just about every newsstand at the dadgum malls. Around the time Dubya gave John Poindexter a job, the postman told me that a lot of people in my neighborhood began subscribing to similar paramilitary catalogs. Knowing some of these people, they were just trying to clutter-up the surveillance system. (By the way, loved the aerial photo of Poindexter’s home that someone posted online.)
Speaking of the postman, if anyone is worried about emails being harvested by the NSA then use the good ol’ USPS sometimes. Don’t you miss getting handwritten letters inside handwritten envelopes? You can send your Grandmother a pressed wildflower, a printed-out photo or recipe. I don’t mean to helicopter but, please, no Mule Headcheese and Kitchen Nukes recipes. Oh, and don’t forget our lonely, forgotten landline phones. We sound so much more sincere when calling Mom and Dad for a favor.
May I also suggest Googling a few times a day using absurd search terms? Google can be your special friend when, for example, you want to bomb Craig James with rumors about dead prostitutes when he was playing football at SMU.
In the end, all of this domestic spy talk is bound to stir the pot with creativity. You all have better ideas than me, and personal experience has taught me that they can spread like wildfires. Remember that one of the most popular postcards is a pix of average Americans giving the finger to the White House, Supreme Court and Capitol Building. What better way to tell Uncle Sam you love him than by grinning real big while reminding him of just how much you enjoy your rights? My wife photographed me giving the one-finger salute back during the Bush, Sr., regime and, well, that could be the reason the NSA Junior College tapped my phone for a while.
Despite all of the nonsense I have pulled over the decades, I still travel freely to other countries and customs agents everywhere never fail to give me a welcoming grin. Maybe they’ve seen my file and the name of that Pro-Life Korean War veteran.
Most important of all, President Obama has done something that presidents before him have failed to do: Start up a national conversation about national security. It was noteworthy that President Obama said our democracy is “mature” enough to have this discussion. I look forward to this conversation. I am going to write my congressmen and senators and start up a conversation with them too.
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