2014
Will Bring More Social Collapse — Paul Craig Roberts
Paul
Craig Roberts
2014
is upon us. For a person who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1961, a year in
which the class ring showed the same date right side up or upside down, the
21st century was a science fiction concept associated with Stanley Kubrick’s
1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” To us George Orwell’s 1984 seemed so far in
the future we would never get there. Now it is 30 years in the past.
Did
we get there in Orwell’s sense? In terms of surveillance technology, we are far
beyond Orwell’s imagination. In terms of the unaccountability of government, we
exceptional and indispensable people now live a 1984 existence. In his
alternative to the Queen’s Christmas speech, Edward Snowden made the point that
a person born in the 21st century will never experience privacy. For new
generations the word privacy will refer to something mythical, like a unicorn.
Many
Americans might never notice or care. I remember when telephone calls were
considered to be private. In the 1940s and 1950s the telephone company could
not always provide private lines. There were “party lines” in which two or more
customers shared the same telephone line. It was considered extremely rude and
inappropriate to listen in on someone’s calls and to monopolize the line with
long duration conversations.
The
privacy of telephone conversations was also epitomized by telephone booths,
which stood on street corners, in a variety of public places, and in “filling
stations” where an attendant would pump gasoline into your car’s fuel tank,
check the water in the radiator, the oil in the engine, the air in the tires,
and clean the windshield. A dollar’s worth would purchase 3 gallons, and $5
would fill the tank.
Even
in the 1980s and for part of the 1990s there were lines of telephones on
airport waiting room walls, each separated from the other by sound absorbing
panels. Whether the panels absorbed the sounds of the conversation or not, they
conveyed the idea that calls were private.
The
notion that telephone calls are private left Americans’ consciousness prior to
the NSA listening in. If memory serves, it was sometime in the 1990s when I
entered the men’s room of an airport and observed a row of men speaking on
their cell phones in the midst of the tinkling sound of urine hitting water and
noises of flushing toilets. The thought hit hard that privacy had lost its
value.
I
remember when I arrived at Merton College, Oxford, for the first term of 1964.
I was advised never to telephone anyone whom I had not met, as it would be an
affront to invade the privacy of a person to whom I was unknown. The telephone
was reserved for friends and acquaintances, a civility that contrasts with
American telemarketing.
The
efficiency of the Royal Mail service protected the privacy of the telephone.
What one did in those days in England was to write a letter requesting a
meeting or an appointment. It was possible to send a letter via the Royal Mail
to London in the morning and to receive a reply in the afternoon. Previously it
had been possible to send a letter in the morning and to receive a morning
reply, and to send another in the afternoon and receive an afternoon reply.
When
one flies today, unless one stops up one’s ears with something, one hears one’s
seat mate’s conversations prior to takeoff and immediately upon landing.
Literally, everyone is talking nonstop. One wonders how the economy functioned
at such a high level of incomes and success prior to cell phones. I can
remember being able to travel both domestically and internationally on
important business without having to telephone anyone. What has happened to
America that no one can any longer go anywhere without constant talking?
If
you sit at an airport gate awaiting a flight, you might think you are listening
to a porn film. The overhead visuals are usually Fox “News” going on about the
need for a new war, but the cell phone audio might be young women describing
their latest sexual affair.
Americans,
or many of them, are such exhibitionists that they do not mind being spied upon
or recorded. It gives them importance. According to Wikipedia, Paris Hilton, a
multimillionaire heiress, posted her sexual escapades online, and Facebook had
to block users from posting nude photos of themselves. Sometime between my time
and now people ceased to read 1984. They have no conception that a loss of
privacy is a loss of self. They don’t understand that a loss of privacy means
that they can be intimidated, blackmailed, framed, and viewed in the buff.
Little wonder they submitted to porno-scanners.
The
loss of privacy is a serious matter. The privacy of the family used to be
paramount. Today it is routinely invaded by neighbors, police, Child Protective
Services (sic), school administrators, and just about anyone else.
Consider
this: A mother of six and nine year old kids sat in a lawn chair next to her
house watching her kids ride scooters in the driveway and cul-de-sac on which
they live.
Normally,
this would be an idyllic picture. But not in America. A neighbor, who
apparently did not see the watching mother, called the police to report that
two young children were outside playing without adult supervision. Note that
the next door neighbor, a woman, did not bother to go next door to speak with
the mother of the children and express her concern that they children were not
being monitored while they played. The neighbor called the police.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/mom-sues-polices-she-arrested-letting-her-kids-134628018.html
“We’re
here for you,” the cops told the mother, who was carried off in handcuffs and
spent the next 18 hours in a cell in prison clothes.
The
news report doesn’t say what happened to the children, whether the father
appeared and insisted on custody of his offspring or whether the cops turned
the kids over to Child Protective Services.
This
shows you what Americans are really like. Neither the neighbor nor the police
had a lick of sense. The only idea that they had was to punish someone. This is
why America has the highest incarceration rate and the highest total number of
prison inmates in the entire world. Washington can go on and on about
“authoritarian” regimes in Russia and China, but both countries have far lower
prison populations than “freedom and democracy” America.
I
was unaware that laws now exist requiring the supervision of children at play.
Children vary in their need for supervision. In my day supervision was up to
the mother’s judgment. Older children were often tasked with supervising the
younger. It was one way that children were taught responsibility and developed
their own judgment.
When
I was five years old, I walked to the neighborhood school by myself. Today my
mother would be arrested for child endangerment.
In
America punishment falls more heavily on the innocent, the young, and the poor
than it does on the banksters who are living on the Federal Reserve’s subsidy
known as Quantitative Easing and who have escaped criminal liability for the
fraudulent financial instruments that they sold to the world. Single mothers,
depressed by the lack of commitment of the fathers of their children, are
locked away for using drugs to block out their depression. Their children are
seized by a Gestapo institution, Child Protective Services, and end up in foster
care where many are abused.
According
to numerous press reports, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 year-old children who play
cowboys and indians or cops and robbers during recess and raise a pointed
finger while saying “bang-bang” are arrested and carried off to jail in
handcuffs as threats to their classmates. In my day every male child and the
females who were “Tom boys” would have been taken to jail. Playground fights
were normal, but no police were ever called. Handcuffing a child would not have
been tolerated.
From
the earliest age, boys were taught never to hit a girl. In those days there
were no reports of police beating up teenage girls and women or body slamming
the elderly. To comprehend the degeneration of the American police into
psychopaths and sociopaths, go online and observe the video of Lee Oswald in
police custody in 1963. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FDDuRSgzFk Oswald was
believed to have assassinated President John F. Kennedy and murdered a Dallas
police officer only a few hours previously to the film. Yet he had not been
beaten, his nose wasn’t broken, and his lips were not a bloody mess. Now go
online and pick from the vast number of police brutality videos from our
present time and observe the swollen and bleeding faces of teenage girls accused
of sassing overbearing police officers.
In America today
people with power are no longer accountable. This means citizens have become
subjects, an indication of social collapse.
