Tuesday, January 13, 2004
A Wondrous Land Whose Boundaries Are That of Imagination
It's been a rough 24 hours for those of us who think the war on terror is an excuse to turn the country into a Republican police state. Homeland Security announced that it will go ahead with a program that assigns threat levels to airline passengers even though the airlines have refused to comply and there's opposition in Congress, and the Supremes refused to make Ashcroft reveal the names of post 9/11 detainees. Not that the day was a total loss--the ACLU stepped up to defend Rush Limbaugh's right to keep his medical records secret, which is the kind of karmic payback Rod Serling used to put on the last page of Twilight Zone scripts. So why shouldn't we just let The Twilight Zone be our guide? Not that we're going to leave the world's concerns behind--quite the contrary. But we're going to explore more deeply the realm where the world's concerns meet the unexplained and unimaginable.
There's a Twilight Zone episode in which a man goes about his normal daily routine, unaware that his entire life is a movie, and that every other person in his life is an actor playing a role. In the Boston Globe, Mark Schone of Spin magazine suggests that the war in Iraq and the neocon drive to rule the world might be only a figment of Richard Perle's imagination.
What if everything you ever said or did was on tape somewhere, and there were armies of people digging into the tapes trying to find the most embarrassing, damaging bits to show to the world? (The preceding sentence should be imagined as being spoken by Rod Serling.) You'd be in the same boat as Howard Dean, whose 2000 criticism of the Iowa caucuses surfaced last week, and now Wesley Clark, who's on tape saying he believed in a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, although he's said the opposite in his book Waging Modern War and on the campaign trail.
(Return to Serling voice.) What if the country's watchdogs over public safety, health, and the environment, scientists and trained experts, were forbidden to warn citizens of threats to public health and safety until the White House had weighed the potential political impact? We'd say that was crazy, Rod. Except that's precisely what the White House is trying to gain the right to do. Currently, individual federal agencies issue health warnings, recalls, and the like. Under a new proposal, the White House Office of Management and Budget would decide what information to release and when. This is as profoundly crazy an idea as has yet surfaced from Bush gang, but it's in keeping with their disdain for peer review and the scientific method, which doesn't serve political ends as reliably as junk science and paid industry propaganda do.
Rod Serling once described the Twilight Zone as "the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition; it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge." Sounds like where we are, yeah.
Recommended reading: In the New York Press, Alan Cabal investigates what we don't know about 9/11--mostly in the context of the lawsuits filed by five widows of men killed in the attacks, but not entirely. In the last half of the article, Cabal asks some of the most basic questions of all--why did the buildings fall down to begin with?
It's been a rough 24 hours for those of us who think the war on terror is an excuse to turn the country into a Republican police state. Homeland Security announced that it will go ahead with a program that assigns threat levels to airline passengers even though the airlines have refused to comply and there's opposition in Congress, and the Supremes refused to make Ashcroft reveal the names of post 9/11 detainees. Not that the day was a total loss--the ACLU stepped up to defend Rush Limbaugh's right to keep his medical records secret, which is the kind of karmic payback Rod Serling used to put on the last page of Twilight Zone scripts. So why shouldn't we just let The Twilight Zone be our guide? Not that we're going to leave the world's concerns behind--quite the contrary. But we're going to explore more deeply the realm where the world's concerns meet the unexplained and unimaginable.
There's a Twilight Zone episode in which a man goes about his normal daily routine, unaware that his entire life is a movie, and that every other person in his life is an actor playing a role. In the Boston Globe, Mark Schone of Spin magazine suggests that the war in Iraq and the neocon drive to rule the world might be only a figment of Richard Perle's imagination.
What if everything you ever said or did was on tape somewhere, and there were armies of people digging into the tapes trying to find the most embarrassing, damaging bits to show to the world? (The preceding sentence should be imagined as being spoken by Rod Serling.) You'd be in the same boat as Howard Dean, whose 2000 criticism of the Iowa caucuses surfaced last week, and now Wesley Clark, who's on tape saying he believed in a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, although he's said the opposite in his book Waging Modern War and on the campaign trail.
(Return to Serling voice.) What if the country's watchdogs over public safety, health, and the environment, scientists and trained experts, were forbidden to warn citizens of threats to public health and safety until the White House had weighed the potential political impact? We'd say that was crazy, Rod. Except that's precisely what the White House is trying to gain the right to do. Currently, individual federal agencies issue health warnings, recalls, and the like. Under a new proposal, the White House Office of Management and Budget would decide what information to release and when. This is as profoundly crazy an idea as has yet surfaced from Bush gang, but it's in keeping with their disdain for peer review and the scientific method, which doesn't serve political ends as reliably as junk science and paid industry propaganda do.
Rod Serling once described the Twilight Zone as "the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition; it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge." Sounds like where we are, yeah.
Recommended reading: In the New York Press, Alan Cabal investigates what we don't know about 9/11--mostly in the context of the lawsuits filed by five widows of men killed in the attacks, but not entirely. In the last half of the article, Cabal asks some of the most basic questions of all--why did the buildings fall down to begin with?
