The Tyranny of Crisis

The Tyranny of Crisis

There’s an old joke that’s been around forever that goes something like this: “Question: How do you approach a sleeping lion? Answer: Very slowly.” This are several versions of this old chestnut, and it’s been adapted to a host of different situations. Here’s one permutation: “Question: How do you take away people’s civil liberties? Answer: Very slowly.”

The Bush administration has taken this wise advice to heart. Case in point: their recent victory in the US Court of Appeals, 4th District. The judges there agreed with the government’s assertion that it is allowed to imprison American citizens indefinitely, without recourse to legal council and scant contact with the outside world, as long as those citizens are judged to be “illegal combatants”. How do we know if someone’s an illegal combatant? If the administration says he is.

Now this is several steps short of abolishing the right to a fair and speedy trial, but it’s a start. Bush and his cadre of CEO advisers seem to have reconciled themselves to the slow road in their quest to separate us from our civil rights, and it’s paying dividends. Yesterday’s decision, other court victories along the same lines, the justice department’s newly lax preconditions for domestic spying, the FBI’s PATRIOT-act-powered ability to secretly subpeona our reading records from public libraries, and many other recent developments have stayed largely under the public’s radar. And when people do notice, they tend not to care. After all, they’re not enemy combatants, and so need not fear the specter of indefinite detention. They have nothing to hide, and so don’t have to worry about the government snooping into their private affairs.

Besides, we’re at war.

And that’s the big one. There’s nothing quite like a national crisis to empower an executive branch bent on overstepping its bounds. Everyone was horrified and sickened by what happened on September 11, and acknowledge it to be a depraved and — dare I say it — evil act. But there are elements in our government who nevertheless see it as an opportunity, the carte blanche they’ve been waiting for to pursue an unpopular and jingoistic agenda under the guise of patriotism and concern for national security. The Rumsfelds and the Cheneys and the Wolfowitz’s are holdovers from the cold war, and they brought that paranoid, secretive mentality with them into the White House and into our lives.

The policies they’re pursuing now rely on a public and a press that is either ignorant of or insensible to the danger they pose. They tell us as little as possible and distract us from the issue at hand with chest-thumping appeals to our patriotism and our paranoia. They set up systems and pass laws that make it easier for them to peel away the thinning layers of our privacy. And all the while they chip away at our civil rights, slowly, piece by piece, like a prisoner digging a tunnel out of his cell with just an awl and a spoon. Except they’re not digging their way out of jail, they’re digging their way in. And they certainly won’t be using the tunnels they’ve made.

We will.