Suspicion breeds confidence

That's a slogan from Terry Gilliam's film “Brazil”, a comic take on Orwell's “1984” but with the same gruesome ending (they own his mind). Where to begin, with Orwell of course and what he saw coming before the NSA, drones, listening devices and wiretaps. What he saw was the emerging of the managerial elite bred in WWII—the unelected, unaccountable “experts” who are now in charge of our government. The head of the NSA, the arrogant James Clapper, was the kind of man Orwell feared most. Dave Eggers new novel, “The Circle”has a company credo “All that happens must be known”, which is Big Brother in the guise of Google and Facebook. I'm not on Facebok or Twitter, but my privacy has been hijacked just the same. Edward Snowden should get a medal (he won't) for revealing that the NSA is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world. The public blindness to the harm of our out-of-control technology is baffling. The NSA is there to petrify the population into a permanent state of war, or they say in Newspeak “War is peace”. The Pentagon has an annual budget of $650 billion while Congress cuts food stamps and guide dogs for the blind. American global ambition has reached a tipping point and it is backfiring. This security psychosis is no longer a stable basis for our society. On a more serious note, there is a controversy about renaming the Washington Redskins football team (not politically correct it seems). I have a wonderful, modern, new name for the team the “Washington Stealers”! Too subtle? Too close to the Pittsburgh Steelers? They ran a focus group of 500 million and it was suitable.