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Curious about how much safer I'd feel once President Bush got his new Department of Homeland Security, I called my favorite inside source: Ananias Ziegler, media relations director for the Committee That Really Runs America.
After I explained my mission, he was relieved. I was
afraid you were calling about the corporate accounting
scandals and the bear market on Wall Street,
he said,
and we haven't really prepared a statement on
that.
Why was it important to make a statement, I wondered. After all, most people don't have any trouble figuring out what happened -- there were people who could make big money by lying, and so they lied. They touted stocks that they knew were bad, or they cooked their books so the stock price would rise.
Our problem is that we need to restore confidence in
the markets,
Ziegler said, so that Americans will
have the faith to continue to invest in enterprises they
know nothing about, thereby insuring that the supporters of
the Committee have sufficient capital to continue our
important work.
Besides, Ziegler continued, if stock prices had
continued to rise the way they had during the lax moral
climate of the Clinton-Gore years,
then the American
way of life would have been threatened.
But I had thought a bull market was good for us, judging by what I read now about people who had planned to retire but now can't, etc.
If lots of people retired, we'd lose some of our most
productive workers,
Ziegler explained. And what do
people do with their time when they retire? Some of them
might start attending meetings and participating in public
life and paying attention to how their senators and
representatives vote, that sort of thing.
They might start asking why, if America has the best
health-care system in the world, no other country's
politicians ever campaign on providing an American-style
health-care system. The last thing we need is a bunch of
informed people with time on their hands. Better to keep
them toiling and commuting just to pay the bills.
I could see where there might be problems with too much citizen participation, but before I could respond, Ziegler continued.
Another problem with the boom was that we had all
these emerging zillionaires with nose rings and tattoos and
purple hair. They might run for office, or support
candidates who had sensible views about the expensive and
unwinnable War on Drugs, or otherwise threaten the
Committee and its work. Even if a lot of innocent people
suffered in the market meltdown, we had to act to protect
the American way as we know it.
So the Committee engineered the stock market collapse?
I wouldn't go that far,
Ziegler cautioned.
Let's just say that it was not an unanticipated
development, and leave it that. Now, what did you want to
know about Homeland Security?
Will it prevent future terrorist attacks?
All Americans have already been warned that future
attacks are inevitable, that it's a matter of when, not
if,
Ziegler intoned.
So if it won't prevent future attacks, what good is it?, I wondered.
For one thing, people will get to spend a lot more
time standing in line at airports where their every word is
monitored and even their shoes get inspected,
Ziegler
explained, and that should help create a more docile
population that will be easier to govern. And surely that
represents an improvement in security, does it not?
Such logic was hard to argue with, so I moved on.
How does this new Operation TIPS work? Are their
rewards for ratting off your neighbors if you see them
interfering with our infrastructure, say by bootlegging a
cable TV connection?
It is my understanding that the cable companies offer
their own rewards,
Ziegler said. And no, there
won't be cash rewards. The idea is to have millions more
people out there reporting suspicious activities.
You mean like those FBI agents in Minneapolis and Phoenix who noticed a pattern in flight-school registrations a year ago? That sure made a difference, didn't it?
Quit being sarcastic, Quillen. You wouldn't want to
get arrested as an enemy combatant and get held
incommunicado, would you?
Of course not, so I got back to the Department of Homeland Security. The biggest threat to our sense of security in this homeland has been the wildfire starting on federal lands. Certainly the new department would help there, right?
But some of those fires were allegedly started by
government employees,
Ziegler pointed out. So why
would adding more of them necessarily help you?
He had a point. But then something occurred to me. Why is it that the same Republicans who criticize inefficient government bureaucracies all the time are now trying to inflict a new one on us?
It all depends on who controls the bureaucracy.
Ziegler laughed, and said he had to take another call.
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