seek to be “secured” in the interests of constraining the forces on the other side of the fence. Think of those decapitated heads in Mexico and hope the cartels don’t decide to learn incompetent transit terror from the jihad— because, inevitably, Big Government will respond with big, bloated, manpower-intensive, ever more intrusive bureaucratic overreach. A citizenry that shrugged when government bureaucrats took to themselves the power to poke around with no probable cause in the nooks and crannies of its genitalia will discover that such extraordinary powers will not remain penned up in Terminal Three, but will spread—to bus stations, and key Interstate ramps, and eventually random Main Streets. As the Shoe Bomber led to the shoeless shuffle and the Panty Bomber led to the federally mandated scrotal grope, so the first Suppository Bomber will lead to complimentary federal prostate exams from LAX to JFK.
Then factor in the end of the dollar as global currency. Oil heads up past five, six, seven bucks a gallon, and everything else follows. That inflation-proofed schoolmarm in Yonkers isn’t going to want to stay at Number 27 when everybody else in the street is poor and hates her. Nobody travels very much anymore—who can afford it?— but the lines are as long as ever: the Security State barely bothers to pretend it’s for anything other than domestic crowd control. As the armed forces shrink with the dollar, hundreds of thousands of American troops are demobbed and come home to find that, whether or not it’s over over there, it’s certainly over over here. A statist America won’t be a large Sweden—unimportant but prosperous—but something closer to the Third World. As a dead-end economy drives its surplus manpower deeper into poverty, addiction, and crime, parts of the country will take on post-Soviet Russian characteristics, with a gangster class manipulating social disintegration for its own ends. What’s left will be Latin America, corrupt and chaotic, broke and brutish—for all but a privileged few.
What to do? Where to go? In 1785, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham began working on his famous “Panopticon”—a radial prison in which a central “inspector” could see all the prisoners, but they could never see him. In the computer age, we now have not merely panopticon buildings, but panopticon societies, like modern London, with its wall-to-wall CCTV cameras. Soon perhaps, excepting a few redoubts such as Waziristan and the livelier precincts of the Horn of Africa, we will have a panopticon planet.
Yet high-tech statism still needs an overarching narrative. The “security state” is a tough sell: if you tell people the government is compiling data on them for national security purposes, the left instinctively recoils. But, if you explain that you’re doing it to save the planet by monitoring carbon footprints and emissions compliance and mandatory recycling, starry-eyed coeds across the land will twitter their approval, and the middle-class masochists of the developed world will whimper in orgasmic ecstasy as you tighten the screws, pausing only to demand that you do it to them harder and faster. Consider a recent British plan for each citizen to be given an official travel allowance.94 If you take one flight a year, you’ll pay just the standard amount of tax on the journey. But, if you travel more frequently, if you take a second or third flight, you’ll be subject to additional levies—all in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bear documentaries and his county-sized carbon footprint. The Soviets restricted freedom of movement through the bureaucratic apparatus of “exit visas.” The British favor the bureaucratic apparatus of exit taxes: the movement’s still free; it’s just that there’ll be a government processing fee of ?412.95. And, in a revealing glimpse of the universal belief in enviro-statism, this proposal came not from the Labour Party but from the allegedly Conservative Party. At their Monday night poker game in hell, I’ll bet Stalin, Hitler, and Mao are kicking themselves: “‘It’s about leaving a better planet to our children?’ Why didn’t I think of that?”
You remember how President Bush used to talk about illegal immigration—about how we needed to help all those undocumented people “living in the shadows”? Doesn’t that sound kinda nice—and restful? Living in the shadows, no government agencies harassing you for taxes and numbers and paperwork. By comparison, those of us in the blazing klieg lights of the nanny state are shadowed everywhere we go: government numbers for this, government cards for that, a life of barcodes and retinal scans, the TSA Obergropinfuhrers at the airport…. You’d almost think that, compared to the 15 or 30 or however many million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community are out there, the 300 or so million in the overdocumented segment of the population get a lousy deal.
Incidentally, over half the illegal population supposedly came to America after September 11, 2001.95 That’s to say, they broke into a country on Code Orange alert. Odd that. Even under the panoptic surveillance of the “security state,” certain identity groups seem to be indulged by Big Government. In California one notices that the same regulatory leviathan that thinks nothing of sending in the heavies if a hardware store is offering complimentary coffee to its customers seems somewhat shyer of enforcing its bazillions of building code/food prep/environmental/health and safety rules against ad hoc mobile kitchens serving piping hot Mexican dishes up and down the highway. Park your van, get out the plastic chairs, pull out a tarp for a bit of shade, and start selling. All those county kitchen inspectors and food-prep permit issuers? Not a problem. Victor Davis Hanson, a tire-less bicycler round the Golden State’s Central Valley, notices the ever proliferating slicks of fat and lard emptied out on the road by such mobile restaurants, as do the crows and squirrels who love lapping them up.96 In the Panopticon State, the Shadowlands are thriving: a state that presumes to tax and license Joe Schmoe for using the table in the corner of his basement as a home office apparently doesn’t spot the half-dozen additional dwellings that sprout in Jose Schmoe’s yard out on the edge of town. Do-it-yourself wiring stretches from bungalow to lean-to trailer to RV to rusting pick-up on bricks, as five, six, eight, twelve different housing units pitch up on one lot. The more Undocumented America secedes from the hyper-regulatory state, the more frenziedly Big Nanny documents you and yours.
This multicultural squeamishness is most instructive. Illegal immigrants are providing a model for survival in an impoverished statist America, and on the whole the state is happy to let them do so. In Undocumented America, the buildings have no building codes, the sales have no sales tax, your identity card gives no clue as to your real identity. In the years ahead, for many poor Overdocumented-Americans, living in the Shadowlands will offer if not the prospect of escape then at least temporary relief. As America loses its technological edge and the present Chinese cyber-probing gets disseminated to the Wikileaks types, the blips on the computer screen representing your checking and savings accounts will become more vulnerable. After yet another brutal attack, your local branch never reconnects to head office; it brings up from the vault the old First National Bank of Deadsville shingle and starts issuing fewer cards and more checkbooks. And then fewer checkbooks and more cash. In small bills.
The planet is dividing into two extremes: an advanced world—Europe, North America, Australia—in which privacy is vanishing and the state will soon be able to monitor you every second of the day; and a reprimitivizing world—Somalia, the Pakistani tribal lands—where no one has a clue what’s going on. Undocumented America is giving us a lesson in how Waziristan and CCTV London can inhabit the same real estate, like overlapping area codes. There will be many takers for that in the years ahead. As Documented America fails, poor whites, poor blacks, and many others will find it easier to assimilate with Undocumented America, and retreat into the shadows.
It will not merely be states and sub-state jurisdictions that secede, but individuals, too.
COUGAR TOWN
In 2003, Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev got together for an all-star recording of Prokofiev’s beloved children’s classic,
But fortunately, Peter gets hold of a rope and uses it as a noose with which to muzzle the wolf and take him into captivity.
In the Clinton version, you won’t be surprised to hear, Peter realizes the error of his lupophobia and releases the creature back into the wild. The wolf howls a friendly goodbye. Which is jolly sporting of him when you consider that it’s all our fault in the first place. “Forgetting his triumph, Peter thought instead of fallen trees, parched meadows, choked streams, and of each and every wolf struggling for survival,” narrates our Bill, addressing the root causes and feeling the wolf’s pain. “The time has come to leave wolves in peace.”
How about the duck? Is she left in peace? Or in pieces?
Do you recall the weeks before September 11, 2001? On the Eastern Seaboard, it was the summer of shark
