creeping peeping tomism

Elsewhere, Vice President Dick Cheney made his case for warrantless wiretaps today, telling reporters, "Everything else we've done for the past five years has been completely unwarranted." --Andy Borowitz, The Borowitz Report

Houston's chief of police Harold Hurtt, apparently feeling a bit overwhelmed these days by the influx of hurricane refugees (some of whom are criminals), has proposed placing surveillance cameras all over his fair city--in apartment complexes, in shopping malls, even in private homes. "I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother," Hurtt has commented, "but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?"

Mr. Hurtt is hardly alone in holding this opinion. After all, we have a president who is very much at ease with placing warrantless wiretaps on countless American citizens -- this ostensibly (note I say ostensibly) as a sort of fishing expedition launched in hopes of catching a terrorist or two. If you are not a bad guy, why worry that someone is eavesdropping on your telephone conversation? Why sweat it, even if this eavesdropping is in clear violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and therefore a felony? George Bush is the president, after all, and the president knows best.

One begins to fear that ours has become a nation of full-time busybodies --individuals who, instead of putting their shoulders to the wheel and their noses to the grindstone, are gleefully occupied applying their ears to the wall and their eyes to the keyhole. Our famed work ethic is being transformed, before our very eyes, into a watch ethic. Everyone watching everyone else, expecting -- yea, hoping -- to see the worst.

Consider the psychology of the surveillance enthusiast, he who would place a peephole camera in every kitchen, living room, and (especially) bedroom in America. This individual is not only voyeuristic but probably amnesiac as well. A moment's recollection would probably call up an instance wherein he had done something or said something that, presented to a spouse or a superior at work, would be the cause of acute embarrassment if not instant decapitation. (As Shakespeare put it, “Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?") Yet this man's conviction of his own moral rectitude -- and the utter depravity of the rest of mankind -- makes him blind to such a possibility. Either that or he is simply convinced that he's far too clever ever to fall into the trap he would so casually set for others.

Among the rights central to the American way of life is the right to privacy. And as the shrinking of our world makes true privacy ever more rare, we need to grow more vigilant in safeguarding the right. This is why, whenever one of the self-proclaimed Guardians of Public Safety threatens to violate our privacy, we need to go after him, using every resource of the law. If we are lax in this, these contemptible peeping toms may very quickly morph into malignant Big Brothers. Then it will be too late.

A good place to start? Impeach George W. Bush.