Uncle Frank's
Diary
Number Eight
 Naked at
Noon: Uncle Frank Comes Back Mad
Uncle Frank went away, and he came back mad. He
is, as one of my high school pals put it from time to time,
seriously P.O.’d.
Uncle Frank, my accidental alter ego, surfaced
one day during my long, otherwise solitary commute. He appropriated
my middle name, and my status as an uncle to a scad of nieces and
nephews.
He’s a testy, demanding sort. When I want to
listen to an oldies station, or turn off the radio and roll down the
windows to enjoy a pleasant spring morning on the back roads, Uncle
Frank insists on turning on the NPR news. Loud.
And commenting on it, often in language that
would embarrass your average Rap artist. This morning he made me
listen to Juan Williams interviewing some White House legal
functionary. First he chewed out Williams, then he went after the
White House guy. I saw that he was in a very bad mood.
“Uncle Frank,” I said, “Don’t you think you
should count to ten and think happy thoughts, and maybe meditate for
a few minutes before you say anything further uncouth? I mean, look
on the bright side of life, and all that? What would your mother say
if she heard you talking that way?”
“My mother’s dead,” said Uncle Frank. “And if
she weren’t, this business with the FBI and the CIA and for all I
know the Girl Scouts and those geniuses in the B**h Gang ignoring
terrorist intelligence from their field agents would kill her.”
All right, all right: I’m letting Uncle Frank
go, because I can see that he wants to rant.
Uncle Frank Spews
What is this krock o’ krap, he wants to know,
with Attorney General Ashcroft, the B**h administration, and the May
30 unleashing of the FBI? We’re going back to the golden days of
COINTELPRO’s wanton spying on law-abiding American citizens,
citizens who happened to support civil rights, or who opposed the
war in Vietnam, or who simply got on J. Edgar Hoover’s bad side.
What it is, aside from the thrashing of a gang
of sanctimonious, self-congratulating screw-ups caught with their
pants around their ankles in the middle of a fire alarm, is yet
another step toward the full realization of the world Orwell warned
us about in 1984.
In retrospect, one’s admiration for the good
taste and intelligence of the voters of Missouri in electing in
November 2000 a dead man to the United States Senate instead of John
Ashcroft should be going off the charts. Ashcroft, whose idea of
patriotism consists of composing and singing bombastic, smarmy songs
about America being too young to die, and whose idea of protecting
the nation from evil entails draping nude statues in the District of
Columbia, responds to the criminally stupid failure of his regime’s
upper administrative functionaries (including himself) by turning
loose FBI agents in the street to engage in the kinds of
totalitarian domestic surveillance banned in the U.S. since the days
of Gerald Ford.
You remember Ford, right? The former U.S.
representative who let the despicable crook Richard Nixon off the
hook? Who once advocated the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice
William O. Douglas because the literary/art mag Evergreen Review
(which occasionally ran features with photos of lightly clad women)
published an essay by Douglas?
During one of Ford’s fugue phases, his
administration clamped down on the kinds of abusive investigations
the FBI pursued under J. Edgar Hoover (perhaps the Bureau’s greatest
director ever to wear a dress). Now, with most sentient
Americans—aside from the administration mouthpieces who pretend to
give the “news” on the Fox network—searching for their dramamine as
they reel in nauseated astonishment at revelations of the ineffable
ineptitude of the nation’s “intelligence” apparatus in response to
warnings about last September’s terrorist attacks, AG Ashcroft kicks
out the jams blocking everyday agents’ access to the stuff they need
to know to Keep Us Safe.
Fire Their Asses, Says Uncle Frank
Uh-huh. Having read the accounts that have been
everywhere, even in the mainstream “liberal” media, showing how
thoroughly the boss-types in D.C. bungled the intelligence passed on
to them by competent, hardworking, thoughtful agents in the field,
you might think that a responsive commander in chief would call AG
Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller into the Oval Office and fire
their sorry asses.
“Uncle Frank, Uncle Frank,” I pleaded when I
read this. “That’s no way to talk. People will think you’re
indelicate. They’ll mistake you for someone indifferent to the
refined tastes of sensitive librarians and impressionable youth.
Your reputation as a man of discretion and gentility will suffer.”
“Shove it,” he said, and went on.
After canning these creeps, B**h should address
the public on television, apologize in his most abject manner for
the hideous failures of his chiefs, and promise that he will install
at high management levels officials at least as conscientious and
capable as the men and women working the field.
Are you kidding? That ain’t the way the federal
bureaucracy works.
What we get instead, in the Ashcroft, Mueller,
and general B**h administration heinie covering, is this retro move
to reinstate the unaccountable, unchecked FBI powers that disgraced
the Bureau under The Hoove and that compromised the basic civil
rights of every law-abiding citizen in the country.
In a blistering essay in the June 3 New York
Times, conservative columnist William Safire accuses Ashcroft
and Mueller of fabricating alibis, “posterior covering” (the
Times is a tad timorous in the language department), and, in
general, of perpetrating a “fraud” on the public in the
disemboweling of longstanding provisions against federal spying on
American citizens.
Mere ass covering is the most benign
interpretation of our leaders’ behavior. Far more sinister is their
using the terrorist threat as a convenient excuse to shape the
government according to their own fascist preferences for the long
haul. AG Ashcroft reportedly read Arizona agent Ken Williams’s
warning memo about Osama bin Laden preparing functionaries for
terrorist operations in American flight schools only a few days
after 9/11. Ashcroft knew, and knows, that conventional
surveillance achieved its objectives before 9/11. Ken
Williams didn’t need superpowers: He relied on hard work and his own
smarts.
The difference now, surveillance fans, is that
the means of intelligence gathering have advanced far beyond the
primitive techniques available to J. Edgar’s domestic snoops.
Electronic measures, notably computer monitoring, make the methods
current during the FBI’s hounding of Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Ernest Hemingway (poor old Ernie: Everyone thought he was nuts when
he said the FBI was after him—but he was right) positively quaint.
The Ashcroftian edict of 3/30/02 makes these
tools even more readily available, and threatens Americans’
religious, political, and intellectual freedom. It will lead to the
invasion by surveillance of churches, libraries, associations,
businesses and online behavior without probable cause, without basis
for suspicion, and without evidence of criminal activity on the
parts of those being monitored.
Roasting Civil Liberties
It’s not as though the infamous USA/Patriot Act
wasn’t sufficient to put personal privacy on the grill. Almost all
of the 50 states have laws on the books making it illegal for
libraries to squeal to legal authorities on borrowers’ reading
habits without a court order. Doesn’t matter. The USA/Patriot Act
gives the FBI and local law enforcement access to citizens’ library
records—including Internet use. Oh, you don’t use libraries? You buy
all your books from Amazon? My, aren’t you the secure one. The FBI
would never, ever think of using its new powers to requisition the
data in your Amazon account, would it?
As so many say so earnestly, if you have
nothing to hide, you have no problem. If you feel otherwise, you
probably don’t love America. Otherwise, you wouldn’t mind the
authorities stripping you naked at noon in front of the Lincoln
Memorial, just as a little random check to make sure you haven’t
secreted some plastic explosives in your nether bits.
But hey, 9/11 changed everything, didn’t it?
Just say the Pledge of Allegiance, sit down, and shut up. And don’t
believe for a moment that anything you think, do, or say is not the
proper business of Mueller and Ashcroft.
Uncle Frank hates these bastards.
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P.O. Box 1580