We Are the Enemy
By: The Ümlaut
Tags: Politics, Hillary Clinton

by Martin Gurri

Consider the view from the highest positions in the world’s greatest democracy. If you are a cabinet-level appointee or a civil service supergrade, you imagine yourself to be a data-driven manager, almost a scientist, playing vast impersonal forces like a keyboard in the service of the public. Then you gaze out the window of your office in the top floor of an ornate Federal edifice, and you feel surrounded by hordes of volatile barbarians — Muslim extremists, Occupiers, Tea Partiers, militiamen, fundamentalists of the biblical or ecological kind, plus angry lunatics innocent of any coherent ideals. Those are the public, and you are aware, dimly, that they blame you for every failing of their non-data-driven lives.

What’s a wise Platonic guardian to do?

The answer is obvious to anyone who has attempted to enter a Federal building or catch a flight at an airport. We, the public, have been declared the enemy.

I have lived and worked near Washington most of my life. It used to be a welcoming city — at least, once you got past the inscrutably rational street design imposed by Pierre L’Enfant. I can remember when you could saunter into the C Street entrance of the State Department building straight through to the inner courtyard, no questions asked. I’m not saying you could catch the elevator to the seventh floor and shake hands with the Secretary of State — but I’m not saying you couldn’t, either.

Today State Department looks like it has been taken over by a hostile force — and my point is that it has. C Street has been closed to traffic by concrete barriers so removed from any sense of design as to make L’Enfant groan in his grave. Guards with guns patrol the perimeter of the building, eyeing nervous tourists closely, in case they go rogue. A hundred feet from the entrance, you will be stopped and asked to explain yourself. Inside, you must endure yet another ordeal before being allowed into the inner sanctum — more armed guards, sullen gatekeepers, metal-detecting devices, X-ray machines, anxious people herded into slow-moving queues.

Most of us have endured similar rites of passage. It’s what transpires in American airports. Recently I stood in a long, slow-moving queue at Dulles Airport, while the public address calmly announced a set of demands so eccentric and arbitrary they reminded me of the revolutionist in Woody Allen’s Bananas: “Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.” I feel reasonably certain that every interaction with TSA would have come under the “mandatory duel” etiquette of our sturdy ancestors. The most fight I have shown, alas, has been to remark to a particularly enthusiastic body searcher, “I think we have to get married now.” He was not amused.

Government grandees insist they have no quarrel with the public, only with potential terrorists. For the rest of us that is a distinction without a difference. There are many ways to fight terror: assuming every member of the public is a terrorist until proven innocent is only one of them. Someone could try closely coordinated police and intelligence work, for example — that would at least get points for originality.

Or they could ask for the help of those who dwell on the far side of their office windows. I am not the first to note that, on 9/11, while staffers ran screaming from the White House and the government stood helpless and blind, the only successful interception of a terror attack was conducted by ordinary people trapped inside United Airlines Flight 93.

It won’t happen. Terrorism has been too good for Federal executives, and they have no incentive to share. It’s proved an absolute boon to the Federal limo fleet, which now allows over 400 public servants to transcend our world-famous rush hour. Washington is a city where the movers and shakers never just get into their cars: instead, they “board the motorcade,” and so maintain the proper degree of separation even while shuttling between their barricaded offices. It’s our version of the red carpet, only in reverse — the better shielded you are from cameras and public, the more important you are considered to be. No doubt watching burly Washington cops or even burlier Secret Service types bark orders at the snarled masses of traffic adds to the experience a sense that all is right with the world.

I believe the people who run the government are sincerely afraid of us, however. It isn’t a self-interested dodge. For evidence I would point to the amazing proliferation of SWAT teams funded by Federal agencies. I mean, the Fish and Wildlife Service keeps its own SWAT team. So does NASA. Even the Department of Education has a SWAT team, setting up all kinds of alternative endings to Ferris Buehler’s next day off. There’s only one plausible explanation for these investments. The recurring nightmare of agency heads is that, like slow but persistent zombies, we will one day catch them out in the open, away from their limos and Jersey barriers. They want lethal force to rescue them before they become infected and turn into one of us.

Representative democracy requires industrial quantities of trust, but it’s easy to lose that trusting feeling when being told to take off your belt and shoes so you can be groped for self-detonating devices. In a spirit of good citizenship, therefore, I have developed a plan that should restore the bond of trust between rulers and ruled in America.

I propose that we, the public, find the nearest person in authority and surrender. We should turn ourselves in, then request to be sent to Guantanamo Bay. I can reassure everyone that we’ll be treated humanely, and allowed to keep tokens of our cultural identity — 24/7 access to Oprah reruns, with miniature golf on Saturdays. This is certain to save our democracy. As for us, I’m betting we won’t be worse off than before — and we’ll sport much nicer tans.