The Second Decade of the 21st Century celebrates Edward Snowden as the Canary of this or any Year.
Editor(s):
I am delighted to see that the Times Editorial Board has come to the conclusion that Edward Snowden’s illegal (and-then-some) revelations are something other than simple treason. I’m sure I’m not alone in considering his actions to be among the most important examples of Civil Disobedience that we non-heroes will ever get to witness. (“Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower,” editorial, 1/1/14)
As a rookie at the hero business, Mr. Snowden can hardly be compared to the likes of Dr. King and Nelson Mandela, yet one could make a good argument that his revelations — if We the People have the courage and wisdom to act to make the necessary changes in our government — are as valuable as Dr. King’s and President Mandela’s lifelong efforts.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that Mr. Snowden deserves the Nobel Peace Prize as much as they did. Does the Times Editorial Board have the standing to nominate Mr. Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize? If so, I would ask that you do so as soon as possible.
Respectfully,
Lawrence Houghteling
Lawrence Houghteling
9 Marble Terrace
Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706
914.478.2059Static or Serenity?
“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.” —Edward Snowden
In private conversations, whether its between friends or teachers, parents or spiritual advisers, or even a dialogue between physical sensations and considered reflections in the mind, we human beings make our moral choices, choose representations of perceived reality—impressions or images—that become approved or disproved by the mind, which are transformed into ideas and concepts, whether objective and real or abstract and spiritual. Inside the mind, we get to think freely for ourselves despite the prying voices of parents, government, and social conventions.
In effect we follow those ideas that become part of our consciousness, act upon them consciously, unconsciously, or in a variety of ways, constantly measuring ourselves, whether in the present, remembering our past, while projecting a future. We measure our actions and thoughts, and try to weave together a coherent self, where we act and live, feel and think. But as we human beings weave together a self into a coherent identity, the process can be an exhausting lifelong occupation, until we begin thinking, like a Sage or less than that, like a philosopher thinking more clearly.
Among the road blocks to clear thinking are customs, conventions, confusing social and political forces, physical limitations, feelings and emotions, the constrictions born of one’s natural temperament. Just as the presence of a parent or teacher or a recording camera in the courtroom changes the behavior of children, judges and attorneys, defendants and jurors, so the presence of the secret police—NSA listeners, watchers, and babysitters—changes the behavior of the subject thinker. Consequently the the thinker finds him or herself an object of desire when external eyes or ears intervene.
The ancient philosophers like Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Epictetus, Epicurus created the idea of consciousness in the West and taught human beings how to think for themselves, saying ” judgment is everything.” Others noted the shortcomings of society and the interference with what Emerson called “Man Thinking,” letting conventions and propaganda do the work of thought and language. Kafka made literature out of insidious family forces, the Father and family in “The Metamorphosis,” for instance.
Freud turned the presence of family feeling and influence into a psychological and professionalized bureaucracy. H4 more than anyone spawned the profession of psychologists, who, today, help the overseers of Gitmo study and experiment with the unique effects of torture and interrogation. You might say Kafka and Freud discovered that justice and injustice begin at home.
Now comes the NSA, imitating undreamed of standards far more Orwellian than Orwell dreamed of in 1984. The very brain and identity of the human being is at risk. The government seeks to replace the unpredictable contingencies of conscience and consciousness with a mechanistic robotic psyche as the center of social and economic control. For in its human objects, NSA would substitute “static” as a lifetime goal for the notion of “serenity,” the more traditional and widespread goal of both philosophical and religious practices.
Edward Snowden’s fortunate name is symbolic of literary history. In Joseph Heller’s anti-war novel, Catch 22, the hero, Yossarian recognizes that his colleague the dying Snowden is symbolic: “The spirit gone, man is garbage.” Indeed, Edward Snowden, the greatest of all modern whistle blowers, reminds us of Socrates, who warned the Athenians, not to kill the “Horse Fly,” lest they suffer (as the Greeks do today). Jesus suffered and asked the Father to forgive them because “they know not what they do.” And James Joyce wrote at the end of his famous short story, “The Dead, that “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Long after history has forgotten the names associated with NSA’s manipulative manifestations of static snowstorms like James Clapper, and General Keith Alexander, Diane Feinstein, and the impostor Barack Obama, the poets will remember the caveats loudly proclaimed on behalf of humanitarian roots and the promises of consciousness, now slowly being shuttered, in the voice and figure of Edward Snowden, the man who whistled louder than all the other canaries.