In Transmetropolitan #30, there is mention of a new law. Spider Jerusalem files a story on the murder of many, many unarmed civilians by the police, a story that, though true, conflicts with the version of the story that the police have released. His editor calls him to tell him that the story has been spiked by the White House, through the use of a new law, called a "D-Notice". This is described as a law by which "Stories considered dangerious to local and national security and international standing can and will be spiked by the Callahan administration."

Now, aside from proving that I spend entirely too much time reading Transmet, I bring this up in response to Cheney's statement that the US must be prepared, in this time of war, to suffer restrictions in her citizens' rights. I know that's not what he said verbatim; I was told this by someone who was reading the news and I don't remember the exact wording. But this strikes me as being uncomfortably close to a D-Notice. This does not strike me as being a necessary move. Instead, it strikes me as being along the lines of the preventative measures by which we interned Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II.

Here we were, fighting, on one front, an enemy that basically invented modern concentration camps, efficient extermination of so-called inferiior races, and suppression of rights of said inferiors. We borrowed their tactics to use against the people we were fighting on the other front. We threw people into concentration camps as a highly practical response to the possibility that these people, who happened to be highly visible because of skin color, were plotting to hand their adopted country over to the country they had left behind. Very pragmatic. Also, totally unfounded, unjustified, and against the rights of all citizens of the United States, which many of the internees happened to be.

So it strikes me that Washington, in the process of shitting itself over the apparent fact that the US is under biological attack, realized that they now had an excuse to do exactly what they always wanted to do, which is to abrogate our civil rights, as set forth in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Washington is, honestly, probably none too thrilled by a number of the freedoms we have been given, that people, notably (if not only) in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 have died to preserve. Washington also realizes that it is much easier to get things changed if you can plead the exigencies of the situation to remove rights. It's a little bit like gated and covenanted communities. If you move into one of those and sign the covenant, the board or whatever they're called has the right to tell you what colors you can and cannot paint your house, in the interest of not aesthetically offending anyone else in the community, who are, let's face it, paying a shitload to live apart from the filth and tragedy of the common streets. The minute you agree to that, they can tell you what Christmas decorations you can and cannot have, then what color your mailbox can be and what distance from the curb it should be, and on and on. In other words, the minute you give up a right in the interest of something larger than yourself - i.e. the community as a body, the nation's war effort, or whatever they care to call it - it is easier to take away the next one. And we become used to the state of things. It's hard to remember when you weren't told what color your house could be. It's always been that we needed to take passports on long trips in the US. That sort of thing. It gets to the point where generations grow up accepting that that's the way things are. And then no one is interested in getting the rights back. If anyone even remembers them at all, they also remember the justifications for why the rights were removed in the first place.

So someone decided to mail anthrax spores. So somebody died. So what? Anthrax is extremely hard to catch, particularly in its airborne phase. An average of 20,000 people in the US and 4,000 in Britain die of influenza every year. The common flu. Every year. In other words, anthrax is not a particularly effective weapon, but we're not used to people dying of it. That makes it scary. We're used to people dying of the flu - it isn't even remarked on, beyond the fact that the elderly and those particularly at risk should get a flu shot every year.

The Aum Shinryuken (or whatever it's called, can't look it up right now) cult tried to release airborne anthrax in the middle of Tokyo eight times. Not one person was even infected, let alone died. It is, as I said, extremely hard to catch, particularly in its airborne form.

So we need to quit letting anthrax scare us. We need to quit showing bin Laden or whoever decided to release these spores that they've got the citizens of the US scared. That's merely playing into their hands. We need to quit the kind of shit that I'm quite sure is going on - lives are not being led as normal, travel is interrupted, that sort of thing. My parents left for an extended trip through the West on 10/12. I'm worried about them. Not that they're at risk from biological terrorism, or even that they're particularly at risk, but because I suspect, from my vantage point 10,000 miles away and days behind on the news, that travel restrictions "for the duration" will be announced any day now. I worry that they won't be able to get home.

So we need to tell the person who's responsible for the anthrax mailings that that's not going to stop us from living our lives.

And we need to tell the government that too. We will not tolerate a D-Notice. There will be no abrogating of our rights, particularly if it seems to be a risk to our international standing. Let's face it - we're Americans. As far as most governments are concerned, we're the country they need to be watching - we're famous for helping those in need, even when they need miliarty assistance - as in Israel, Bosnia, Somalia, etc. As far as most civilians go, we're noisy tourists who assume that anyone who doesn't speak English is an idiot. We either have a highly regarded international standing, one where abrogating rights will merely make us look like hypocrites, or we don't have one at all, where abrogating rights will not make too much difference.

But back to the topic at hand. There is no such thing as a reasonable abrogation of civil rights; there never is. We need to be prepared to fight tooth and nail to keep our rights intact, because I have a hinky feeling that if they go away now we won't get them back anytime soon, if ever. Because, honestly, once a right is gone, unless you're in the habit of challenging it every day, which most people aren't, it's hard to be aware that it's gone. And the police have a habit of letting illegalities occur (otherwise they'd have busted anyone who ever talked about smoking pot a long time ago) until they want to enforce the laws. So, for example, the government could take away our freedom of assembly. That's fine. We would be able to go on assembling for any purpose whatsoever until the government found it inconvenient. (I have fantasies of this inconvenience being a mob gathered outside the White House baying for Cheney and Bush's resignation.) But the minute the government did find it inconvenient, much as they find low-income teens smoking pot inconvenient, they would squash whatever assembly they were against, probably by treating it as a riot. One with lots of injuries. In fact, can we say WTO, class? Once the cops had the protestors out of downtown Seattle - and the cops were operating in the interest of business, don't even question that idea, there was no reason for them to continue attacking the demonstrators. Especially demonstrators who were already down. Demonstrators who were obviously harmless. But they did.

And, getting back to the main point of that last paragraph, they would be perfectly justified in stopping such a "riot". Because the right of freedom of assembly was gone, but no one had remembered that.

That's the sort of shit I suspect we need to be watching out for. Good old fashioned abrogation of rights that we take for granted. Let's just invite the Taliban over to the US to take over the leadership. I mean, hell. They can't be any worse than the Chimp. In fact, now that I think about it, G.W. bears a striking resemblance to Warren Ellis' description of the Smiler - a man who "will tell any lie, wear any mask, to become president, and not only that, he fucking hates you, and he's doing this just so he can make your lives hell." I don't know about the last part, but let's face it, compassionate conservatism, the concept that largely got Bush elected, is merely a mask worn by the man who sent more people to the gas chambers than any other governor. A mask for the man who slashed social services, removed abortion from the list of options discussable by US funded family planning critics, and whose home-state government is now quietly undoing all the damage he did to Texas. In other words, the reason that the Texas state government backed Bush's campaign was to get him the hell out of their state so they could fix the shit he did to them. This story broke back in March or April, I think - if you don't believe me, look it up.

The Smiler is a very dangerous, very stupid man. You have been warned. Watch your backs. And your rights.

The protruding nail that refuses to be pounded flat,

Channon