After America - Mark Steyn [127]
Picture an American airport on the Friday afternoon before a big public holiday—the long, slow trudge to gain admission to the secure area. The “secure area” won’t be just for airports anymore. More and more of America will seek to be “secured” in the interests of constraining the forces on the other side of the fence. Think of those decapitated heads in Mexico and hope the cartels don’t decide to learn incompetent transit terror from the jihad—because, inevitably, Big Government will respond with big, bloated, manpower-intensive, ever more intrusive bureaucratic overreach. A citizenry that shrugged when government bureaucrats took to themselves the power to poke around with no probable cause in the nooks and crannies of its genitalia will discover that such extraordinary powers will not remain penned up in Terminal Three, but will spread—to bus stations, and key Interstate ramps, and eventually random Main Streets. As the Shoe Bomber led to the shoeless shuffle and the Panty Bomber led to the federally mandated scrotal grope, so the first Suppository Bomber will lead to complimentary federal prostate exams from LAX to JFK.
Then factor in the end of the dollar as global currency. Oil heads up past five, six, seven bucks a gallon, and everything else follows. That inflation-proofed schoolmarm in Yonkers isn’t going to want to stay at Number 27 when everybody else in the street is poor and hates her. Nobody travels very much anymore—who can afford it?—but the lines are as long as ever: the Security State barely bothers to pretend it’s for anything other than domestic crowd control. As the armed forces shrink with the dollar, hundreds of thousands of American troops are demobbed and come home to find that, whether or not it’s over over there, it’s certainly over over here. A statist America won’t be a large Sweden—unimportant but prosperous—but something closer to the Third World. As a dead-end economy drives its surplus manpower deeper into poverty, addiction, and crime, parts of the country will take on post-Soviet Russian characteristics, with a gangster class manipulating social disintegration for its own ends. What’s left will be Latin America, corrupt and chaotic, broke and brutish—for all but a privileged few.
What to do? Where to go? In 1785, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham began working on his famous “Pan-opticon”—a radial prison in which a central “inspector” could see all the prisoners, but they could never see him. In the computer age, we now have not merely panopticon buildings, but panopticon societies, like modern London, with its wall-to-wall CCTV cameras. Soon perhaps, excepting a few redoubts such as Waziristan and the livelier precincts of the Horn of Africa, we will have a panopticon planet.
Yet high-tech statism still needs an overarching narrative. The “security state” is a tough sell: if you tell people the government is compiling data on them for national security purposes, the left instinctively recoils. But, if you explain that you’re doing it to save the planet by monitoring carbon footprints and emissions compliance and mandatory recycling, starry-eyed coeds across the land will twitter their approval, and the middle-class masochists of the developed world will whimper in orgasmic ecstasy as you tighten the screws, pausing only to demand that