Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [41]
I think back to when I went to China on a trade mission, and climbed the Great Wall in Beijing. Which had sparked my contemplating the “great wall” that the U.S. is planning to build between us and Mexico, as a supposed answer to illegal immigration. By the end of ’08, about 670 miles are supposed to be completed along our southwestern border. Why is it we don’t see that if you don’t learn from history you’re destined to repeat it? The Great Wall of China did not work. The most formidable barrier ever built by mankind—and it failed! In 1644, the Chinese were overrun and now the Great Wall is nothing but a tourist attraction. At least their Great Wall is an architectural wonder that people built by hand, all day long, many of them living and dying there. So I hope they end up making our “great wall” tourist friendly. I tell Terry that, when it gets built, I’m gonna find where it’s on public land and I’m gonna cross it into Mexico, in protest. I don’t want my country to be East Berlin.
“That’s probably another of my ideas that won’t sit too well with the powers-that-be,” I say. Terry nodded.
We sleep on that for a while. When we wake, the sunrise fills the desert sky as we cross over into Mexico.
The first thing you realize, when you reach the other side, is that your cell phones don’t work anymore. Neither does the OnStar Locator on your vehicle. That’s the button you push that tells you where the next restaurant is, or can summon the police if you break down, because a satellite pinpoints your location. Of course, at the same time that they’re available to help you, it means they can also monitor you. Who’s to say, with the computers that exist today, that someone isn’t keeping tabs on where everyone is driving? So, in a strange way, not having these things gives me a sense of breakaway freedom. I want to escape, to have anonymity.
Terry and I were no strangers to the feeling we were being observed—and I don’t mean only publicly. After I was elected governor, the state sent a big crew over to our ranch house to install a hotline phone. We kept it on the floor under our bed. It connected directly to the local police and, if anything ever went wrong, all we had to do was knock the phone off the hook and they’d be over like gangbusters.
“Remember that hotline phone, Terry?” I am musing about this, thinking about how cut off from communication we are in Baja. “They put it in one day when we were gone.”
“Do I remember! I started noticing after a while that, every time I would use the phone at our house, it sounded like someone had picked up an extension in another room. Of course, there was never anyone there. And it always happened whenever you were involved in anything controversial. Then, all of a sudden, that clicking sound was there. It got so bad even my mom could hear it. She’d say, ‘Someone’s listening again, I guess we’d better be careful.’ It became like a family joke.”
“Then there was the time you found that little electrical transmitter laying there with the two little wires hanging from it,” I remind her. “Of course, you always notice when something isn’t right.”
Terry smiles. “I was opening up the sliding door when I saw all these bits and pieces of electrical wire. And then the transmitter out on the patio.”
I’d taken Terry’s find to a friend of mine who worked for the phone company. He knew instantly what it was: a bug. My friend used to install these. Not by choice. He’d be ordered to do it. He told me, “The government would come around, and you’ve simply got to do what they tell you.”
I was shocked, but what could we do? There was nobody to make a complaint to; the media would have just said I was paranoid. Who do you go to about something like this, when you can’t trust your own government—and you’re in it! In fact, you’re at the top of