Defining our Terms

GENERAL RIPPER:

Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridated water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake. Children's ice cream?

MANDRAKE:

Good Lord.

-Dr. Strangelove

And thus, mes p'tits, do I give you the "FEMA Rap for Kidz." This sort of Hitlerjugend effort to acculturate children to their collective responsibility to the body politic is not without its self-parodic charms, and I'm surely not the sort who "considers the children," even those children who are our future. That said, there is something grotesque and monstrous about this perceived need to indoctrinate the youngest among us with an irrational belief in the ubiquity of catastrophe. I won't be the first to point out this irony at the heart of the teleology of the security state: on one hand, necessary dependence on the state as the sole defender from disaster; on the other hand, the total inevitability of disaster regardless. I may be a little more original when I suggest that without this central irony, the argument for the necessity of the state becomes rather weak. At the heart of justifications for state power, even modest, minarchical, secure-property-and-defend-the-borders libertarian justifications, is the proposition that disaster will befall you in the absence of a state agent with a capacity to act forcefully. You will be mugged and raped and murdered by some Hobbesian villain. You will die in a natural disaster. You will be invaded. If, conversely, you presume otherwise, then the protective necessity of monopolistic force seems less evident; indeed, it seems extraneous