Speak Up! I Can't Hear You!

Yesterday found one of our favorite objects of antagonism, Glenn Greenwald, getting snippy with Al Giordano. Al responds in kind. I think he comes off the better in the exchange, but journalistic methodology doesn't interest me very much, since everything is permissible in a universe where nothing is true, etc. etc., ad inf., et alia, gloria, hosanna, amen.

It's just this evident conviction, widely shared and endlessly amplified, that a "defeat" of the "FISA bill" will represent a roadblock, a pothole, a piece of gravel on the road to the Last Exit to Panopticon . . . I mean, it would be fun and potentially profitable to sue a lot of big telecoms, but the notion that this new legislation "expands" surveillance by, what?--admitting to it; it's crazy talk, man, crazy talk.

And this, I suppose, is the goofy theological underpinning of progressivism: Fallen, but Perfectible. In this narrative, the United States has "gotten away from its principles," or what have you, drifted from its noble roots as a genocidal slave-owning patrician Republic, and we have but to reclaim some noble period of principle, sometime after Jackson killed all those Injuns and after Lincoln freed all those slaves but before we, uh, occupied the Philippines? Am I on the right track here? When was the last time the 4th Amendment actually obtained in this country?

Reading the Constitution or the Federalist papers or what have you is as meaningful an insight into the actual operations of the American Empire as Marx into the workings of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.