Pubdate: November 1998
Source: Vanity Fair
Page: 96
Copyright: 1998 The Conde Nast Publications Inc.
Contact:  http://www.vanityfair.com
Author: Gore Vidal

THE WAR AT HOME

The U.S. Bill Of Rights Is Being Steadily Eroded, With Two Million
Telephone Calls Tapped, 30 Million Workers Under Electronic Surveillance,
And, Says The Author, Countless Americans Harassed By A Government That
Wages Spurious Wars Against Drugs And Terrorism.

	Most Americans of a certain age can recall exactly where they were and
what they were doing on October 20, 1964, when word came that Herbert
Hoover was dead. The heart and mind of a nation stopped. But how many
recall when and how they first became aware that one or another of the Bill
of Rights had expired? For me, it was sometime in 1960 at a party in
Beverly Hills that I got the bad news from the constitutionally cheery
actor Cary Grant. He had just flown in from New York. He had, he said,
picked up his ticket at an airline counter in that magical old-world
airport, Idlewild, whose very name reflected our condition. "There were
these lovely girls behind the counter, and they were delighted to help me,
or so they said. I signed some autographs. Then I asked one of them for my
tickets. Suddenly she was very solemn. 'Do you have any identification?'
she asked." (Worldly friends tell me that the "premise" of this story is
now the basis of a series of TV commercials for Visa unseen by me.) I
would be exaggerating if I felt the chill in the air that long-ago Beverly
Hills evening. Actually, we simply laughed. But I did, for just an instant,
wonder if the future had tapped a dainty foot on our mass grave. 

	Curiously enough, it was Grant again who bore, as lightly as ever, the
news that privacy itself hangs by a gossamer thread. "A friend in London
rang me this morning," he said. This was June 4, 1963. "Usually we have
code names, but this time he forgot. So after he asked for me I said into
the receiver, 'All right. St. Louis, off the line. You, too, Milwaukee,'
and so on. The operators love listening in. Anyway, after we talked
business, he said, 'So what's the latest Hollywood gossip?' And I said,
'Well, Lana Turner is still having
an affair with that black baseball pitcher.' One of the operators on the
line gave a terrible cry, 'Oh, no!"' 

	Innocent days. Today, as media and Congress thunder their anthem,
"Twinkle, twinkle, little Starr, how we wonder what you are," the current
president is assumed to have no right at all to privacy because, you see,
it's really about sex, not truth, a permanent nonstarter in political life.
Where Grant's name assured him an admiring audience of telephone operators,
the rest of us were usually ignored. That was then. Today, in the all-out,
never-to-be-won twin wars on Drugs and Terrorism, two million telephone
conversations a year are intercepted by law-enforcement officials. As for
that famous "workplace" to which so many Americans are assigned by
necessity, "the daily abuse of civil liberties ... is a national disgrace,"
according to the American Civil Liberties Union in a 1996 report. 

	Among the report's findings, between 1990 and 1996, the number of workers
under electronic surveillance increased from 8 million per year to more
than 30 million. Simultaneously, employers eavesdrop on an estimated 400
million telephone conversations a year--something like 750 a minute. In
1990, major companies subjected 38 percent of their employees to urine
tests for drugs. By 1996, more than 70 percent were thus interfered with.
Recourse to law has not been encouraging. In fact, the California Supreme
Court has upheld the right of public employers to drug-test not only those
employees who have been entrusted with flying jet aircraft or protecting
our borders from Panamanian imperialism but also those who simply mop the
floors. The court also ruled that governments can screen applicants for
drugs and alcohol. This was inspired by the actions of the city-state of
Glendale, California, which wanted to test all employees due for promotion.
 Suit was brought against Glendale on the ground that it was violating the
Fourth Amendment's protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures."
Glendale's policy was upheld by the California Supreme Court, but Justice
Stanley Mosk wrote a dissent: "Drug testing represents a significant
additional invasion of those applicants' basic rights to privacy and
dignity ... and the city has not carried its considerable burden of showing
that such an invasion is justified in the case of all applicants offered
employment."

	In the last year or so I have had two Cary Grant-like revelations,
considerably grimmer than what went on in the good old days of relative
freedom from the state. A well-known acting couple and their two small
children came to see me one summer. Photos were taken of their
four-year-old and six-year-old cavorting bare in the sea. When the couple
got home to Manhattan, the father dropped the negatives off at a drugstore
to be printed. Later, a frantic call from his fortunately friendly
druggist: "If I print these I've got to report you and you could get five
years in the slammer for kiddie porn." The war on kiddie porn is now
getting into high gear, though I was once assured by Wardell Pomeroy,
Allied Kinsey's colleague in sex research, that pedophilia was barely a
blip on the statistical screen, somewhere down there with farm lads and
their animal friends.

	It has always been a mark of American freedom that unlike countries under
constant Napoleonic surveillance, we are not obliged to carry
identification to show to curious officials and pushy police. But now, due
to Terrorism, every one of us is stopped at airports and obliged to show an
ID which must include a mug shot (something, as Allah knows, no terrorist
would ever dare fake). In Chicago after an interview with Studs Terkel, I
complained that since I don't have a driver's license, I must carry a
passport in my own country as if I were a citizen of the old Soviet Union.
Terkel has had the same trouble. "I was asked for my ID--with photo--at
this southern airport, and I said I didn't have anything except the local
newspaper with a big picture of me on the front page, which I showed them,
but they said that that was not an ID. Finally, they got tired of me and
let me on the plane."

	Lately, I have been going through statistics about terrorism (usually
direct responses to crimes our government has committed against
foreigners-although, recently, federal crimes against our own people are
increasing). Only twice in 12 years have American commercial planes been
destroyed in flight by terrorists; neither originated in the United States.
To prevent, however, a repetition of these two crimes, hundreds of millions
of travelers must now be subjected to searches, seizures, delays. The state
of the art of citizen-harassment is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, new
devices, at ever greater expense, are coming onto the market--and, soon, to
an airport near you--including the dream machine of every horny schoolboy.
The "Body Search" Contraband Detection System, created by American Science
and Engineering, can "X-ray" through clothing to reveal the naked body,
whose enlarged image can then be cast onto a screen for prurient analysis.
The proud manufacturer boasts that the picture is so clear that even
navels, unless packed with cocaine and taped over, can be seen winking at
the voyeurs. The system also has what is called, according to an A.C.L.U.
report, "a joystick-driven Zoom Option" that allows the operator to enlarge
interesting portions of the image. During all  this,  the  victim  remains,
 as  AS&E proudly notes, fully clothed. Orders for this machine should be
addressed to the Reverend Pat Robertson and will be filled on a first-come,
 first-served  basis,  while  the proud new owner of "Body Search" will be
automatically included in the F.B.I.'s database of Sexual Degenerates-Class
B. Meanwhile, in February 1997, the "Al" Gore Commission called for the
acquisition of 54 high-tech bomb-detection machines known as the CTX 5000,
a baggage scanner that is a bargain at a million dollars and will cost only
$100,000 a year to service.  Unfortunately,  the  CTX  5000 scans baggage
at the rate of 250 per hour, which would mean perhaps a thousand are needed
to "protect" passengers at major airports from those two putative
terrorists who might--or might not--strike again in the next 12 years, as
they twice did in the last  12 years. Since the present scanning system
seems fairly effective, why subject passengers to hours of delay, not to
mention more than $54 million worth of equipment? 

	Presently, somewhat confused guidelines exist so that airline personnel
can recognize at a glance someone who fits the "profile" of a potential
terrorist. Obviously, anyone of mildly dusky hue who is wearing a fez gets
busted on the spot. For those terrorists who do not seem to fit the
"profile," relevant government agencies have come up with the following
behavioral tips that should quickly reveal the evildoer. A devious drug
smuggler is apt to be the very first person off the plane unless, of
course, he is truly devious and chooses to be the last one off. Debonair
master criminals often opt for a middle position. Single blonde young women
are often used, unwittingly, to carry bombs or drugs given them  by Omar
Sharif look-alikes in sinister Casbahs. Upon arrival in freedom's land,
great drug-sniffing dogs will be turned loose on them; unfortunately, these
canine  detectives  often mistakenly target as drug carriers women that are
undergoing their  menstrual period: the sort of icebreaker that  often
leads to merry laughter all around the customs area. Apparently one
absolutely sure behavioral giveaway is undue nervousness on the part of a
passenger though, again, the master criminal will sometimes appear to be
too much at ease. In any case, whatever mad rule of thumb is applied, a
customs official has every right to treat anyone as a criminal on no
evidence at all; to seize and to search without, of course, due process of
law.

	Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in
order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to
arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on. In 1970, I wrote in
The New York Times, of all uncongenial places,

	It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a
very short time. Simply make 	all drugs available and sell them at cost.
Label each drug with a precise description of what effect-	good or bad--the
drug will have on the taker. This will require heroic honesty. Don't say
that 	marijuana is addictive or dangerous when it is neither, as millions
of people know--unlike "speed," 	which kills most unpleasantly, or heroin,
which can be addictive and difficult to kick. Along with 	exhortation and
warning, it might be good for our citizens to recall (or learn for the
first time) that the 	United States was the creation of men who believed
that each person has the right to do what he 	wants with his own life as
long as he does not interfere with his neighbors' pursuit of happiness
(that 	his neighbor's idea of happiness is persecuting others does confuse
matters a bit).

  I suspect that what I wrote 28 years ago is every bit as unacceptable now
as it was then, with the added problem of irritable ladies who object to my
sexism in putting the case solely in masculine terms, as did the sexist
founders.

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Checked-by: Patrick Henry