Paranoia – The Destroyer, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #347 | @MDWorld

October 28, 2013 Mike Gold 8 Comments

European leaders are still falling over each other in feigned outrage over the latest revelations that the United States of America was – can you believe it – actually spying on them!

And that big yellow ball of heat up there in the sky? It’s called “the sun.” You learn something new every day.

Do I think America should be spying on its allies? Well… there was a time when Britain was sending boatloads of soldiers out here to grab their land back. They burned down the town in which I now live (Norwalkers moved to Ohio in the belief that the Red Coats wouldn’t follow). More recently, Germany had that World War I / World War II thing going on. Japan screwed up Hawaiian tourism for half-a-decade. These days, or at least before Edward Snowden confirmed the truth behind our long-held suspicions, those guys were our friends.

 

But eternity is a long time, and sides shift. The Soviet Union and the United States were on the same side during both World Wars. After that, not so much. Today… well, that’s where Snowden lives, isn’t it?

I’m not crazy about all this, but international espionage is a force akin to gravity, fueled by paranoia. If we weren’t paranoid, we wouldn’t be spending two-thirds of a trillion dollars each year on “defense.” And that doesn’t count the actual black-budget spying activity that is kept off the books in the name of… security.

At the end of the day, I’m not concerned about the fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was “severely shaken” by the revelations or that the European Union is going to pass a “Data Protection Reform Act” that would have the same affect on the American National Security Council as a fart in a blizzard. If they haven’t had their spy operations looking at the United States, and if they weren’t receiving the benefit of American spy operations from time to time, then a severe disservice has been done to the European people.

As the song says, “it starts when you’re always afraid” and we’ve been on a fear-footing ever since Hitler took his dirt nap. We invent reasons to be afraid of the rest of the world  as though there aren’t enough real reasons. Then again, we’ve got a two-thirds of a trillion dollar defense budget that needs justification. That’s a whole lot of jobs.

Not that it ruined Barack Obama’s otherwise awesome week. Executive branch incompetence has been off the charts for 13 years now, and no one would be surprised if it continues until the Chicago Cubs win the World Series.

But, please, spare me the self-righteous indignation. Like the rest of Snowden’s revelations, there’s nothing new here. There’s only public confirmation of what we all believe in our heart-of-hearts has been going on since the days of James Fenimore Cooper.

You know. Back when Great Britain was our enemy.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.