Has Uncle Sam Gone Crazy_.pdf

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Publication: The Economic Times Mumbai;Date: Nov 3, 2013;Section: Trendspotting;Page: 21

Has Uncle Sam Gone Crazy?

The US employs 850,000 people to monitor its security, and spendsmore on defence than budgets of the next 10-highest spendingcountries combined. But Americans are still a:: Bennett Voyle s

The symptoms were all there all right: Confused thinking. Check. Social withdrawal. Check. Excessive fears and anxiety.Check. Denial of obvious problems. Check. Paranoid thoughts. Check. Strong feelings of anger. Check. Excessive spending.Check. I had resisted the obvious conclusion for a very long time, the way you do when you see a beloved relative start to lose

his grip. Even this month, after I read one day that the National Security Agency had monitored the telephone calls of everyonein France for a whole month and a few days later when I learned that the National Security Agency had probably listened in on Angela Merkels mobile phone calls and maybe as many as 35 other world leaders besides her I thought maybe somedark but rational intelligence was at work. But when I heard White House spokesman Jay Carneys bizarrely past-tenselessresponse to the German allegations The US is not and will not monitor the chancellors calls, I had to face the truth:Uncle Sam is out of his mind. Looking back, ever since September 11, 2001, something had been a bit odd about poor oldSam:

Why else would the US have racked up over $2.5 trillion in debt, according to Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitzs 2010 estimate more than half the $4.6 trillion (in current dollars) spent by the US through all of World War II pursuing two wars andbuilding a vast new security system, all to prevent the repetition of an attack in which the entire enemy force consisted of 19guys armed with box cutters.

What sane country would have built a security apparatus that now The Washington Post estimates employs 850,000 peopleand monitors a good share of the worlds electronic communications a lot of people considering it took just 20,000 spooks inthe Central Intelligence Agency to keep the Cold War simmering in the 1950s?

Who would spend more on defence in 2012 than the budgets of the 10 next-highest defence budgets combined (includingRussia and China), particularly given the fact that the countries the US is most afraid of at the moment are Iran (which outsideoil is an economic powerhouse mostly in pistachios) and North Korea (whose per capita GDP is less than

Bangladesh)?

Nor is this obsession just driven by Congressional budgeting. Within the government, September 11 still feels like asurprisingly recent event. Bridget Rose Nolan, a Central Intelligence Agency analyst and sociology graduate student for theUniversity of Pennsylvania, wrote in a recent dissertation for her PhD on the organisational culture of the CIA, that she wassurprised to find how recent 9/11 still felt to many of her colleagues.

Like Carrie Mathison, the bipolar CIA analyst in the popular TV thriller Homeland, real-life analysts think about 9/11 all the time,according to Nolan.My new colleagues told me that they thought about September 11 every day, not just in the course of their work, but also during the mundane activities of everyday life, like when they saw a plane flying overhead or saw a picture of anyskyscraper, Nolan recalled in her study.

How could one attack so unhinge such a powerful country? For one thing, no one saw it coming. The Cold War was over andthe US had won. The US government actually had a fiscal surplus. All that was left to do was to get richer still and make surethat the emerging markets kept on emerging. One pundit even wrote a book called The End of History.


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Even during the Cold War, the idea of an attack on the US was sometimes considered the stuff of comedy: Peter Sellersand Jean Seberg made a movie in 1959 called The Mouse that Roared, about a group of men from the tiny principality of GrandFenwick who decide to try to invade the US in the hopes that American reconstruction aid will make them rich.

In World War II, the closest foreign enemies came was a two-man German submarine that ran aground off Long Island and aclever-but-ineffectual campaign by the Japanese to send fire-bomb carrying balloons into the jet stream in the hopes of sendingUS forests and farms ablaze.

In fact, outside Pearl Harbor, an attack on the US had not happened for nearly 200 years, not since the British invasion of 1812.

But it was more than surprise that has given 9/11 such a tight grip on the American imagination. Part of it was the Bushadministration. Rather than reassure the public that this was an isolated criminal incident, they turned it into the opening battleof a new and endless national emergency, and to drive support for its Middle Eastern military adventures.

However,its too easy to blame Bush & Co. To an extent, the security s tate they built is the one Americans wanted. Americans may have given the world Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone, but the truth is, were a deeply frightened people: a2007 survey estimated that there are 89 firearms for every 100 residents, and given that in a recent Gallup poll over 45% of

Americans said they have a gun in their house, which means that nearly half are more or less ready for a siege.

Making matters still more peculiar is that this fear persists despite the fact that the country now locks up roughly 1% of itspopulation and that violent crime rates have actually plummeted since the early 1990s. Although still a violent country by globalstandards, the US now has only 4.7 murders per 100,000 people a year. Thats not as good as Indias 3.2, but its almost half the 1990 US average.

Why should such a rich country, home to the worlds most advanced military machine, feel so frightened?

100 hours of solitude

I think part of the answer is that wealth buys a lot of solitude. The average household size in the US is now around 2.5,according to US Census figures. Outside your family and your office, the average American doesnt see many people. Youprobably work more or less alone, and chances are good you spend about an hour a day commuting to work alone in your car.Many of your relatives may be thousands of miles away, and your old school chums are just postage stamp photos onFacebook.

Work tends to be isolated too. Unlike the post-war generation, where most people found a job and stayed in it, Americansmove from job to job much more these days. Technology is changing work all the time, and even the professional classes haveto worry about job security.

You also live under a high degree of surveillance at work. Many employers require employees to take drug tests. Lower levelemployees sometimes have their keystrokes per minute monitored, and even their tone of voice in talking to customers on thephone. If you speak with customers, a lot of the interaction may be scripted, and anything more than wishing someone a niceday or asking how you might serve them better is discouraged.

Making the day more anxious still is the fact that relatively few workers have long-term contracts: most are at willemployees you can be fired at almost anytime, on almost any pretext. It doesnt happen a lot, but it can and when itdoes, if youre over 50, the chances are good your next job is going to be a whole lot worse than your last. And if youre out for long, you can easily lose your familys health insurance (though that may be changing with the Obamacare health plan), your house, and your kids education.

If all goes well, however, at the end of the day, youll go home for dinner. Chances are good youre eating alone busyschedules and varying shifts mean that 46% of Americans eat all their meals alone, according to the Hartman Group, a marketresearch firm and as you eat youll watch the news or a murder mystery on TV or order something online, which is moreconvenient than shopping in person but is again yet another solitary act ivity. All in all, its not a situation that inspires muchtrust in authority or even in other herd animals. The world beyond your cubicle and your Starbucks and your home caneasily begin to seem a forbidding and hostile place.

The larger economic anxieties have also contributed to this uncertain feeling. Although the survivors have profited by it, the lastdecade was deeply disruptive for many American comp a n i e s , b e t we e n more global competition and the growth of automation.


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The US has a huge army in place to guard the country. This is in sharp contrast to the just 20,000 spooks in the CentralIntelligence Agency to keep the Cold War simmering in the 1950s


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Wealth buys a lot of solitude. Busy schedules and varying shifts mean that 46% of Americans eat all their meals alone and asthey eat they watch news or a murder mystery or order something online, yet another solitary activity


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Has Uncle Sam Gone Crazy_.pdf

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