June 7, 2013: Prank calls
Ilya Repin, "Portrait of the Composer Modest Mussorgsky" (1881)
My personal physician, Mussorgsky, is a man of dignified bearing, who carries himself as would an exiled king. I anticipate his visits with anomie and dread. My congenital weakness is acute even in optimal conditions, but for a nervous, sweating gurnard like me to be seen next to a rockslide of a man like him – it is the kind of indignity with which I am all too acquainted.
But with the tattered remains of my delicate constitution on tenterhooks, I am finding it increasingly difficult to keep up appearances. The physician thunders like a bassoon, standing up from beside the fainting couch in my solarium, shaking his head. “Fresh air. Outside.” He points a finger like a rolling pin at a window looking out on my gas meter. “Walking. Every day. Less talking.”
Less talking. My legs are slick with sweat under the sheepskin I have pulled up to my chin, and my eyes feel like they’re clogging the gasket of a bicycle pump. But perhaps he is right. Perhaps my problem is I talk too much; there’s no earthlier reason for why I feel the way I do.
Take the telephone, for instance. I hate the contemptible device. I keep it in a bureau drawer stuffed with down feathers so I don’t hear it. But there are things I need that I must obtain jawboning into the damn thing: liquid mercury from my chemical broker, sentinel hawks for my country estate, pad thai. Which makes one wonder: if I need my phone so damn much, what does that say about me to the NSA? What deductions are they drawing in their alien calculus?
You see, the NSA appears to have very good cause behind their thirst for knowing everything there is to know about every call made through a Verizon phone . What earthly interest my monthly supply calls to the greatest cheesemonger in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, could have in battling the forces of Ayman al-Zawahiri – I know not. But perhaps I don’t need to know. Dianne Feinstein, one of the greatest teachers of classical jurisprudence and moral philosophy in the Senate today, posited that spying on each of these phone calls “is called protecting America.”
Well, it was a hard sell. But I must say, lying on my sickbed, wracked with the pains of a lifetime of indulgence, I came to see the wisdom of learned souls like Lindsey Graham and Saxby Chambliss. “Dammit,” I squeaked, into Mussorgsky’s turned back. “Why isn’t the NSA stopping the things I do to myself?”
Friends, I strolled on an evening constitutional this evening, invigorated for the first time in millennia. Houses lie vacant, streets dirtied with litter, but I know which way the wind’s turning. Yes, in this tawdry, cheap culture of soullessness, of moral decay, of spirtual death, where the economy is a pallid face and the future an inferno, maybe, just maybe, there was a hand on my shoulder.
There will be policy questions to determine, of course. When the NSA sees a call from a jilted 22 year-old Texan to his former love at 3:12 A.M. on a Saturday morning, how best will we neutralize the drunk dialing threat? When a prank caller is successfully tagged targeting his neighborhood’s pizzerias for “dick cheese,” will Gitmo or federal courts suffice? Do we even need courts?
All quibbles to be ironed out. Glory in the real truth at hand: for the first time in our existence, somebody is listening to what all Americans are mouthing, every day, tower to tower.
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