By PLS
Every baby plays peekaboo with delight, and older kids love to hide. They hunch inside closets. They crawl under dining room tables. They love stories built around invisibility-granting rings and cloaks. They love magic, too: the presto chango! of making things appear and disappear. So babies and kids love to fool and be fooled, even when they aren’t totally fooled, which makes them feel smart. A definition of being smart: knowing how things work.
Religion specializes in the invisible, too. Adults are comforted by sensed but unseen divinities that offer solace where nothing but woe is apparent. By and large, however, believers don’t laugh with delight when religious mysteries are unmasked. Hence, the bitterness of the intelligent design vs. Darwinism fight. At a certain point, people seem to lose their appetite for knowing how things work. Maybe the stakes are too high.
I don’t believe in mystical convergences but coincidences certainly do happen. On Saturday, for instance, after a long demanding hike, I was ready for a little couch potatoing, so I settled into my pillows and watched the dullest, lamest 007 I’ve ever seen. Still, Die Another Day featured a terrific silvery car that could be disappeared and reappeared with the click of a remote.
And then, on Tuesday, I was reading in the Science Section of the New York Times of an experiment in which
a beam of microwave light split in two as it flowed around a specially designed cylinder and then almost seamlessly merged back together on the other side. That meant that an object placed inside the cylinder was effectively invisible. No light waves bounced off the object, and someone looking at it would have seen only what was behind it.
Unfortunately, magic addicts, this “metamaterial” cloak wasn’t “perfect.” According to Duke University engineers, observers would have seen “some distortion,” plus “some shadowing” and some “reflection.” Also the trick works with just one wavelength of light so far. Having the process work simultaneously with a wide spectrum of light on a complex set of ordinary materials is not envisioned in anything like the near future.
Nevertheless: fascinating. And best of all: perfectly consistent with the mundane laws of nature. We could have a lot of fun listing all the things we’d like to not-see. A whole new sub-genre of light bulb jokes—or (groan) mother-in-law jokes, for example. But we could also make a long list of things that shouldn’t ever be concealed from us.
When it comes to government, another important adult activity, what’s there but not visible can hurt us badly, so I like to know how things political work. Yet (I don’t understand this) many people don’t care to learn how the legislative salami is made or what unsavory additives may be introduced in the shadows of the cloakroom.
Understanding the workings of politics isn’t a matter of esoteric science or even magic, much to the dismay of politicians who dislike all sorts of comprehensibility-in-labeling. What’s more, the press (when it’s functioning properly) is around to help us by shining light on what public servants are doing with the people’s trust and the people’s money.
Let’s not forget the reformers who introduced Sunshine Laws a few decades ago. If our representatives have to do the public’s business in public, the theory holds, they’ll be more likely to serve the public conscientiously. Actually, Sunshine Laws do work, which is why there are so many efforts to evade them or find loopholes or, these days, to plead executive privilege or the need to protect national security arcana. Keeping government open and honest isn’t easy.
Indeed, the Bush II administration has dedicated itself to perfecting the art of non-transparency in government. Although habeas corpus is the time honored way of keeping people from being disappeared, our current government not only believes it’s good for us to keep people locked out of sight without a trial, it has stooped to the practice of making people evaporate through what is called special rendition. Now you see ‘em! Now you don’t! Once abroad the invisible men can be tortured where their screams will never be heard by Americans not brainwashed into thinking they are doing the nation a service. How comforting. Experts say that torture doesn’t produce reliable evidence, but facts don’t matter to to national security sadists who like to make people suffer.
The courts could do something about this. They could hold that the Constitution does not make habeas corpus optional. They could say everyone has a right to a fair and speedy trial. Everyone has a right to know the evidence against them. Everyone has the right to a lawyer and a vigorous defense. Everyone has a right to confront accusers. But for now many judges and justices prefer to skulk behind their invisibility-conferring black cloaks or robes instead of making a strong open stand for the Constitution and the rule of law. Peekaboo! I see you.
Alberto Gonzales and others in this administration have been working on a definition of executive powers which permits the president to do anything anytime, in secret, so long as it’s for national security—which, post 9/11, is considered to be every minute of every day for the foreseeable future. We wouldn’t even know that we are being subjected to unlimited warrantless spying if not for some leaking and whistleblowing by brave self-sacrificing federal employees who were brought up to believe that democracies shouldn’t operate that way. One reason that the German film Other People’s Lives has had such a long run this year is that Americans feel at home in the East German milieu now. We have our own Stasi. We are all constantly under suspicion. As for the evidence? Sorry, it’s a secret.
There are other disappearances that this administration has mastered. Departments that were created to do one thing mysteriously morph into agencies doing the opposite. The FDA promotes the interests of Big Pharma, not sick folks. The EPA protects the auto and coal industries not the environment or people’s lungs. The Justice Department serves the Republican Party, not the Common Good. Federal Student Loan programs enrich banks and prey on students. You’ve got to hand it to this administration. They are incredible magicians when it comes to reversing legislation without new legislation. Presto chango!
Fortunately, there is another bit of magic which can make hidden information appear. It’s called the subpoena power. The House and the Senate, having learned nothing from Alberto Gonzales, that sly concealer of Bush administration secrets, have finally decided to force Harriet Meirs and other members of the White House staff to testify under oath. Maybe we’ll finally find out exactly how certain insufficiently red federal prosecutors were disappeared (so to speak) last year.
So many disappearances. So many transformations. But there’s one to come—in 2008. We can get rid of this bunch of black magicians. We can make them disappear into history books. Now you see ‘em. Soon you won’t. I hope.