Eschew Obfuscation –
By Michael Douglass –

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — What’s mind blowing about the whole Snowden thing is not what huge deal it was, it’s what a huge deal it is.

Michael Wade Douglass

To my dismay I have become cynical, so it occurred to me at the time that it really sucked but I wasn’t at all surprised.

I mean, how could anyone in real time America be in any way at a loss over the nefarious efforts of our government to know and control everything within its reach? Who doubts that shit?

What floored me the most was the indignity of professional blowhards along with the great unwashed. They were all pissed and everything.

Whoulda thought our government was anything but benign and magnanimous?

I was nascent during the the Vietnam war era and the Nixon administration. My mother made us watch the resignation of Nixon live on television along with stuff like any televised activity by the Apollo Space Program and Sesame Street. God love her.

Consequently, I never had any reason to to trust my government and went on to date the daughter of an ABC News science correspondent. She may have had access to an actual moon rock and she did have a great rack. She was crazy and smart and beautiful and told me her father was a real prick.

Edward Snowden

So I watched the Snowden Documentary the other night and regardless of my feelings on the subject, the film was brilliant. Fascinating.

Yep, Snowden is fascinating too. Erudite and still clever. He’d obviously thought hard about what he was doing and taken at face value, was pretty unselfish and altruistic about it.

I’m not going to spend any time here guessing about his true intentions because I’m not sure how much it matters. This is not about whether Edward Snowden is a hero or a villain. Hardly. The focus so far on that question is deliberate distraction on the part of the players. I’ll say this much, he’s no traitor and is probably only as earnest a patriot as he knows how to be.

What is important to me is what he revealed, because as cynical as I am, it was awesome and profoundly disturbing. The chilling malignancy of our government and its corporate partners to deceive and manipulate the gen pop gnaws at me. I can’t stop thinking about it because I can’t stop wondering what we don’t know.

It’s an iceberg.

Think about that.

If you don’t think what we know now pales in comparison to what we don’t, I’d like for you to join my ministry and buy my free book.

Okay look, it’s hardly a stretch these days to conclude that the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK were at least somewhat the behest of the CIA and organized crime, right? That’s a 50 year old iceberg. The tip of Snowden’s iceberg shows drones, secret prisons, torture, spying on Americans in vulgar defiance of the 4th Amendment, the suspension of Habeas corpus, Posse Comitatus, etc.

Try for a minute to imagine what lies beneath that waterline.

Americans only gave a shit about the salient aspects of the story for like a day. The next day it devolved into a debate about whether this dude should be hung or shot. After that it was Benghazi, Ebola, ISIS and all manner of things more existential.

How quick this event stopped selling tickets in the American theater of short attention spans.

Drinks for my friends.

Republished with permission from BrainSpank.Org.