Dad's Invisible Guard-All Shield

For the April, 1993 Electronic Frontier column in Communications of the ACM
by John Perry Barlow

The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge. --Jeremiah 31:29

Some years back, when I was still a Wyoming environmentalist, I found myself crossing South Pass with an old sheep rancher I knew. We were going to a federal hearing in Casper where, as an ideologically committed resource rapist, he would be my principal opponent. I can't remember the issue at contest. Probably strip-mine reclamation or something. That memory is blurred by the more vivid recollection of sun dogs through the tinted windows of his Olds Tornado and something he said to me that winter afternoon.

Our opinions had few intersections, but we liked each other. Our opposition was cultural, not personal. He had his sense of Nature and what one might responsibly do to Her. I had mine. We'd been arguing for about an hour, getting nowhere near any joint accommodation, when old Leonard leaned back and said, "Well, John Perry, look at it this way. Someday I'll be dead and you won't."

By this he meant that a time would come when world management would be up to me and others of my generation. Then it would be ours to mess up as we saw fit. Of course, he was also saying that we should wait patiently while his generation continued to mess it up as they saw fit. But still, he had a point.

Over the last year I've frequently found myself close to the places from which the world really does get managed, to whatever little degree it doesn't somehow manage itself. As Leonard predicted, the good old boys are now mostly either dead or terminally golfing. For the first time in my life, the President is a contemporary.

During its first year, Bill 'n' Al's Excellent Adventure seemed proof that, however unwillingly, the previous generation had finally relaxed their defining grip on the dominant American Reality. It looked like the stiff-lipped, big-fisted, team-playing, can-do geopolitical style to which they adapted while coming of age in World War II might finally be ready for History's Yard Sale.

But now I begin to wonder if they haven't out-foxed us after all. Like Pharaohs booby-trapping the Pyramids, they have left behind great institutional automata which will keep much of government dancing to Sinatra (and all the cultural perceptions and values he embodies) until the Dead finally are. They are reaching out from the grave (or some back nine at Palm Desert) and defining the New World Order around the same old paranoid paradigm.

The Sixties were a scary time for everyone. I, for one, fully intended to bring about The End of Civilization as We Knew It. Of course, the guardians of that Civilization responded accordingly. First, they disinherited the lot of us. Then they remained in office themselves much longer than is usually the custom any place but Beijing or Salt Lake City. Then whenever possible, they passed the torch over to our younger siblings who, being more generally comfortable in a nice blue serge, were less likely to conduct government by apocalypse.

Given what was going down at the time, I could hardly blame the old guys for their reaction to us. And, in retrospect, I am even forced to admit that a few of their policies, most notably Mutually Assured Destruction, were not as mad as they seemed to me then. After all, there hasn't been a global bloodbath since the one they fought in. It may well be that such vile psychic weather as used to blow up every generation was prevented by their tight forty year focus on assuring the Soviets that attacking us was tantamount to committing national suicide.

But maintaining that threat also meant keeping my peacenik kind away from the hideous machines which would carry it out, so they protected them behind billowing ink-clouds of secrecy and semi-permeable political membranes called security clearances.

The latter included, as a prerequisite to serious government service, being asked the following questions (from National Agency Questionnaire (NAQ) DD Form 398-2):

Question 20: Drug/Alcohol Use and Mental Health ("YES" answers must be explained in accordance with DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS)

a. Have you ever tried or used or possessed any narcotic (to include heroin or cocaine), depressant, (to include quaaludes), stimulant, hallucinogen, (to include LSD or PCP), or cannabis (to include marijuana or hashish), or any mind-altering substance (to include glue or paint), even one time or on an experimental basis, except as prescribed by a licensed physician.

b. Have you ever been involved in the illegal purchase, manufacture, trafficking, production, or sale of any narcotic, depressant, stimulant, hallucinogen, or cannabis?

c. Have you ever misused or abused any drug prescribed by a licensed physician for yourself or someone else?

d.

e. Have you ever been treated for a mental, emotional, psychological, or personality disorder/condition/problem?

The "DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS" say:

If "Yes" is answered to any of the questions in this item, describe the circumstance in item 14, in accordance with the following explanations. If necessary, attach additional sheets for a full detailed statement.

a. Drug Use/Possession. A listing of those drugs which have been designated as controlled substances is located on the last page of these instructions. If you used any of these drugs, or any other mind-altering substances, mark "Yes", and provide in Item 14, the following details:

IF MORE THAN ONE DRUG HAS BEEN USED/POSSESSED, PROVIDE THE Information ABOVE FOR EACH DRUG SEPARATELY

b. Drug Activity. The drugs referred to are again those listed on the attachment or any other mind-altering substances. If "Yes", you must indicate on the NAQ the activity (or activities) in which you were involved by circling "purchase", "manufacture", "trafficking", "production", or "sale" and provide in Item 14 the following details:

AGAIN, IF MORE THAN ONE DRUG IS INVOLVED, PROVIDE SPECIFIC INFORMATION FOR EACH DRUG SEPARATELY.

Now I'm probably a special case, but I don't have very many friends or colleagues who could remember detailed answers to such a quiz, let alone find time to answer them in the required detail. Then of course there's the matter the matter of self-incrimination. Or the fact that either way, you

don't get the job.

Even if you were perfectly straight with regard to other drugs besides the legal ones, getting a security clearance requires that neither you nor your friends are made uncomfortable by having FBI agents inquiring into the finer shades of your sexual settings (and, sex being what it is, almost everyone has some minor oddity in the closet), your political associations, your personal associations, or any of the other details of a life which might deviate from their own pious path.

A security clearance is, in other words, a cultural filter which is designed to assure that the higher reaches of government will be staffed by the conventional, the dutiful (generally younger or older than me), the strangely old paradigm Dan Quayle types nobody wanted to hang out with in college, or those of us who are willing to swear under oath that we never did any of the things that most of my generation did several times a week. (And that, in many cases, they still do.)

In fact, it assures that America will be run by people who are temperamentally quite different from the people they serve, unless you think that most Americans are like FBI agents and career military officers. (I think it's safe to say that a majority ofthe members of Association of Computing Machinery would have a hard time making it through this invisible Guard-All shield.) It certainly assures that it will be run by people who have roughly the same values, perceptions, view of the world...the same culture...which our fathers had. (Note that I do not say "mothers.")

Thanks to this engine of cultural self-propagation, the official culture of American government is straight from the Fifties. In the view of most of those now gathered around the misty summits of power, the Sixties were a period in which you either didn't participate or only did so by some mistake of which you are now soundly repentant. They were an experiment that failed. There was nothing to be learned from them. No consciousness

was altered for the better.

Indeed, consciousness is not a word they use there much, and certainly not in reference to anything more than the difference between waking and sleeping. In short, not much has changed in a very long time. Nor is it likely to in a environment in which the prevailing sentiment is that all change is for the worse.

Elsewhere, of course, things have changed, rather fundamentally and in many ways that arise directly from the lessons, insights, technologies, and paradigm shifts cut loose by the Sixties.

Elsewhere, the Cold War is over and America has other jobs besides preserving its borders against hostile attack. Indeed, all the political, cultural, and geographical boundaries over which humans glowered at one another from World War II until a few years ago seem barely functional constructs in the instantaneous reality most of us now inhabit.

The very idea which is so central to those who can get security clearances...the primacy of national security...bases itself on the premise that there is a clearly defined Nation to secure, that national borders are still meaningful, that there is something like an American consensus.

Exactly what is the United States of America these days? I recently asked a couple of Clinton/Gore staffers this question. What, I wanted to know, did they regard it their duty to protect?

Whatever pays taxes to Washington? Whatever lies within our traditional geographical boundaries? Whomever speaks English with an American accent, believes in Jesus and free markets, and beams his global reality from CNN above?

They looked at me funny, of course. "That's not the kind of question we ask around the White House," one of them said, dismissing me for some kind of

precious Post-Modernist ninny. They didn't ask questions like that because, as my father (or old Leonard) would have said, it just isn't practical.

However similar these fellows were to me in their age, education, intelligence, and general commitment to the human commonweal, they were on the other side of that cultural barricade, our fathers' side. They had security clearances. They had passed through a filter which vouchsafed their adherence to a paradigm which hasn't been mine since that fine day back in 1967 when I dropped acid for the first time, eliminating my shot of ever simultaneously being both an honest man and a high government official

I also eliminated on that day my sense that reality was a fact and not an opinion. But for these fellows, there were no new realities to accommodate because, as our fathers knew before us, reality is not something which might be mutable. Reality just is. As it always has been. World without end. That it might now be impractical not to ask such questions, or that failure to do so might be a form of institutionalized denial, has not apparently occurred to many in this or any other government in my lifetime.

The purpose of the foregoing rant is not quite as self-serving as it might appear. I'm not simply another old hippie belly-aching about his shattered dreams, though I'm certainly vulnerable to the charge. Nor am I whining over being excluded from government, nor even bragging that my mind is too expanded to fit through the artificially narrowed portals of power. It's also expanded enough to know that power is itselfa largely delusory condition from which I am well enough pleased to be excluded.

Rather, I'm trying to give you a context in which to understand a number of government actions and policies which baffled me until I understood who was promulgating them, how their directors looked at the world, and why that particular world view, quaint though it is, still seems to be in the promulgative driver's seat.

Readers of this column will hardly be surprised at the policies which snap most readily to my mind. They're things like:

What these policies have in common is an underlying assumption that we

still live on the crisply divided planet of our father's experience, a world where the Us/Them dichotomy is not open to conjecture and where They are so depraved and well-armed that few measures are too extreme to ensure our safety from them.

Those of who live in the world as it has become, and particularly those of us who live on the Net, may find it hard to believe that there enough Old Paradigm types left to staff the power end of the Executive Branch. But, as I say, the security clearance filter has managed to catch the few that are available.

In addition, the more evolved people who did somehow make the cut (usually by some lawyerly gavotte around certain questions) are soon subsumed into the mind-field on the other side of the security membrane. In a fairly short time, they drink that Kool-Aid and the result is straight out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I got a close-up look at this phenomenon recently while trying, with pitiful futility, to convince various White House officials of the folly of their freshly hardened positions on crypto. Though I knew that some of these folks had once been rather like me...indeed, I had known them when they were...they now seemed, well, different.

They were transfixed by the vision of the nuclear-armed terrorist, and they were ready to do just about anything, no matter how ridiculous, if it could seen as an honest effort to stop this heretofore unexperienced disaster. Within the strait confines of the national security logic, they were prepared dedicate the same level of wartime energy (and expediency regarding civil liberties) to protecting against nuclear horror that our fathers had when the other side had missiles rather than Ryder trucks to deliver its warheads.

Every time I thought I had them logically backed into some particularly goofy aspect of the Clipper "solution" to this threat, they would zip down the tautological rabbit hole of: "If you knew what we know and can't tell you, you'd feel the same way we do."

Where had I heard that phrase before? It was all-purpose "reason" behind which my father's generation pursued everything from the massive manufacture of nuclear weapons to the War in Vietnam.

It said that no matter how apparently senseless a governmental policy seemed to the unbriefed, there was certain knowledge, forbidden to all but our self-selecting guardians, in which lay the necessary components of reason. That argument didn't work for me then. It doesn't work for me now.

And it wouldn't have worked for Thomas Jefferson, who said: ""I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

It's time for the paternalism to end. And it's time we restored government by the people, such as we are, and not such as our fathers always wanted us to be.