the drama of secrecy revisited

Music: The Today Show

Last Friday the New York Times decided to publish a story about a secret government program that monitored a financial database known as SWIFT in their seemingly never-ending quest for "terrorists." Sunday partisan politicians blasted and defended the move, and on Monday both the president and vice-president publicly slammed the Times for compromising "national security." The story marks an increasingly emboldened—but not emboldened enough—press, no doubt a consequence of mounds and mounds of evidence of sanctioned (in both senses) abuse and torture by various U.S. federal agencies ever since Herr Commander declared a state of exception on September 20, 2001. In the name of a war on a rather abstract but highly connotative noun, it would seem one can prolong this state of exception indefinitely as long as evil lurks in men's hearts.

After the widely publicized abuse of "prisoners" at Abu Ghraib, the U.S. sponsorship of anti-humanitarian efforts has been hard to ignore, and I daresay many of us have been inoculated—if not downright worn-out—by all these stories of my government's turn to the darkside . . . or should I say, the public turn to the darkside? Regardless, this particular story intrigues me because the defense of secrecy is at issue. The Grand Wizard of our country maintains secrecy is what allows the U.S. government to prevent events like Nine-eleven. Representative Peter King of New York said that the expose on Friday was really the attempt of the editors of the New York Times to advance "its own arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda before the interests of the American people." So-called democrats have defended the Times by suggesting the CIA/Treasury department program is abusive and part of a tradition of secret abuse that stretches back to the phone-tapping surveillance that began shortly after Nine-eleven.

As I write this, the NBC report about the melee between the Times and the Bush Administration story has just ended, and is now reporting (if you can call it that) about the Harry Potter Book series: "Will Rowling Kill off Harry Potter?" The report is about a publicity tease in which the author of the book series has hinted two characters would die in the final book. "I've never been tempted to till off Harry until the book seven," said Rowling.

Now, since I'm horribly predictable, most of y'all know where I'm going with this: the stories about government secrecy and Harry Potter publicity are not merely coincidental: since the emergence of tabloid or "yellow" journalism in the late nineteenth century the sensational exposure and reporting of "secrets" has been the bread and butter of the Fourth Estate: as David Byrne sings, "same as it ever was." The current melee between the wizards of the All-Seeing Sauron's Tower and the Dark Tower of My Tax Dollars is merely part of an ongoing creation and revelation of secrets. Indeed, in our time of spectacle and surveillance, the art of politics can be defined as the interplay of secrecy and publicity. This is why Rep. King is wrong about the Times "left-wing agenda" (we need only point to their relentless critique of academics affiliated with the humanities in the last twenty years). This is why both brands of magic are premised on the delusion of novelty.