Pig Latin

Say, if USA convictsSnowden, could we then use him as captured labor or parole him to work for the NSA.  I could see a Tea Party President using him as 4^th Amendment snoop on NSA reporting to Congress and to the People and to their several states. You know you have to use talent wherever you find it. 

    So if I have foreign exchange students who are like sons and daughters, with whom I communicate with emails constantly, are these being monitored by NSA?  If I express political opinion in those emails, could they haul me in?  (Well, I know, I’m hardly worth the jail space.)  One of our German exchange daughters told about her and a friend riding the trains in France headed for a fun weekend in Paris.  And all the French passengers were listening-in on their German conversation.  Because suddenly some of them wanted to take issue with what the girls were saying.  Annoyed, the kids began using English, only to discover that the French understood that too.  So they began using English pig-Latin and it made all the darned Frenchmen mad because they scowled and crossed their arms in protest.  Evidently they couldn’t understand pig-Latin. 

    Err, then do the rest of us need to develop a pig latin so that future governments won’t be able to understand what we are talking about?  The OK Indians have a solution.  Just speak in native language.  Very few people with understand it and the government has no one to translate.  Windtalkers.  My friend is in charge of getting Ponca Tribal teens to learn the Ponca language.  Few have much interest and only about 20 people are still fluent in the native tongue. 

     “Oh, you are so paranoid!” You will say.  “The government is collecting data on everyone and has no intent to use it.”  Of course.  Perhaps we should suspect nothing and just assure ourselves that all is well.  Every person in government has good intentions.  That is what the Germans did in 1934.  Then came the Night of the Long Knives when people started showing up at Bundestag (parliament) member’s homes, threatening them not to show up for a vote in the Reichstag.  Mostly the Nazi members attended and immediately declared marshal law.  The rest, as they say, is history.

    “So Mr. Maldono, we see you are a political activist that opposes the present regime.  If you would give up your activism we might be willing to give your granddaughter that lung transplant she needs so desperately.”  The NSA data center as well as IRS privacy violations in behalf of Obamacare is insidious.  If the 4^th Amendment’s unreasonable search and seizure clause doesn’t apply to this, when and where will it ever?

    But, you may protest my logic.  Obama is a cool guy and he would never violate anyone’s privacy.  Well in that case, another friend of mine is correct.  He deflects my concerns about how Obama might violate civil rights.  Obama, he says, is more like James I of England /Scotland than Mussolini or Stalin. He might be right. There is a dire warning.  James was the son of Catholic Mary Stuart when she was run out of Scotland, sought refuge in England, was thereupon imprisoned for 19 years and tragically beheaded.  James was crowned king of the Scots at the tender age of 10 months.  Raised by nannies and tutors to be a Protestant, he was very bright, and educated as well as any man in Europe in an era when most Scots couldn’t write their name.  But what do you get when you have a king who can’t remember when he wasn’t the king, had missing parents, and everyone bowed to him.  You get a narcissist, an egotist who thinks the world revolves around him.  (sounding familiar?)  James then inherited England when Elizabeth died in 1603.  He was not so much a tyrant as a college professor who was a king.  He was not too serious about religion and very squeamish about war.  When Germany was getting destroyed by the Hapsburgs in the Thirty Years War, James wouldn’t commit to help the endangered fellow Protestants, despite pleas by his parliament and privy council.  He derided parliament and badmouthed them. Disgusted, they issued the Great Protestation of 1621, whereupon he disbanded parliament in a clever move to get around the rules.  Finally, to appease the polls against himself, James declared a futile war against Spain in 1624.  Most historians think that if James had countered Austria, the Thirty Years War would have ended in a couple years—the 5 Years War?-- instead of killing half the population of Central Europe. The Thirty Years War should technically be called the first world war since it destroyed so much of Europe and eventually included just about every country (Sounds like Syria, when Obama doesn’t commit to action until the situation is too late and sets up the entire Middle East to explode. 

     James ruled both Presbyterian Scotland and Anglican England with differing faiths.  James decided to solve this by calling the Hampton Court Conference in which he declared that not only did he have a divine right to rule but that his word on doctrine was infallible.  This was a stunning thing, for only the popes had claimed this last.  The Conference went home more divided than ever.  Yet James, typically loose about faith issues, didn’t enforce his decree.  He was a scholar miscast as a ruler.  (There was one saving grace of Hampton, the resolution of the clergy to authorize the King James Bible.)  James was too wishy-washy to follow his edict, but he set in motion, the Great Revolution against his son, Charles.  Maybe this really is like Obama. Not the achiever, but the divider and critic of every other institution.  Not the hawk but the dodo.  Not the law writer, but the orator. Not the dictator, but setting us up for one.