In the early nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon, a prison where the guards can watch the prisoners, but the prisoners don’t know when they are being watched. As Neal Stephenson observed in his Baroque Cycle series, the net effect is to hack the minds of the prisoners, who basically become their own wardens.

A couple of weeks ago computer security pundit Bruce Schneier published a marvelous article entitled “Refuse to Be Terrorized” about what’s become our country’s very own Panopticon … the 24-hour media-fueled firehose of The Awful Things You Should Be Afraid Of. Which only serves to make people more afraid, and which, in the end, is Exactly what a terrorist is after.

In a way, it’s a Curse of the Dumb. We almost yearn to believe bizarre stories and like to scare ourselves to death. To this day I am still stunned by the number of my friends who pass along those stupid Internet Chain Mail things (”People who pass this email to 10 friends experience uncanny good luck, and to break the chain risks certain death!”). Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon forged entire political careers making vague and ominous suggestions about communist boogiemen hiding under our very noses, plotting our demise. And people believed it. People seem to want to believe it. Most people simply believe it without bothering to think about it, even a little … either it seems plausible, or inevitable, or appeals to deep-seated insecurities, and, after all, everyone else seems to think so, right? And after a while, enough of the population is in just such a state that the Panopticon Effect kicks in, and they simply scare themselves with little or no provocation (”I’ve heard that a terrorist with just a tube of Prell Shampoo and that Gillette Foamy shaving cream can create a nuclear bomb in an airplane bathroom!”) And then whole masses of people can be easily shifted into mindless fear with anything: “Arggh! If the Democrats get in, Gays will start to get married! Dogs and Cats will start burning flags! Civilization as we know it will come crashing to a horrible, firey end!!!”

The people that take advantage of this simply fuel the fires and watch for opportunities … Karl Rove and Osama bin Laden work from very much the same playbook.

Every generation produces its share of nut cases, and with a little communal intelligence, society can take care of most problems. These aren’t demons, they’re just criminals. We got Capone. We got Charlie Manson. We can’t stop bad things from happening, but if we stay calm, we can usually figure out how to solve these problems. Yeah, there are mistakes. A rhyming attorney can get a jury to acquit a football player guilty of a double murder (you want to scare yourself … imagine what could have happened if Dr. Seuss had gotten onto the Supreme Court.) A Saudi terrorist hiding in Pakistan somehow inspires a US administration to invade Iraq. But on a large scale, if you treat these problems as deviates from the norm, rather than the Gathering Clouds of Impending Doom, getting around to effective solutions is a whole lot easier, and involves far fewer people getting hurt.

Excellent column by David Goodman in the Boston Globe today, “Reading, Writing, and Recruiting“, exploring how the “No Child Left Behind” initiative enables the military to gather names of entering high school freshman for recruiting purposes down the road. A parent’s only defense an opt-out card that arrives with the mountain of forms that every school year seems to start with. Goodman says their card was hard to find. [We thought that the one for our daughter was simply missing, only to discover that the damn notice is on Page 20 of the Student Handbook advising anyone who wants to opt out that they’d better do it by week three of the school year. We will be following up on that.] Goodman also identifies a group working to make this process a little more visible (specifically Leave My Child Alone).

Like Vietnam, it is becoming apparent that the war in Iraq is a Corporate War directed by (to steal a line from Garrison Keillor) “The Bald-Faced Vandalism of Old Men in Suits”, and our kids are sitting on the wrong end of a Return on Investment calculation in the oil business.

Many young men and women enter the military seeking opportunity, and all take on a commitment to courage and service. In return, they’ve been sent into a conflict unrelated to the ‘War on Terror’ by a pack of half-wit poli-sci majors, professional opportunists, and neo-fascists. Of course, say that out loud and you’re accused of not supporting the troops. But the fact is that if you respected the troops at all, you would not trivialize what they put on the line. Get those men and women home. Protect your own kids from the hard sell jingoism that would throw them into this failed foreign policy. Fight the power, baby. Americans will stand up to a real threat, but man, this ain’t it.