Donald Craig Mitchell: Getting Punked by Fabulists in a Technological Society
In The Technological Society, published in 1954, the French political scientist Jacques Ellul predicted that within a decade or two or three the relentlessly intertwining tentacles of technological systems would take over the world and that, when they did, maintaining the integrity of the systems would become more important than the fate of any human being the systems were intended to benefit. Ellul also predicted that, when that happened, the only form of government capable of maintaining the integrity of the systems would be fascism.
I think of Jacques Ellul and his prescience every time I run my belt and car keys through a metal detector, take my shoes off without waiting to be told to do so at airports, or read another New York Times article about Pinwale, Stellar Wind, or one of the other semi-secret programs the National Security Agency has created since 9-11 to monitor the telephone, email, and text messaging communications of tens of millions of United States citizens. And in the years ahead the intrusion of the national security state into every facet of day-to-day life in the US of A is going to get worse. Because when compared to Britain, where in London more than 10,000 closed-circuit television cameras installed on street corners keep an Orwellian eye focused 24-7 on the citizenry, America has a long way yet to go.
I am resigned to that. But I still have enough spunk left in me to appreciate the occasional slave revolt. Which is why my new heroes of the moment are Michaele and Tariq Salahi, the Virginia hunt country socialites who recently crashed the White House state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
If Mr. and Mrs. Salahi had not posted their photo opportunities with Joe Biden and Katie Couric on Facebook, their get-away would have been clean and the Secret Service would have been none the wiser. But Michaele, who has been jockeying to bring herself to the attention of the producers of the “Real Wives of D.C.” TV reality show, and Tariq, her scofflaw spouse, did not want to get away clean. What they wanted is what their Big Adventure has gotten them: an appearance on the NBC Today show, an invitation they turned down to appear on Larry King Live, a “representative” who is working to try to incite a six figure bidding war between the television networks for the exclusive right to an interview, and, best of all, their own skit at the opening of last weekend’s Saturday Night Live. How much more fun can there be?
But while the Salahis have been enjoying themselves, on Capitol Hill and inside the White House and the Secret Service there has been blow-back.
Last week the House Committee on Homeland Security hauled Mark Sullivan, the director of the Secret Service, into the dock to explain how Tariq, with Michaele on his arm, so easily breached the White House security perimeter. The Republican members of the Committee want Desiree Roberts, the White House social secretary, to take the fall because she demoted the member of her staff whose job during the George W. Bush administration had been to stand with a clip board at the east portico entrance to the White House and check off the names of guests invited to social events as they arrived. But so far the only confirmed scapegoats have been the three uniformed Secret Service agents who, with night coming on and rain drizzling and several hundred dressed to the nine guests backing up behind them, allowed Michaele and Tariq to two-step their way through the metal detectors and into the pre-dinner reception.
When he was asked how he thought that could have happened, Ralph Basham, who preceded Mark Sullivan as director of the Secret Service, said: “That individual agent apparently made a unilateral decision that that person doesn’t look like a threat and let’s not cause a back up in processing with the others in line.”
But that explanation does not explain why that agent made that decision. But the answer is as simple as it is age-old: as the photographs on her Facebook page document, Michaele Salahi is hot. And that evening with her blond hair cascading into her eyes and down below her shoulders and wearing a red sari to celebrate the Indian theme, she looked terrific. And I am willing to bet the mortgage that the three agents who allowed her through security even though she and her husband were not on the guest list were middle-aged.
That’s my theory because I once saw it happen.
For reasons serendipitous, between 1978 and 1980 former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and I were co-counsel in Washington, D.C., for the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) during the years Congress was considering H.R. 39, the bill it enacted in 1980 as the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). Stewart did the heavy political lifting. I was the thirtysomething who worked the halls of the Senate and House office buildings and kept in day-to-day touch with Committee staffs and the other lobbyists who were part of the swirl.
The fight over H.R. 39, which was terrific fun, pitted a consortium of national environmental organizations and the Carter Department of the Interior against the State of Alaska and the oil, mining, and timber industries over creating new national parks and wildlife refuges in Alaska and designating tens of millions of acres of Alaska as “wilderness” in which no economic development can occur. The fight ended on November 12, 1980 when the week after Ronald Reagan was elected to succeed Jimmy Carter as President, Representative Morris Udall, the chief sponsor of H.R. 39, begrudgingly urged the House to accept the version of the bill that Senator Henry Jackson, the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, had shepherded through the Senate.
A week or so later I received a telephone call from someone in the White House who informed me that President Carter would sign ANILCA into law on December 2 at a signing ceremony in the East Room. I also was told that twenty or thirty seats had been reserved for whomever AFN wanted to invite, and that I would be responsible for coordinating the logistics.
One of the reasons the fight over H.R. 39 was such fun was that thirty years ago I had the run of Capitol Hill. There were no metal detectors and I could travel through the tunnels underneath the Capitol Hill campus, as well as back and forth between the House and Senate chambers in the Capitol Building. And there was not all that much more security anywhere else in Washington, D.C. In front of the White House, Pennsylvania Avenue was clogged with traffic. And anyone who wanted to could walk the narrow path that runs between the White House and the Treasury Department.
Security was so lax at the Department of the Interior that after the “guards” got to know me, when friends who worked at the Department and I would return from lunch, the guards not only would wave me through without having to sign in, because they were with me, the guards also would wave my friends through without requiring them to show their Department of the Interior IDs.
In that security environment, to get the individuals on the AFN guest list for the ANILCA signing ceremony into the White House all I was required to do was provide the Secret Service with names and social security numbers. When he or she arrived at the White House, each individual on the list had to show his or her driver’s license. That was all there was to it.
An hour before the signing ceremony I stationed myself at the gate at the southwest entrance to the White House grounds in order to be on hand in case any of the individuals on the AFN guest list had any problems. It was a sunny and, for that time of the year, quite warm winter day and the two or three hundred guests who had been invited to the signing ceremony moved through the gate without incident. At the gate a guest would show his or her driver’s license to the guard who would check the guest’s name off his list. Then the guest would walk up the driveway to the White House and make his or her way, pretty much on his or her own, to the East Room.
That system worked great until Dee Olin arrived. Dee was the twenty-nine-year-old mayor of Ruby, a small Athabascan Indian village on the Yukon River. When Dee reached into her handbag for her wallet which contained her driver’s license she realized she had left her wallet in her hotel room. But tough luck. Even though the name Dee Olin was on his list and even though I vouched that the woman standing at the gate was known to me to be Dee Olin, the guard was insistent. No driver’s license, no entrance.
That is until Dee went to work on him. In 1980 Dee Olin, with her mane of black hair, almond eyes, and stop traffic body, was a stone cold Penelope Cruz-quality fox. But after five minutes of eyelash-batting and cajoling, while I could see him weakening, the guard remained reluctantly adamant. The rule was the rule. No identification no entrance.
Seemingly out of luck, Dee thought for a moment and then had an inspiration. She reached into her handbag and pulled out a copy of the Spring 1979 edition of The Alaska Journal, a quarterly arts magazine that marketed a romanticized view of life in the Alaska bush, principally to tourists. Dee thumbed through to page 11 and there it was: a four-page article, with photographs, profiling “Dee Olin Mayor of Ruby” who “battles with bureaucracy to improve the lives of Ruby’s 200-plus residents.” One photograph showed Dee having lunch with Bella Hammond, the Governor’s wife. Another was a full-page color photograph of Dee wearing a plaid shirt and beaded moose skin moccasins sitting on the bed in her cabin in Ruby petting a sled dog.
Dee gave the guard the copy of The Alaska Journal turned to the page that featured the color photograph. Then she said, “See, it’s me. Dee Olin.” The guard looked at the photograph, looked at Dee, looked back at the photograph, looked again at Dee and then said, “That’s you alright.” And then he let her through the gate. If Stuart Knight, the director of the Secret Service, had seen him do so, he would have cashiered the guard who succumbed so easily to Dee’s pheromonic charm on the spot.
Dee and I and everyone else who were invited had a terrific time at the signing ceremony and the reception that followed. And Dee (who unlike Michaele Salahi could have been carrying a hand gun or a buck knife in her handbag) did not attempt to assassinate Jimmy Carter by sprinkling him with anthrax as several pundits have suggested that Michaele could have done if she had wanted to assassinate Barack Obama (and if she had known how to manufacture anthrax and if she had had access to a laboratory in which to do so).
That was then. Even I understand that now is now. But it’s still a shame that the national security state is wrapped so hard around the axle that it cannot take a joke. The joke is that the Secret Service got punked by two fabulists. And so what? In 1997, 2001, and 2003 the Very Reverend Richard “the Handshake” Weaver, a whack job preacher, crashed two presidential inaugurations and a National Prayer Breakfast to shake hands with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. And Dick Tuck spent forty years punking Richard Nixon. Including, so urban legend has it, by hiring an elderly woman wearing a Nixon for President button who the evening after the Kennedy-Nixon television debate, and with the Secret Service looking on, hugged Milhous on camera as she cheerfully counseled: “Don’t worry son. He beat you last night, but you’ll get him next time.”
But rather than the Secret Service chalking off the Salahis’ Big Adventure to experience, news sources are reporting that the Department of Justice may charge Michaele and Tareq with a felony for having committed the crime of fibbing to the three officers who let them through their checkpoint. If they are charged, watching CNN in his cave in the mountains of Pakistan, Osama bin Laden undoubtedly will chortle over what, beyond his wildest expectation, his nineteen guys armed with box-cutters have frightened America into doing to itself. But bin Laden would be claiming too much credit.
Because as Jacques Ellul explained in The Technological Society, no technological system can allow its integrity to be breached. Not for any reason. Not by anyone. Unfortunately for Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the guys with the box cutters hurried things along.
Read entire article at The Mudflats
I think of Jacques Ellul and his prescience every time I run my belt and car keys through a metal detector, take my shoes off without waiting to be told to do so at airports, or read another New York Times article about Pinwale, Stellar Wind, or one of the other semi-secret programs the National Security Agency has created since 9-11 to monitor the telephone, email, and text messaging communications of tens of millions of United States citizens. And in the years ahead the intrusion of the national security state into every facet of day-to-day life in the US of A is going to get worse. Because when compared to Britain, where in London more than 10,000 closed-circuit television cameras installed on street corners keep an Orwellian eye focused 24-7 on the citizenry, America has a long way yet to go.
I am resigned to that. But I still have enough spunk left in me to appreciate the occasional slave revolt. Which is why my new heroes of the moment are Michaele and Tariq Salahi, the Virginia hunt country socialites who recently crashed the White House state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
If Mr. and Mrs. Salahi had not posted their photo opportunities with Joe Biden and Katie Couric on Facebook, their get-away would have been clean and the Secret Service would have been none the wiser. But Michaele, who has been jockeying to bring herself to the attention of the producers of the “Real Wives of D.C.” TV reality show, and Tariq, her scofflaw spouse, did not want to get away clean. What they wanted is what their Big Adventure has gotten them: an appearance on the NBC Today show, an invitation they turned down to appear on Larry King Live, a “representative” who is working to try to incite a six figure bidding war between the television networks for the exclusive right to an interview, and, best of all, their own skit at the opening of last weekend’s Saturday Night Live. How much more fun can there be?
But while the Salahis have been enjoying themselves, on Capitol Hill and inside the White House and the Secret Service there has been blow-back.
Last week the House Committee on Homeland Security hauled Mark Sullivan, the director of the Secret Service, into the dock to explain how Tariq, with Michaele on his arm, so easily breached the White House security perimeter. The Republican members of the Committee want Desiree Roberts, the White House social secretary, to take the fall because she demoted the member of her staff whose job during the George W. Bush administration had been to stand with a clip board at the east portico entrance to the White House and check off the names of guests invited to social events as they arrived. But so far the only confirmed scapegoats have been the three uniformed Secret Service agents who, with night coming on and rain drizzling and several hundred dressed to the nine guests backing up behind them, allowed Michaele and Tariq to two-step their way through the metal detectors and into the pre-dinner reception.
When he was asked how he thought that could have happened, Ralph Basham, who preceded Mark Sullivan as director of the Secret Service, said: “That individual agent apparently made a unilateral decision that that person doesn’t look like a threat and let’s not cause a back up in processing with the others in line.”
But that explanation does not explain why that agent made that decision. But the answer is as simple as it is age-old: as the photographs on her Facebook page document, Michaele Salahi is hot. And that evening with her blond hair cascading into her eyes and down below her shoulders and wearing a red sari to celebrate the Indian theme, she looked terrific. And I am willing to bet the mortgage that the three agents who allowed her through security even though she and her husband were not on the guest list were middle-aged.
That’s my theory because I once saw it happen.
For reasons serendipitous, between 1978 and 1980 former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and I were co-counsel in Washington, D.C., for the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) during the years Congress was considering H.R. 39, the bill it enacted in 1980 as the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). Stewart did the heavy political lifting. I was the thirtysomething who worked the halls of the Senate and House office buildings and kept in day-to-day touch with Committee staffs and the other lobbyists who were part of the swirl.
The fight over H.R. 39, which was terrific fun, pitted a consortium of national environmental organizations and the Carter Department of the Interior against the State of Alaska and the oil, mining, and timber industries over creating new national parks and wildlife refuges in Alaska and designating tens of millions of acres of Alaska as “wilderness” in which no economic development can occur. The fight ended on November 12, 1980 when the week after Ronald Reagan was elected to succeed Jimmy Carter as President, Representative Morris Udall, the chief sponsor of H.R. 39, begrudgingly urged the House to accept the version of the bill that Senator Henry Jackson, the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, had shepherded through the Senate.
A week or so later I received a telephone call from someone in the White House who informed me that President Carter would sign ANILCA into law on December 2 at a signing ceremony in the East Room. I also was told that twenty or thirty seats had been reserved for whomever AFN wanted to invite, and that I would be responsible for coordinating the logistics.
One of the reasons the fight over H.R. 39 was such fun was that thirty years ago I had the run of Capitol Hill. There were no metal detectors and I could travel through the tunnels underneath the Capitol Hill campus, as well as back and forth between the House and Senate chambers in the Capitol Building. And there was not all that much more security anywhere else in Washington, D.C. In front of the White House, Pennsylvania Avenue was clogged with traffic. And anyone who wanted to could walk the narrow path that runs between the White House and the Treasury Department.
Security was so lax at the Department of the Interior that after the “guards” got to know me, when friends who worked at the Department and I would return from lunch, the guards not only would wave me through without having to sign in, because they were with me, the guards also would wave my friends through without requiring them to show their Department of the Interior IDs.
In that security environment, to get the individuals on the AFN guest list for the ANILCA signing ceremony into the White House all I was required to do was provide the Secret Service with names and social security numbers. When he or she arrived at the White House, each individual on the list had to show his or her driver’s license. That was all there was to it.
An hour before the signing ceremony I stationed myself at the gate at the southwest entrance to the White House grounds in order to be on hand in case any of the individuals on the AFN guest list had any problems. It was a sunny and, for that time of the year, quite warm winter day and the two or three hundred guests who had been invited to the signing ceremony moved through the gate without incident. At the gate a guest would show his or her driver’s license to the guard who would check the guest’s name off his list. Then the guest would walk up the driveway to the White House and make his or her way, pretty much on his or her own, to the East Room.
That system worked great until Dee Olin arrived. Dee was the twenty-nine-year-old mayor of Ruby, a small Athabascan Indian village on the Yukon River. When Dee reached into her handbag for her wallet which contained her driver’s license she realized she had left her wallet in her hotel room. But tough luck. Even though the name Dee Olin was on his list and even though I vouched that the woman standing at the gate was known to me to be Dee Olin, the guard was insistent. No driver’s license, no entrance.
That is until Dee went to work on him. In 1980 Dee Olin, with her mane of black hair, almond eyes, and stop traffic body, was a stone cold Penelope Cruz-quality fox. But after five minutes of eyelash-batting and cajoling, while I could see him weakening, the guard remained reluctantly adamant. The rule was the rule. No identification no entrance.
Seemingly out of luck, Dee thought for a moment and then had an inspiration. She reached into her handbag and pulled out a copy of the Spring 1979 edition of The Alaska Journal, a quarterly arts magazine that marketed a romanticized view of life in the Alaska bush, principally to tourists. Dee thumbed through to page 11 and there it was: a four-page article, with photographs, profiling “Dee Olin Mayor of Ruby” who “battles with bureaucracy to improve the lives of Ruby’s 200-plus residents.” One photograph showed Dee having lunch with Bella Hammond, the Governor’s wife. Another was a full-page color photograph of Dee wearing a plaid shirt and beaded moose skin moccasins sitting on the bed in her cabin in Ruby petting a sled dog.
Dee gave the guard the copy of The Alaska Journal turned to the page that featured the color photograph. Then she said, “See, it’s me. Dee Olin.” The guard looked at the photograph, looked at Dee, looked back at the photograph, looked again at Dee and then said, “That’s you alright.” And then he let her through the gate. If Stuart Knight, the director of the Secret Service, had seen him do so, he would have cashiered the guard who succumbed so easily to Dee’s pheromonic charm on the spot.
Dee and I and everyone else who were invited had a terrific time at the signing ceremony and the reception that followed. And Dee (who unlike Michaele Salahi could have been carrying a hand gun or a buck knife in her handbag) did not attempt to assassinate Jimmy Carter by sprinkling him with anthrax as several pundits have suggested that Michaele could have done if she had wanted to assassinate Barack Obama (and if she had known how to manufacture anthrax and if she had had access to a laboratory in which to do so).
That was then. Even I understand that now is now. But it’s still a shame that the national security state is wrapped so hard around the axle that it cannot take a joke. The joke is that the Secret Service got punked by two fabulists. And so what? In 1997, 2001, and 2003 the Very Reverend Richard “the Handshake” Weaver, a whack job preacher, crashed two presidential inaugurations and a National Prayer Breakfast to shake hands with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. And Dick Tuck spent forty years punking Richard Nixon. Including, so urban legend has it, by hiring an elderly woman wearing a Nixon for President button who the evening after the Kennedy-Nixon television debate, and with the Secret Service looking on, hugged Milhous on camera as she cheerfully counseled: “Don’t worry son. He beat you last night, but you’ll get him next time.”
But rather than the Secret Service chalking off the Salahis’ Big Adventure to experience, news sources are reporting that the Department of Justice may charge Michaele and Tareq with a felony for having committed the crime of fibbing to the three officers who let them through their checkpoint. If they are charged, watching CNN in his cave in the mountains of Pakistan, Osama bin Laden undoubtedly will chortle over what, beyond his wildest expectation, his nineteen guys armed with box-cutters have frightened America into doing to itself. But bin Laden would be claiming too much credit.
Because as Jacques Ellul explained in The Technological Society, no technological system can allow its integrity to be breached. Not for any reason. Not by anyone. Unfortunately for Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the guys with the box cutters hurried things along.