Victor Keegan makes a good point in this morning's
Guardian about surveillance cameras (of which there are apparently almost half a million in the capital - while the average citizen is supposedly caught on CCTV about 30 times in the course of a day). Even though his signoff is the classically non-committal "Either way, Bin Laden will have won", Keegan says:
"The danger from all this is that few people will object as long as there is a serious threat of terrorism. But once (if?) the threat subsides, the infrastructure of surveillance will remain. Then it might not be the police reconstructing a fuzzy image from a crowd to catch a terrorist but an employee of the imaging company extorting money from someone found in a compromising position."and he concludes:
"If George Orwell were alive now (21 years after the London he depicted in '1984') he would be astonished by the fact that the sort of surveillance he feared is supported not by a government imposing it from above on an unwilling population but by a groundswell of popular support." Expect this to be the first in a series of long-running
police actions against abstract concepts.
Never too early, I guess, to speculate on who might run in 2008.
Indianapolis Monthly has a profile of Evan Bayh, one of the he-who-would-be's...
Excerpt:
"For Evan Bayh—the political prodigy always among the great mentioned for president and vice president, elected statewide five times but still pegged as an “empty suit,” regarded as perfect on paper but too risk-averse to win the big one—the long-awaited someday is now."While
this guy's blog makes an interesting point about Bayh's cross-over potential.
I've always liked what I've read about Bayh, and believed he might have made a better VP pick than Edwards last time.
Last summer, I was at CNN for a broadcast of Aaron Brown's show with a friend of mine who works there. Bayh was the guest via videolink, and the revealing thing was not what he said on-air, but what he and Brown talked about during the ad breaks.
Bayh was obviously angry at particular Republicans and their hypocrisy over the war, but wouldn't say so on camera. His pragmatism was understandable, I suppose, and doubtless no more or less than any other aspirant, but you have to wonder if he would be able to manifest the sort of genuine passion that Democrats hoped - in vain - for in Gore and Kerry.
Finally,
my kind of headline. Thank God! I saw the breaking news and the early shots of the crash, and it looked like there was no way anyone, let alone everyone, could have walked away.
Sort of puts everything in perspective. You just never know when your world will be turned upside down. Never miss the chance to tell the people you care about how you feel.
