Edward Snowden

It is said that America loves an underdog. That's nonsense of course. Like all countries, America worships success and probably worships the visible signs of success--cars, money, power, and fame--more avidly than other countries.

We are (after all) the heirs of successive waves of frugal Calvinists, thrifty Scots and Germans, stingy Jews and impoverished Irish immigrants (to mention only the most conspicuous players)who expected a payoff for their labour and got it.

To quote the poet laureate of muscular America, "Nothing like us ever was."

The other side of success is failure. And just as America loves a winner, it also gloats over losers, especially if the loser is a former winner.

This is nothing special to America; it seems to have been hardwired into human consciousness in antiquity--it's the essence of Greek tragedy and Biblical kingship: Lo, how the mighty are fallen. Every great city shall be brought low.

So when a nobody, for no reason, at no particular time, can challenge the World's Greatest Democracy and embarrass it in front of its adversaries, and friends, a certain kind of Granny Comeuppance will say "Well done."

When it can be done with the cameras rolling to humiliate the President of the United States just as he is about to lecture the President of China on cyber-spying and human rights, it a David and Goliath moment, sort of. When the world's most durable alliance can be thrown off track for a week (to the applause of the orchestra) by the "revelation" that the espionage services of the United States have tracked the mobile phone of Germany's Chancellor, who does not chortle, who does not crow? Bloody Us, we liberals say. Bloody Americans say the others.

I know I am not alone in feeling a little weary about the whole Snowden debate. I confess I cannot begin to understand the definition being used by those who see him as a hero--a man who deliberately went to work for a spy agency, took an oath not to betray its secrets (after all, lives are at risk all over the world), violates that oath in a manner that can only be seen as conspiratorial and designed to do harm; sells his government's secrets [sic] to the highest bidder, and flees the country like a common thief only to proclaim a victory for democracy in a country that is unrivaled for enforcing the kinds of fascist policies towards freedom of expression that he is supposed to be opposing in his own country.

This totally irrational scenario then concludes with the two newspapers who bought the pilfered jewels (and presumably keep him flush and with Russian girl-friends) touting a victory for free speech and press and winning a Pulitzer Prize for--public service. The irrational now crowned with the incredible. The mighty have fallen; the humble have been exalted.

This whole mess has severely dented my liberal credentials.

Like almost everyone else of my university generation, I cheered when Daniel Ellsberg did what he did to expose the strategies of a war in Vietnam, a war that cost almost 60,000 American lives--and countless Vietnamese. At last we had confirmation that our worst suspicions were grounded in a kind of nightmarish reality. Our leaders were lying to us: there was no way out, no victory, no way forward, and a "planned withdrawal" that was little more than a trail of carnage and death that the United States could not afford to call defeat.

VietNam was not about spying. It was about war. But unless I radically misunderstand the purposes of the NSA, one of their primary missions is to reduce the risk of civilian casualties by keeping track of violent men (and women) who never tire of plotting against "the West". That is not a paranoid delusion; it is a reality. There is simply no good analogy between Vietnam and NSA spying, a very basic fact that Snowden's fans, who seem desperate to fix on a new progressive anti-establishment hero-- routinely miss or dismiss. -Why let logic and truth interrupt the quest for a new David?

It is a shame, of course,indeed an outrage, that the former US president exploited paranoia for political purposes by invading and fighting a war in a bystander country. But that piece of lunacy has to be kept separate from the question of Edward Snowden: what Edward Snowden did, with malice aforethought and personal gain and harm in view, was treacherous. I happen to think his revelations were unimpressive. But I also think that if he had had more to sell, he would have sold it. Most of his revelations were pimples that the media tried to turn into festering sores. Flash: The NSA gathers data.

Not all whistle blowers are created equal. The human love for a new David bringing down the muscle-bound Philistine was forgivable before we had a clear sense of the man behind the newspaper story. But with each day that passes, the new story is Snowden himself: his self-serving smirk, his delusions of rectitude, his stage-managed persona. His call-in to the Putin Show last week was, for many people, the revelation of a man who is barely there at all, a hollow man with straw purposes. He looks intellectually thin, weak, petulant and self-serving.

And yet, and yet: as we await the second coming, there is something about Edward Snowden's new brand of heroism that is perfectly representative of our age. Nathan Hale, the American spy hanged by the British in 1776 is said to have said "I regret I have but one life to give for my country." What, in his secluded and protected penthouse outside Moscow, does Edward Snowden regret?