Keeeping America Safe by Staking out the Local Starbucks

Dear George,

Future generations will have a real whoop and a holler over all the nonsense you’ve generated. The one thing a corporatized security state produces, besides oppression, is lowbrow humor.

Take the parasitic relationship between our defense policy and our tax code. America is bankrupting herself to pursue corporate goals overseas by launching unwinnable wars so we can secure oil, run pipelines and create a string of client (read captive) states. Meanwhile, as we drown in our red ink, the corporations we are helping are doing everything in their power to avoid paying the taxes that would help pay for our efforts to insure their prosperity.

It’s a case of the classic corporate one-liner: Privatize profits; externalize expenses.

However, all of this pales beside the sick humor generated by your Eternal War of the Empty Policy.

The newest comic to step up to the mike is the state of Colorado. Colorado is the latest state to sign on to a federal initiative to train Terrorism Liaison Officers, better known as snitches. The program trains firemen, policemen, paramedics and corporate employees to be on the lookout for “observed behavior that may be indicative of intelligence-gathering or pre-operational planning related to terrorism.”

Suspicious behaviors include, “taking photographs or videos of no apparent aesthetic value; making measurements, drawing, or taking notes; and conversing in code.”

Given the large Hispanic population in the state, I assume talking in code includes conversing in Spanish. There’s no telling what diabolic plots those brownskins are hatching.

Before they are turned loose on an unsuspecting public, Terrorism Liaison Officers are given twenty-four hours of training. I assume this training includes a crash course in aesthetics so the officers will be able to judge the aesthetic value of a retiree taking a picture of his wife standing on the plaque that marks the convergence of four states.

Once an alert officer notices this picture-taking retiree at work, he feeds the information into a local “fusion center” that is connected to a centralized government computer that is busily collecting similar bits of information about picture-snapping retirees and Spanish speaking suspects from all over the country.

This means that this government computer will be so clogged with data that a report from a TLO that Osama bin Laden was observed ordering a latte in a Boulder, Colorado Starbucks will be lost.

We will all sleep better tonight knowing that somewhere in Colorado a corporate middle manager is staking out the local Starbucks, waiting for Osama to appear.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones