May 2008 Archives

Now I have an inkling of how it feels to be Britney Spears. The girl is a walking economic stimulus agent. Her very existence supports thousands of individuals -- from paparazzi to copy editors to advertising executives. My case has been that of an unwitting commodity for intelligence contractors who have given nearly everyone in my life the opportunity to make some cash off of information, solicitation or entrapment.

These are people with bumper stickers like "Live Simply So Others May Simply Live." People who take their dogs on generous afternoon hikes on the sides of mountains before studying the I Ching. Individuals who ride their bikes, buy organic, and play benefit concerts in their quasi-hipster alt-country bands. Who among them would like to think of themselves as akin to Nazi collaborators? I can't even simply equate them with "Good Germans" who stood by and did nothing as the Jews were dehumanized and eventually carted off. They were/are modern day willing executioners.

I don't know many veterans yet. I will. 

Surviving a year of intense government-sanctioned spying has changed me. Post-traumatic feelings of safety and trust will be hard-won. The pain of constant betrayal twinned with the stigma of seeming crazy to those who can't fathom it are difficult to describe.  

So, I know how much this has impacted my life and how much time and effort it will take to recover, and how I'd just like to live in a spa for six months. Looking at it in relative terms, I was under a sort of cushy guerrilla house arrest -- as long as I was at home and not being manipulated or lied to by "friends" I was safe (though constantly monitored). 

I was never cold or hungry or exposed to depleted uranium, or dodging sniper fire. I didn't have to see friends and civilians killed, or hear agonized screams and cries. I wasn't required to kill.

Imagine recovering from combat. How do people come home to their families after facing such unending stress and horrors? How do they ever find "normal" again? Deal with becoming disabled and struggling to pay the bills, or being stuck at Walter Reed? We have over 300,000 troops suffering from PTSD and a veteran suicide epidemic.

Veterans should never have to want for anything again. They should finish their days in absolute comfort, have the best medical and psychological care, housing credits, and scholarships for their children. Veterans should not be homeless. That it took domestic, government-sanctioned repression for me to "get" to some small degree what it would be like to recover from military work is one of many unexpected gifts and ironies.

Update: Since writing this, I have discovered that a certain set of Republican/Religious Right operatives is somewhat obsessed with my sexual habits, and seems to have shared them with their foot soldiers. God bless hidden cameras and chatty therapists! (If the harassment continues, you'll get to know all about some of these folks.)

Since puberty I've struggled with two major sexuality-related themes: how to be both smart and happily sexual, and how to get out from under the culturally-ingrained notion of my sexuality as some sort of commodity.

Ironically, my sexuality seems to have literally become a commodity in the form of tape(s) purchased by government contractors. The reason? My environmentally- and rights-preoccupied brain.

While all of this surveillance/harassment has been happening in the last year, I've constantly tried to piece together why. Now a number of events have made clear that at least part of it was an aspect of the $250 million anti-environmental PR industry that was trying to recruit me. This makes so much more sense than a variety of other explanations, and actually makes me feel a lot more hopeful about the dismal state of civil liberties in the U.S. I wasn't targeted just because of my political beliefs, but because of my very specific theory/activism/PR skill set, and the fact that my course of study had the potential to do great damage to anti-environmental PR efforts.

Now it has. After circumventing Herculean efforts to prevent me from filing my thesis for May graduation, I released a shortened version of it to a variety of journalists. The work exposes Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus as very likely funded by anti-environmental industries (there's a link to it at the bottom of this post). After their work is investigated, I have very little doubt that they and others will be discredited. Of course, this means that I must be discredited too.

Since efforts to frame me as a would-be assassin or entrap me using drugs have failed, I do expect that some day the compromising images I've been taunted with repeatedly over the last year will make their way onto the Internet.