Howelings

Listening in on Citizenfour

By Mark Howell

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

 

Our nation has been graced, or perhaps cursed, this Thanksgiving season with one of the most important pieces of critical journalism in our history.

Written by David Bromwich, a professor of English at Yale University and author of a new collection of essays titled “Moral Imagination,” it has just been published in the December edition of The New York Review of Books.

“The Question of Edward Snowden” is ostensibly a film review of a new documentary directed by by Laura Poitras called “Citizenfour,” yet it contains paragraphs regarding this country’s state of health so dire that your columnist is compelled to share them with the general reader.

Filmed largely in a Hong Kong hotel room where the director met with a whistle-blower who identified himself simply as “Citizenfour,” the film contains information that “the American public ought to know,” Bromwich quotes Snowden.

Snowden’s quote as Citizenfour explains that: “The director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith Alexander, lied to Congress, which I can prove. Alexander lied under oath that the NSA had ever engaged in the mass surveillance of Americans that was then going forward under the code names PRISM and Keyscore.” Citizenfour says he could also demonstrate that Gen. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, came no closer than Gen. Alexander to telling the truth. When asked, under oath by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon whether the NSA collects data on “millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,” Clapper answered, “Not wittingly.”

Clapper’s statement proved to be false in every possible sense of the words “not” and “wittingly,” writes Bromwich. The agency was indeed collecting data, it was doing so in accordance with a plan, and the director had ordered no halt to the mass collection.

The film critic continues by quoting Jacob Appelbaum, a freelance critic of surveillance: “The extraction of private information about Americans without our consent makes one wonder how it is that so many people associate freedom with privacy while the same people accept the idea that privacy has been abolished.”

Regarding Snowden’s personal history, Bromwich concludes that, “He is mostly self-taught. He learned to think, it seems, largely by using the freedom of the Internet. So he cherishes the memory of a better time. ‘I remember what the Internet was like before it was being watched.’”

Snowden uses the English language “with simplicity and precision — an entirely different medium from bureaucratic sludge of Alexander and Clapper and different, too, from the emollient nothings spoken by President Obama when he told us, ‘nobody is listening to your phone calls’.”

Snowden is often called a “fanatic” or a “zealot,” “a techie” or a “geek,” by “persons who want to cut him down to size. Usually these people have not listened to him beyond snippets lasting a few seconds on network news. But the chance to listen has been there for many months. The temper and penetration of mind that one can discern in full-length interviews scarcely matches the description of fanatic or zealot, techie or geek … Nevertheless, they are likely to be repeated or anyway muttered in semiprivate by otherwise judicious persons who want to go on with their business head-down and not be bothered, as opposed to those who do not recognize the constitutional right of the government to put him in prison indefinitely and bring him to trial for treason. His action constitutes a reproach to the many good citizens who have learned what is happening and done nothing about it.

The “strangest revelation” of “Citizenfour,” says Bromwich in a brilliant conclusion, is this: “Snowden in his hotel room affords a picture of a free man. It shows in his posture and in a sense of humor touched by self-irony. He is not haunted by any fretful concern with what comes next. He is sure he has done something he chose, and sure that someone had to do it. He acted in obedience to a principle; and it was right that the actor should disappear in the action. ‘The final value of action,’ wrote Emerson, ‘is that it is a resource.’ It is up to other Americans now to rouse ourselves and find the value of Snowden’s action as a resource.”

 

Quote for the Week:

And now good-morrow to our waking souls

          Which watch not one another out of fear,

          For love all love of other sights controls,

          And makes one little room an everywhere.

          Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

          Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,

          Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

          — John Donne (1572 -1631)        

 

 

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