Komplaint Dept. – Trust Never Sleeps

John Lennon, 1974. Photo by Bob Gruen

As history has shown us time and again, if you want to change a person’s mind in a significant, meaningful way, you have to prohibit it from functioning.

That was going to be the opening line to a column about gun control, which would have been titled “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” It should be noted, however, that no irony was intended in referring to a song written by a beloved counterculture figure and peace advocate who was the victim of senseless gun violence. It’s an incredible song, maybe two or three songs in just as many styles fused together, and although John Lennon got the title from the cover of a gun magazine in 1968, it might not even be about guns. Brought to bear on a debate over their control, it was meant to account for those among us who are committed to preserving a part of American life that seems diminished every single day: individualism.

Most people rightly define individualism in terms of what they want it to mean for them. Both philosophically and practically speaking, it demands exactly that kind of contention. It has everything to do with the limits of personal freedom and freedom of speech—neither of which, by the way, have anything to do with being able to purchase assault rifles, or to buy handguns on a slippery secondary market. This very debate is a smoking gun, meant to distract us from an even greater assault on basic rights—the NSA’s routine violations of our privacy.

Though written more than 40 years ago, Lennon’s song has never been more timely. Take the lyric: “Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime.” For that moment, if you will, forget the NRA. Doesn’t this provide an utterly compelling and vivid image of the NSA? A dirty old man lurking at the edge of the playground, on company time.

On a recent chilly winter night, alleviating the boredom for which YouTube was invented and not caring in the least whether anyone knew what I was watching, I came across a clip from 1973 of Todd Rundgren on a TV series called The Midnight Special, which I always tuned into as a teenager. And it’s still good in virtual reruns. You get to see everyone from James Brown to Kraftwerk, and comedians like Richard Pryor and Andy Kaufman. In the looping, ridiculous midst of Kaufman’s song, “I Trusted You,” the phrase constituting its only lyrics, one commenter notes that Kaufman slips in “prostitute, prostitute” to his repetitions of “trusted you, trusted you.” But as I rewind the memory tube, it’s the Rundgren clip that I always come back to. He’s singing “Hello It’s Me” while wearing an outrageously winged outfit with glitter-encrusted, sci-fi butterfly brows pasted above his eyes. He resembles a rather exotic bird just flown in from trip land, and embedded in his lyrics, soaring across the ether of time and space, he has a message for us in the bland here and now. Rundgren, in what’s ostensibly the appeal of an ambivalent lover, offers an oddly intertwined indifference: “I take for granted that you’re always there / I take for granted that you just don’t care.” Yes, once again, you guessed it, the NSA.

Our own ambivalence in the face of being watched in the name of protection is more than a matter of sleeping with the enemy. Because we’re the enemy—at least potentially—so can there even be a pretense of trust? Whoever’s on the other side of the bed lies there, night after night, listening in case we mumble something in our sleep. Even worse, we pay for them to rumple the sheets. Working overtime, undercover. Might NSA also stand for No Strings Attached?

While “Trust Never Sleeps,” may be catchy enough, it’s really mistrust that we’re confronted with, and it’s at the root of that incurable insomnia. Keep in mind that sleep deprivation inevitably results in disorientation, paranoia, and delusion. Conversations and messages endlessly recorded, 25-7. An extra hour added to accommodate all that’s scooped up but never analyzed, a vast surface that will be surveyed yet remain barely scratched. And the people manning these operations are ordinary citizens placed in extraordinary situations, conducting legally and morally questionable operations, which only encourage their, and our own, conformity. Even if this is, shall we say, the banality of technocracy—and of patriotism?—the budgets and benefits are certainly abundant, and unlike so many struggling companies in this great land of ours, jobs are being added all the time. The workforce that would be necessary to intercept all those computers and phones, fine-tune them, and rewrap them in their not so tamper-resistant factory packaging… why that would require a veritable army toiling around the clock. What you call a real growth industry, to be perpetrated in perpetuity. Let’s raise a glass to the hard-working people, to the indefatigable inebriates of the National Sobriety Association. Intoxicated by their power, they seem to believe they are involved with intelligence.

Fandom can be a scary thing—just ask any celebrity who’s been stalked. While I was searching for Lennon and Rundgren online, they overlapped in a wholly unexpected way. In a brief interview with the Guardian last summer, Rundgren was asked about Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman:

“Were you creeped out when it transpired that on the day [Chapman] murdered John Lennon he left a copy of Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren by his hotel bed, that when he was arrested he was wearing a Hermit of Mink Hollow promo T-shirt, and that he was obsessed with you and your music?”

“I didn’t learn about that stuff till way after the fact. But put it this way, I’ve had bomb threats, I’ve had assassination threats—it’s part of the business of being in the public eye. I’ve even got a stalker in Kauai! Someone who moved there just to stalk me. It comes with the territory. It doesn’t come with the territory if you write songs like ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy I’ve Got Love in My Tummy.’ But it does if you write anything that affects people. If you’re going to get seriously down with the muck of the human experience, you’re going to have to deal with other people and all the weirdness that comes with them.”

The reporter, Paul Lester, was compelled to footnote his line of questioning: “There is a chapter in Mark Chapman’s biography entitled ‘Todd and God.’ It is even alleged that Chapman went looking for Rundgren in Woodstock, New York, before heading back to NYC to kill Lennon.” If you can believe his own later admissions, Chapman had other celebrities in his sights, among them Johnny Carson and Elizabeth Taylor, but he concluded that they were either too inaccessible or not famous enough. Chapman thought that the full luster and weight of Lennon’s fame would immediately transfer to him upon the star’s death. After the shots were fired, he realized, much to his dismay, that it had not.

Image via Zine Library

In the song “Hello It’s Me,” there’s another line that stands out: “It’s important to me / That you know you are free.” In the context of a love song, this doesn’t come across as a particularly radical statement—certainly not something that might threaten national security. And yet there’s nothing more dangerous than reminding someone that he’s not free. Pop music, that supposedly innocent bubble, is easily burst. In the hands of someone like Lennon, it was a kind of weapon. He’d been considered such a threat that the Nixon administration tried to deport him in ’72. Being vocally anti-war, as opposed to a pied piper for the docile hippies or junkies, makes you part of a problem that must inevitably be “solved,” especially when whatever you say and do is given a global platform. Lennon sealed his fate years earlier when he declared, and it was too true, that as far as younger people were concerned, the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” By the time he admitted that he believed in neither Jesus nor the Beatles, it was simply too late. Other battles, other wars, were on the horizon, and as for the youth of America, it was much simpler if there was no one around to galvanize them. You can hear now, as an ever-fainter echo: “Oh whatever, never mind.”

As Jack Nicholson once said in a harmless Hollywood make-believe:

“This used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it… it’s real hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are.”

Violent behavior is usually displayed by loners, those seriously deranged or possessed, sometimes carrying a dog-eared copy of The Catcher In the Rye. They are outside of society. They can’t possibly reflect what we’re all potentially capable of and what built this country of ours. That’s one fiction that persists. But it’s much messier. The real downside of individualism is that we tend to forget we are all in this together, and sometimes you need to be ready to defend yourself.

With this in mind, and wondering whether there’s any way to deal with the increasingly sinister times in which we live, a friend suggested checking out a lecture that Jacob Appelbaum gave at the 2013 CCC conference. This is not the Civilian Conservation Corps—though it could easily be interpreted that way—but the German-based Chaos Computer Club, the largest and most established association of hackers in Europe. Angela Merkel, please take note:

Appelbaum had a lot to say, and none of it was reassuring. He dispels the notion that what is going on with this indiscriminate sweeping up of information is in our best interest, and that only the bad guys are being monitored. And despite its grim reality, his most memorable, most quotable line is, hands down: “When you bareback with the internet, you ride with the NSA.”

If an individual rather than a government agency were doing this, compulsively and covertly recording everyone around them and doing almost nothing with the material—storing it for ten to 15 years at a time—this person might be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and institutionalized. You wouldn’t believe much of what this person had to say in his own defense. But this is a government agency, entrenched and above the law—higher than even presidents, who simply come and go—and the “madness” is the institution itself, feeding on and ultimately listening only to itself. Will the vicious circle be unbroken? The voices it hears are its own, lost in an endless loop of feedback. Yet none of us are immune from its waste, its pathology and side effects, and how they compose our larger body, the corpus of our technology, our flesh and blood. You, your children, your grandchildren, this generation and the next.

“Conspiracy means to breathe together.” Think about that when you’re in the Lamaze class. The way things are going they’ll be bugging sonograms any day now.

Image via Amazon