Nine-o’clock on a Sunday night in a Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts bookshop and, thankfully, there’s no sign that the staff are shutting shop. I am in book heaven. Smelling, touching, gawking, and setting aside a formidable load to lug home to South Africa.
A sign next to the till invites me to sign a petition in support of The Campaign for Reader Privacy. Provisions of the frightening US Patriot Act allow the government to conduct what are euphemistically called “sneak and peak” actions like garbage bag searches. And to obtain from booksellers records of individuals’ purchases and book requests.
These mimic the worst violations of human rights under apartheid. I wonder: Have the National Party’s thought police been reinvented in America?
Of course, proponents of such excesses will always argue that a clear and present danger exists, with its genesis in 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran. Does it? In another context, it’s the sometimes hazy line between the rights of suspected paedophiles, including the right to privacy, and society’s imperative to protect a child suffering at the hands of a sexual abuser. But the freedom to think and speak and write has been at the heart of the democracy which the US has shared with the rest of us. Why are these tenets of American society, enshrined in its constitution, no longer held sacrosanct?
Perhaps it’s just one example of how the US, a world-in-one-country, is actually a world of contradictions. Another is how this land which owes its existence to a bunch of native inhabitants and an influx of millions of immigrants over 500 years, has decided it will not provide security of tenure to the illegal migrants of today.
Of course, it risks keeping out a potential baseball, basketball or football star of Latin American or African descent. But, far more importantly, the buggers who threaten the security of the state are being weeded out.
At every turn in the bookstore, the Judas book, documenting the newly discovered Gospel according to the one who betrayed Jesus Christ, seems to jump out at me. More like “newly created”, say the more cynical of the Judas-as-victim text. It’s publication is perfectly timed for Easter. (I wonder how another group of marketers timed the English court’s judgment that The Da Vinci Code’s description of Jesus-as-man wasn’t cribbed from another, but that’s another story.)
The thought occurs to me that American society has created lots of space for skulking, civic-minded, ear-to-the-ground Judas types. There’s no space for prophets and philosophers, mystics or a messiah. Certainly, there’s no room for an objectionable character, born into a dislocated, working-class family who adopted a homeless lifestyle during his known adult life, threatening that he would establish his father’s kingdom over the existing authority, through an entourage of the downtrodden and hopeless.
Jesus probably would have offended Jews – actually, he did offend Jews – and Muslims, Buddhists and New Ageists, gays and straights, capitalists and socialists, black and white, Caucasian and Asian. Americans? Perhaps, unless they were disenfranchised, in which case he’d have had them in his party.
And the writings about him – simple, low-brow, soap-opera-standard scripts written by some of the most anti-literate men of their time in the funagalo or Capie dialect of the day – would certainly have been banned.
Anti-apartheid theologians, challenging the conservative churches’ support for the excesses of the NP’s anti-communism campaign of the 1980s, reminded us that God doesn’t need our help in mounting a defence against communists. We can relax, God’s got that one covered.
My bet is that in an America covered by a Patriot Act, someone with a messianic impulse would have been nailed to a cross this Easter. It would have been a clear and present danger.
