A Vocabulary Lesson: Flexing Our Ab-’s

The Latin prefix ab- means from or away from in many English derivatives. With a little practice using this Latin prefix, a student’s vocabulary will increase absolutely. — Vocabulary-Lesson-Plans.com

ab-¹ —prefix

away from; off; outside of; opposite to: abnormal; abaxial; aboral

[from Latin ab, away from]
— Collins English Dictionary

A headline on Antiwar.com’s blog today blares, “Cindy Sheehan Under IRS Investigation For Not Funding Gov’t Terrorism and Waste“. It begins:

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan has recently been informed that she is the target of an IRS lawsuit. She posted the following on her Facebook page:

I just got a notice from the IRS that I owe them 104 grand and they are going to levy my bank accounts and property. I don’t have any property and there’s less than 150.00 in my bank accounts. Looks like Fed Prison is in my future. I would rather go to prison than fund the crimes of this government. I am going to send them a notice that they owe me infinity dollars for killing my son.

I can still remember when I first heard Cindy Sheehan’s name, back in 2005 when she set up camp outside Emperor Bush’s Crawford estate only to be pitilessly ignored before becoming a target of the right-wing hate machine. What I remember most about her is her zealous devotion to her cause, which is nothing more and nothing less than to rub the government’s nose in its own shit rather than letting it casually ignore the consequences of its shameless conquests for power. So, in honor of Cindy Sheehan, I’d like to invite Antiwar.com to step up its game. Allow me to explain.

The Antiwar.com article makes an excellent case that the wars are hugely wasteful in terms of both money and human life, which hopefully we all know well by now. It concludes:

After all these costs, for unnecessary and criminal foreign policies, the United States government is threatening to put a peace activist in prison for $104,000 that they have been unable to steal from her, at least in part to fund their horrible murderous crimes abroad. Even the most mainstream, knucklehead, Republican or Democrat has the ability to sense something wrong here.

What’s wrong here is that this is surprising, and is cast as an abuse of the government’s power. The only way this can be construed as an abuse (meaning an abnormal use, outside the expected range of possibilities) would be tacitly to set up a fantasy in which the government would normally never do such a thing, or in which an ideal government could wield such far-reaching power and authority without putting it to such ends. This myth of a just state is just as hollow and decrepit as the myth of a just war.

There is nothing remotely unusual or unexpected about the way Cindy Sheehan is being treated. If you don’t pay your taxes, you go to jail. That’s it. That’s the way of things. It doesn’t matter in our so-called democratic society why you choose not to pay taxes (even if it’s so that unaccountable public officials can’t secretly use them to enrich their friends and kill poor foreigners). If you don’t pay your taxes, you go to jail. Period. There is no defense. No civil disobedience. No legitimate form of appeal. You participate in the system, or the system destroys you. That Cindy Sheehan would wind up in jail for refusing to pay her taxes on moral grounds is a given. Who in their right mind, regardless of political stripe or sympathy towards Sheehan’s motive, would have predicted otherwise? The Internal Revenue Service collects all taxes from all individuals (except billion-dollar tax-exempt corporations which are above the law, of course), and punishes those who don’t comply. This isn’t surprising; it’s exactly what it’s designed to do.

Furthermore, as the article neglects to mention, this is hardly out of character for the government dealing with activists. It’s hardly the first time Sheehan has been treated this way. The treatment probably wouldn’t surprise Tim DeChristopher either. And what of the ‘unconscionable’ treatment of whistle-blower Thomas Drake? Or the torture and indefinite detention of a white, suburban, American soldier? Whether it’s violating the right of the people peaceably to assemble or just fucking up a good night’s sleep with batons and automatic weapons, nothing — NOTHING — about the government’s behavior can be considered unusual or even slightly out of the ordinary.

In a recent article, Glenn Greenwald mercilessly and thoroughly (as always) documents how the government has systematically repurposed the domestic security apparatus for other ends, quietly shifting the target to more ominous uses once attention to each program had waned and the latest shocking ‘weapon’ in the Domestic War on Terror faded from the public mind.

Meanwhile, much of the anti-Terrorism weaponry in the U.S. ends up being deployed for purposes of purely domestic policing. As the LA Times notes: those aforementioned BearCats are are now deployed by police across the country; the arrests of methamphetamine dealers and bank robbers these days often look much like a tactical assault on insurgents in Baghdad. (his emphasis) Drones are used both in the Drug War and to patrol the border. Surveillance measures originally justified as necessary to fight foreign Terrorists are routinely turned far more often inward, and the NSA — created with a taboo against domestic spying — now does that regularly.

To continue to pretend — or even to continue to use language that suggests — that this is in any way uncommon or out of character for the US government and its functionaries is to perpetuate the damaging myth of an imaginary Benevolent Democratic Government, perhaps from an idolized past, that will return to us and shower us with peace and freedom if only we elect the right combination of people to high office. This is exactly the way the government has been for at least thirty years, and if you doubt it has been in some sense this way since its inception, I highly suggest adding this to your reading list. Institutions of power are designed for the powerful, and power corrupts.