American ‘Right’ love a snooper

Press, 27 March 1981, Page 11

American ‘Right’ love a snooper

By

MIKE ROYKO

Chicago “Sun-Times”

I don't know why conservatives have such a curious

nature, but whenever they get political power, they can’t resist the urge: they want to peek through our keyholes and into our laundry hampers to see what they can see. So it didn’t take very long for the Reagan Administration to start looking for more efficient ways to spy Oh American individuals and organisations. Government intelligence agencies, including the C.1.A., have put together a set of secret proposals that will be submitted to . President Reagan for his approval. If Reagan signs it, as he is expected to do, the intelligence agencies will be able to resume many, of the spying practices that were outlawed during the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. These practices include the kinds of search, surveillance and infiltration techniques that intelligence people refer to as “intrusive.” The reason these practices were curbed is that they bordered on the illegal. Apparently the Reagan Administration figures it can’t guarantee our life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if it is prevented from peeking at us. I’ve never understood why conservatives are so obsessed with official spying on their fellow Americans. It’s not as if this country seethes with revolution. Most Americans are middle-of-the-road-ers politically. Our revolutionary groups are usually smaller than a tavern soft-

ball team, and not nearly as dangerous. ' The conservatives always act as if there is a vast underground of Soviet agents ready to overthrow the government. I might understand that if the snoopers had any kind of history of ferreting out groups of individuals who were a great menace. But they don’t. When Senator Joseph McCarthy was in his witchhunting prime during the Eisenhower Administration, we were told that the Commies were everywhere in the federal government, the army, and under our beds. By the time that episode ended, about all that Joe McCarthy exposed was the fact that he was a raving drunk. If he saw Reds everywhere, it was probably because he wais looking through red-tinted eyeballs. Then there Was the great Hollywood Commie hunt, with actors, producers, directors, and Writers being blacklisted because they were cocktail-party Leftists. Many refused to fink on their friends and .Were driven out of the film industry, out of the country, or out of their minds. Not only were government snoopers wallowing in the joy of discovering that actor Randy Dandy had, in his. long-gone youth, attended two cell meetings, but free enterprise went into the Lef-/

tie-huntihg business. Various Right-wing peeping Toms and gumshoes set themselves up as private consultants to Hollywood studios and television networks, and without much- more evidence than their paranoid suspicions, they put together blacklists and wielded life-and-death power over the careers of decent Americans. During the Nixon era, the snoopers tried to convince us that revolution was breaking out all over the place. Nixon and his burglars never understood that the greatest danger posed by people like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman was that they, might bore us to death. And they never understood that most of those people demonstrating on Pennsylvania Avenue weren’t out to overthrow the government, but merely loathed Richard Nixon — a perfectly, normal sentiment shared by many true-blue American • households. Considering how much official government spying has gone on in this country over the past three decades, and how few genuine menaces have been exposed, either the spies were incompetent, or the menaces weren't really there. Or both. Naturally, the snoopers insist that" the domestic menace exists. If it wasn’t pinko movie actors, it was high-ranking State Department officials who wore Ivy

League clothes. If it wasn't Abbie Hoffman threatening to put LSD in Lake Michigan to make politicians sexcrazed, it was college students in California encouraging each other to swear in public.

Of course, the snoopers have to say that a terrible menace exists. Without it, they wouldn’t have any justification for their own existence. They’d have to go to work as department store detectives.

Take the American Communist Party. If you can find it. The party became so small that it might have gone out of existence if the F. 8.1. hadn’t planted so many informants in it that they kept, it going. What we’ve had is a government-sub-sidised Communist Party — sort of like stocking a fishing •pond.

Now the conservative want to rev up their spying operation .again, without telling us just who these dangerous characters and organisations are.

I think I can make a guess who they are, based on past performance. The dangerous characters would include just about anybody who doesn’t share the Right-wing beliefs of people like Reagan or Senator Jesse. Helms and the other high-flying conservative politicians. The Reaganites talk a lot about getting government off our back. Now I think I understand what they mean. They .want government off their backs, but at our transoms.. , ■- _