'This Is Called National Defense'

" ... The following is an unpublished passage written by Joseph Heller that was printed in the New York Times at some point in the mid-1970’s. I found it in a newspaper clipping while I was cleaning out a deceased relative’s belongings from a closet. It is and will probably remain the single most scathing piece of literature that I have ever read, and manages to sum up my feelings about the government in under 300 words.

 

[ ... ]

 

There is no official title, however the headline of the clipping reads as follows:

‘This is called National Defense’

…

I was a little more perturbed than the next fellow, I’d say, when I learned shortly after his assassination that Martin Luther King’s telephones had been tapped and his living quarters bugged, and that the recorded tapes thus obtained were played many times for the private entertainment of various F.B.I. officials and certain journalists friendly to the F.B.I., who, chortling, all added ribald comments of their own to the personal conversations on which they were eavesdropping so shamelessly.

This tapping and bugging of Martin Luther King was carried out by salaried government employes, with the knowledge and consent of some very distinguished people in high public office, not one of whom, it seems, has yet been executed for this trespass, or even imprisoned, discharged, demoted, or censured. This is called national defense.

I wish that all these gentlemen who so gallantly stand for such national defense would begin tapping and bugging each other’s telephones and living quarters and spitting in each other’s soup, and stop interfering with such decent people as Socrates, Martin Luther King, Eugene V. Debs, Galileo, Jesus Christ, and me.

I never express this disapproval aloud, of course. I would not dare mention it at the office or to my closest friend of even whisper it to my wife in the intimacy of our bedroom, because these courageous guardians of our freedom and safety might be bugging me already and would then start spitting in mine. This is called internal security.

I met an F.B.I. man once at a quiet dinner party who had close-cropped hair and obsessive hostility toward pornography and people who smoked marijuana. He looked like an astronaut.

So did his wife. ... "

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