The topic of the day around the world is Edward Snowden. Is he a hero? Is he a traitor?

As usual, Dear Reader, he is both. When he tells us that our  masters are spying on US, he is a hero.  When he tells furriners that we are spying on THEM, he is a traitor.

Actually, there is a much more apt term for such a fellow. In a great film entitled “The Departed” about dueling double agents planted in the Boston Mob and the Massachusetts State Police, the closing scene shows a four-legged varmint scurrying along on the top of a brick wall. The varmint is a

RAT!

That’s the name for Mr. Snowden. Also stool pigeon, stoolie, fink, rat-fink. In civilized societies, such as the Mafia, Mr. Snowden would be buried up to his neck in excrement with a dead canary stuffed in his mouth as an object lesson to other would-be big mouths.

Do not misunderstand me – I am as appalled as you, Dear Reader, that our masters are in a position to spy on my every word, spoken or written. It is discouraging to find that all my paranoid fantasies aren’t paranoid fantasies after all.

But that doesn’t absolve Mr. Snowden. Just because you get the outcome you desire doesn’t mean that the person who got it for you is a good guy. After all, Mussolini made the trains run on time in Italy.

Snowden is dangerous and amoral. He didn’t only clue you in on what you already suspected was going on anyway (unless you were a naïve boob). He is also in the process of distributing critical information on how our spooks sneak up on folks who don’t like us very much to those very folks. If you think that’s in your interest, you are in error.

This latest disaster is a sure indicator of civilizational collapse. In the good old days, Western Civilization had a much better class of rat. Cassius was a serious player when he stuck Caesar. Benedict Arnold was a leading Revolutionary General. Klaus Fuchs, who gave the nuclear bomb designs to the Russkies, was a senior scientist at Los Alamos. The chief of counterintelligence for the CIA was working for the Russkies, too.

But what do we have now? Manning and Snowden, low level clerks and techies spilling their guts (and maybe ours too, unfortunately) to boost their Facebook followings.

But this is great!

Look, the greatest social scientists of the last century were not, contrary to what we old fogies were taught, Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead. No, no, no! They were Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol.

McLuhan, a Canadian sociology professor, figured out that we would all end up living in a global village. He just didn’t know it would be a digital village called the Web.  Warhol, a crazy painter who invented art as pictures of soup cans, observed that soon everybody in the world would be famous for fifteen minutes.

So now, we can bring the great ideas of these great visionaries to life! Loyalty is so passé’. We can get on the six o’clock news just by betraying whatever institution we belong to, and end up being lionized by the tastemakers. We will have free lunches and dinners forever! We will have earnest young ideologues begging to jump into the sack with us (which can occasionally be a benefit, except when they are the ones who wear thick glasses and don’t bathe much).

Doesn’t that sound like fun?