So, Dear Reader, you thought that you had seen the worst of snooping by the powers that be (commercial and governmental), what with the NSA reading your e-mails, tapping your phone, reading over your shoulder from their keyhole satellites, tracking your cell phone, and collecting all your credit card transactions, did you? Believe me, these are mere peccadillos. The future is much more terrifying, thanks to the evil gnomes of Sky Deutschland. (Sky Deutschland is the Krautland branch of the Sky TV network.)

These folks noticed that many commuters, exhausted from a long day of shifting enormous piles of paper about, collecting inside information, and racing back and forth to the water cooler, plod aboard the train and rest their noggins against the window, hoping to catch a snooze before confronting their spouse and kiddies. “Vhat a vaste of time” thought the geniuses of their advertising department, “Zis time could be spent listening to COMMERCIALS!” And then they had an “ah-ha!” moment.  It occurred to them that it is possible to send sound waves through solid objects. So they and their tech provider have developed a device that drives the windows like little loudspeakers, so that, when you rest your head against the window, you hear a still, small voice inside your head, like the voice of God, transmitting any message the  fiends wish to transmit. Sort of like the description of what prophets experience. Or paranoid schizophrenics.

Our German friends have only crass commercial purposes in mind.  “Eat at Joe’s” is sort of innocuous, you may think. Wanna bet? How about a message like “Eat our hamburgers until you pass out or explode, whichever comes first!” It will contribute more to obesity than the non-stop sequences of fast food ads that punctuate every station break on the idiot box. No one will be able to say “no” when the voice of God tells them to visit McWeinerschnitzel’s seventeen times per week.

But it gets better! Being brainwashed into blimp-hood is one thing. But how long will it be until the gummint gets with the program? Not bloody long, believe me!

But this is great!

Once our masters can REALLY get inside our heads, perfection cannot be far away. The folks in power will now be able to hypnotize us into complete acquiescence with every stupid plan they concoct. We will march willingly to the beat of the perfect drummers in D.C.

Hey! We do that now! Uh oh.

We’re doomed! I’m not talking about the kind of doom we usually discuss, the collapse of cultural norms. No, Dear Reader, today we will discuss the “don’t start any long books” kind of doom.

A classic movie came out in 1956 called “Forbidden Planet.” True, it did have some tacky aspects. (My favorite line was “Any quantum mechanic worth his salt could fix that.”) It starred Walter Pigeon, Leslie Nielson, Ann Francis, and Robbie the Robot (who would later return as one of the stars of the horrible “Lost in Space” TV series.) The burden of the film was that the inhabitants of a distant planet had developed a machine that could instantly turn one’s thoughts into reality.  When the machine was turned on, it worked fine until the first night when everyone went to sleep. Unfortunately, the violent thoughts that everyone has, described in the film as “monsters from the id,” materialized and everyone was killed except Walter Pigeon and his daughter.

In 1956 this was ridiculous. But today?

Let me remind you of two recent technological developments. The first is video games operated by brain waves. Right now you can purchase a set of electrodes to strap on your noggin and play Pong without lifting  a finger. Admittedly, Pong is a pretty primitive video game. But great oak trees from little acorns grow. It will not be long before our teenage progeny will be able to play “Grand Theft Auto” and “Call of Duty” using their weird little brain waves. Now hold that thought.

The second development is computer-driven three-dimensional printing. The most popular application, at least as the press tells it, is the production of guns. The press, knaves that they are, almost never mention that the few times these devices have actually been fired they have blown up, which renders them somewhat less fearsome than the press and the FBI think. However, practice makes perfect, and soon we will be able to print out a functioning 150mm howitzer.

You see where this is going.

Fast forward a few years (or a few months, or a few days, perhaps.) The video game makers and the printer manufacturers will get together and release a thought-powered printer driver. And we Earthlings will play out the Forbidden Planet script for real.

Gives you a warm feeling, doesn’t it?

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?

And by “we” I mean “us.” And by “us” I mean “U.S.” That is right, Dear Reader, the United States stinks.

“How does the Happy Pessimist know this?” you may ask. Well, I’ll tell you. I know it because our enlightened government tells me so.

Dear Leader slithers around the world on his belly, announcing to all and sundry, particularly foreign potentates, how arrogant and pushy the WE has been up until his accession to the throne, I mean, the White House. (In 1956, a humorist named Robert Nathan wrote a brilliant comic piece describing the findings of an archeological expedition in the year 7956 which dug up the remains of the US of A. Since so many objects had US on them, the learned archaeologists decided that the extinct population were known as the “Weans,” or the “us” for short. So I stole his idea. Tough.)

Dear Leader’s Lord High Executioner, Eric Holder, has never met anyone who should not be indicted. The minions of the exchequer, the IRS, announce hourly that we are a nation of cheats and swindlers, who deserve nothing but the worst for our inability to remember all one million pages of the tax code. Dear Leader’s Envoy to the larger world, Samantha Powers, likens us to the Nazis and screeches that we will never be absolved until we all wear hair shirts and genuflect in the direction of Moscow. (To give her her due, she does look terrific barefoot in a red dress that goes halfway up her thigh. But back to work.)

The great historian Arnold J. Toynbee, author of the twelve volume magnum opus “A Study of History,” observed that civilizations do not die — they commit suicide. Choosing people who hate us to run our country is about as close to political suicide as you can get. So what should we do?

Well, it seems to me that, if we stink, the good old American approach would be to be the biggest stinkers on the planet. I am not recommending that we join the “throw the baby in the bonfire” school of thought. I suggest, rather, that we adopt a program of international relations that is affirmatively directed to making everyone else really, really hate us.

Some might argue that is ALREADY what we are doing. Au contraire! We continue to contaminate our meddling with the dross of phrases like “we are bringing democracy to people who yearn for it.” We should replace these vacuous phrases with comments like “we’re here to steal your raw materials, and if you don’t like it, we will blow you up.” “We don’t give a damn what happens to you and your ugly progeny. All we care about is keeping you and yours far, far away from our door.” “Collateral damage is fun.”

At the same time, we can stop sending assistance to the victims of natural disasters. Instead, we lecture them on why God hates them. And then we wait for the reaction.

You know what the reaction will be, of course. Suddenly the US will be portrayed by the press of the nations that count (you know, Iran, Saudi Arabia. North Korea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, et al.) as comrades in arms. Our behavior will be just like theirs, and they’ll love us for it. Dear Leader will be elected to the Tyrants’ Hall of Fame. We will be elected to the UN Committee on the Prevention of Torture.

How’s that for a strategy?

So, Dear Reader, you do not want Big Brother reading your e-mails to your mistress in Dubuque. How unpatriotic of you! Anyway, Dear Leader assures you that he and his minions are not reading your e-mail – they are only collecting addresses of the people with whom you correspond. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. It’s cheap. You’ll like it. Just sign here.

They are also not recording your phone calls. They are just looking for evil interconnections. Once again, we enter bridge territory. You may have noticed that you have a digital phone, not an analogue one. Your conversations are chopped up into little bits and bytes that the Fed’s exabyte storage facilities are swooping up. They know everything. (Now, my e-mails and phone calls are world-class boring. But that’s a different issue.)

They are also monitoring everything you do online. Forget about kiddie porn and drugs. They know what you are buying at Victoria’s Secret! They know how many times you visit Republicans websites! They know how much you spent at Sears! MY GOD, they know how often you visit Funwithdoom!

Now, remember that all this data is being sent in real time to the IRS, the EPA, OSHA, the CIA, the NSA, and Guido the Chicago Hitman (a subcontractor for the Democratic Party). So you are in trouble.

But this is great!

What you have been thinking of as a problem is actually a fantastic business opportunity. And the solution was discovered by the great Baron Rothschild. You may recall the Battle of Trafalgar. That’s the naval battle in which the noble Lord Nelson defeated the short slimy little Frenchman, Napoleon, thus saving us from the fate of having to eat frogs on  a steady basis, and of speaking through our noses even when we do not have a cold. The battle took place in 1805, so we did not have instantaneous communication. But everyone in England was concerned, and the stock markets were boiling. Now Rothschild was the greatest stock trader in the world, and folks noticed that he was standing in his usual spot next to a column in the stock exchange, and he was selling, selling , selling. Panic! Rothschild knows something! We too must sell, sell, sell! And then, when prices hit rock bottom, Rothschild and his buddies bought, bought, bought! And then the news came in that Lord Nelson had won the battle. (Unfortunately not his personal battle, since he was killed.  Oh, well,)

How did Rothschild know the outcome of the battle? Because he had superior telecommunications.

He had pigeons!

Yes Dear Reader, the great Baron had a fleet of carrier pigeons spread about the world, and he knew things way ahead of everyone else. And nobody could intercept pigeon mail. His line of communications was secure.

Astute person that you are, you see where this is going. My breakfast companion,  Bob, pointed out the security of this method to me, and suggested that pigeons could replace the e-mail system. That intrigued me, but I pointed out that carrier pigeons are not that fast, and anyway they cannot fly more than about 1800 miles. Undaunted, Bob proposed that the system could incorporate relay stations.

That’s it!  I spit on the Pony Express! I will set up the Pigeon Express! Picture it: a little pigeon winging its way across America. a missive of enormous importance (handwritten in a secluded hut in the deep woods and then photographically reduced to a microdot) tucked securely into a little capsule attached to its leg. At each relay station, one of our men, immunized against psittacosis, removes the capsule, reads the address of the final destination, and consigns the capsule to the appropriate bird for the next leg of the journey.

The Feds can not interfere with this system for fear of violating the Migratory Water Fowl Act, incurring the wrath of both PETA and the Audubon Society, two powerful voting blocks. They will be forced to sit docilely by, fists clenched in rage, while we share our secrets with each other in perfect safety.

Also when the pigeons become too old to work any more, we can eat them. Pigeons are delicious.