Snowden’s ‘perfect haircut’ is short at the back and sides,
longer out front and on top – the classic High School ‘sports cut’ grown up,
grown out and gone wrong.
Snowden himself is a ‘perfect’ representative of the West's disaffected middle class. Fine features in a WASP-ish complexion.
Spectacles for seriousness-with-self-consciousness: rectangular lenses (antidote to the Vietnam-era aviator-shape), coloured, ‘creative class’ frames that speak supposedly
sophisticated North European (parlez-vous Ikea?) in contrast to the allegedly crude
dialect of Middle America.
Now 30, Snowden’s carrying a couple of days of apparently
adolescent stubble. More beard (six months’ more, at this rate) and he could
pass for Harold Shrinks, jazz musician father of cartoon-boy George Shrinks,
who woke up to find himself three inches tall. Maybe that’s how Snowy will eventually
make his escape from Moscow airport – as a miniature manikin in the pants
pocket or hidden in the hand luggage of a human rights lawyer. Either that or
send in Hollywood’s Edward Norton as a Snowden lookalike: stick a mole on
Norton’s neck and roughen his pearly whites; the CIA won’t know which one to
track.
Edward Snowden speaks like technical experts do when they
expect to be listened to – quietly, confidently, a tad self-righteously. His self-righteousness is truly remarkable, and not only because Snowden’s
CV contains a couple of discomfiting quirks (the distance learning MA he never
completed; the computing course at John Hopkins which took place in a
university building but wasn’t part of the main University).
As you already know – unless you’ve been grounded for a month in a transit camp without WiFi, Snowden is holed up in the world’s headlines because he swapped the chaste chasing down of alleged threats to national security for promiscuous humping of Uncle Sam’s state secrets. Or, the way he tells it, he was prostituting himself before, but now he’s come in off the street.
As you already know – unless you’ve been grounded for a month in a transit camp without WiFi, Snowden is holed up in the world’s headlines because he swapped the chaste chasing down of alleged threats to national security for promiscuous humping of Uncle Sam’s state secrets. Or, the way he tells it, he was prostituting himself before, but now he’s come in off the street.
According to Snowden, he’s doing for the greater good. Working
in Hawaii for the NSA, in his charmed life as a security contractor he was
aiding and abetting the state in getting to know everything there is to know
about the rest of us. In protest against the rise of repression, in defiance of
the surveillance society, Snowden broke ranks and brokered a deal to reveal
specified US security operations to selected news outlets, before revealing his
own identity. Seeking to evade capture by American agents, he fled first to Hong Kong, then flew
on to Russia where he has now applied for asylum.
Public opinion – domestic and international – is divided on
Snowden: one’s hero is another’s traitor. But there is something new about Snowden
which does not fit either of these pre-existing categories: his sense of entitlement. This is more remarkable than the revelation that friendly nations spy on each other ('revelation' as in 'dog bites man').
Snowden admits he had it all in Hawaii. But reading between
the lines of the extended interview he gave in Hong Kong last month, it seems as
if the job he was doing made it difficult for him to feel good about himself. He
comes across as if spying was an affront to his well-being – the ethical
equivalent of being asked to become obese. Really, the federal government
should have found its operatives a way to work for the state and feel
fine about it – that’s the least we’re entitled to, right?
It’s only right that Snowden is thought to have been staying
in the ‘capsule-hotel’ inside Sheremetyevo airport. Located next to the mother
and baby room in Terminal E, Level 5, it looks as if specially created for the
pages of Wallpaper magazine or Monocle: futuristic but in a way which – whether
out of cynicism or naivete – hasn’t quite shaken off the 1960s vision of the
future. It’s a Retro-Futuro Thing. Of course Snowden and Wallpaper readers
alike will be wise to this, whereas the Head of Homeland Security - and all those other personality types that live in the realm of realpolitik - would not be expected to get it, geddit?
are we seeing the emergence of new 'secular saints'?
ReplyDelete(stripped of either humanistic and religious depth but loved by the luvvies and held as bearers of received banalities dressed up as 'revelation/truth'?)