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# Time to put ‘rebel’ back in our lexicon
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/time-to-put-rebel-back-in-our-lexicon/
- Published: 2006-03-28T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T23:45:20.000Z
- Author: David Pisarra
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

The American public has generally become so benighted, so lost, so stupefied in their own juices of Big Macs, Wal- Mart low prices and Chevy Excursions that they don’t even realize the stupidity of their statements, or how easily they are exploited, manipulated and made to dance to the tune of a village idiot.

I speak not of the countless jobs that are lost each year because of our obsession with lower prices over supporting our countrymen’s businesses. I do not look to the poor quality of today’s television — which is probably no worse than it has always been, thank God for cable. I’m not considering the terrible food that is passed off as “nutritional” or “healthy” in its pre-packaged, flash-frozen state of microwave easy to preparedness.

No, I speak of the people who are so drunk on their own self-righteousness, and holier than thou sense of superiority that they deserve to be banished to a land of Jell-o molds and big hair, and forced to watch endless re-runs of “Leave It To Beaver” and “Fantasy Island.”

The fools who have ignited my ire this week are none other than the people who blindly follow the Republican logic that allows a sitting president to issue an executive order which allows the National Security Agency (NSA) to wire-tap our phones and monitor our e-mails without the benefit of a warrant process. A process, one might add, that has granted to the government thousands and thousands of warrants, and denied them only four or five times, depending on the reference source.

It is not as if this is an unduly burdensome process on the government. They had seven judges on the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which has now been increased to 11 judges thanks to the Patriot Act. One of those judges had to be on call at all times. Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, there was a judge available to review an application and grant a warrant. And just to make it easier, the government had the option of going in after the search to get a warrant. A nice trick that is denied to our local constabulary, thanks to a little thing I like to call the U.S. Constitution.

A fool, according to the dictionary, is one who acts unwisely or imprudently. It also means a court jester, or one who is duped. I use the term knowingly, as it seems to me that this term completely describes the people to whom I direct my frustration and anger. They are nothing but puppets for the administration. They drink in the moronic sayings of a village idiot as if they had been lost in a desert for a month.

These are the people who solidly back him at his most inane, with trite sayings, clothed in the rhetoric of the Bible and wrapped in the U.S. flag to protect their idiocy. When asked about the legality of warrantless wiretapping these people fall back on that childishly stupid argument of, “well, if you’re not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?”

This level of analysis is more appropriate for kindergarten than the discussion of our Constitutional rights. It smacks of an inability to think deeper than the headline of a publicist’s press release.

To begin with, one might want to look at applying that logic to the need for warrantless searches, and turn the argument back on itself. If the NSA is not doing anything “wrong” then why isn’t it getting the warrants, even after the fact, for the searches it is doing?

Then there is the discussion of what is “wrong.” Wrong is not a legal term. It is a moral term. It is packed with judgment, moral superiority, and smugness. It is a term that priests — now there’s a group who are deserving of the high ground these days — as well as ministers, KKK leaders and rednecks like to use to set themselves up as deserving and to create a sense of otherness.

This argument that there is security in the government’s snooping is only acceptable to those who are used to blindly doing what they are told to do by their religious leaders. We were founded on the basis of rebellion to government intrusion into our lives. We are a nation that is supposed to revere personal freedoms and to fight the tyranny of despots.

Yet there are those in this country who think it is not only acceptable for the government to wiretap its citizens without a warrant, but actually believe that if they just do nothing “wrong” they are safe against the government’s power to inspect and destroy their lives.

I was listening to NPR the other day and they were interviewing people’s reactions to the wiretapping issue and there was a woman who said, with the just the mildest southern twang, “I just don’t see what the big deal is. If you’re not doing anything wrong, what’s to worry about?”

Obviously I don’t know what she looked like, but my immediate mental picture of her was of a 40-year-old white female, about 50 pounds overweight, driving a Tahoe, and going to church on Sunday with her salesman husband, their two obese kids, and her hair teased and Aquanetted into a hair-helmet. I immediately disliked her Pollyanna view of the world.

I am sure that any of the 174 men and one woman, who were freed by The Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law would agree that a government that has fewer controls on it is a bad thing. I am fairly certain that any black man who has been stopped by a police officer, and humiliated in front of his wife and kids for “driving while black” will agree that stronger controls on police conduct are required, not weaker ones.

We started this country with a rebellion against tyranny from a king. Fools were kept in the royal court to please the king. True Americans don’t tolerate fools well. Don’t be fooled by a fool when they say the king is benevolent. They’re just being foolish. (David Pisarra is a business development lawyer in the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He welcomes your questions and comments. He or (310) 664- 9969.)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 28, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/032806.pdf?ref=smdp.com)