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It Surveils Us Right. So There! On:2006-11-09 06:37:55

As you probably know, when I came to America there were two things I absolutely refused to change. The first was my way of speaking (I’ve never had an accent and I was damned if I was going to get one at that late date); and the other was, of course, my time zone. So when I leave for work of a morning, and it seems to all those Texans about me that it’s a horrendously early 5:30, to me it’s merely a leisurely, eat-your-heart-out-bankers’-hours late start to the working day at half past eleven.


This has many and obvious advantages, but one real bummer of a disadvantage---Traffic lights. The traffic lights I meet are on some sort of timed cycle, which may be fine in the middle of the Texan day (though something leads me to suspect it isn’t) but at my dawn work-going hour it creates an incredible amount of wasted time when, as usual, almost every light is red and, again as usual, no one comes from the other direction--at least no one comes until just after the light has eventually turned red for them. And amazingly almost all of the, presumably grown, men and women who arrive at their baleful red glow wait more or less impatiently locked in place on the almost-empty street by the magic power they wield---and being down here in Texas most of those compliant, timorous slaves-to-the-light are carrying guns and aren't afraid to use them I can tell you, yet they wait. Why, I’m sure I hear you ask, or at least I’m sure you hear me ask, why this waste?

This is particularly irksome to me because back in England, when I was a child, our little at that time one-traffic-light town had for its one traffic light a sort of squishy bar thingy laid across the road some distance before the lights that monitored traffic and changed those lights with wonderful efficiency.

That was forty or more years ago and Plano---Texas---probably most of America hasn’t yet caught up with that simple pre-computeræval device.

Meanwhile back in Britain things developed: and if a little spying on car tyres for traffic-lighty convenience with a squishy bar thingy was seen to be good, then surely spying with hiddenish cameras on whole cars to catch them speeding would be better, and spying with even more cameras almost everywhere on absolutely everyone would be best!

Britain now has one Closed Circuit camera for every fourteen people .Big Bliar is watching YOU!!

And now it's really has gone far too far in Britain, and suddenly it turns out that we are the most monitored people in the entire universe (and being British we joke that everyone should always put on makeup every time they go out because they’re certain to be on TV---which in turn goes a long way towards explaining the popularity of Eddie Izzard).
It is now so bad that Richard Thomas, Britain's Information Commissioner (head of the self-described “UK's independent authority set up to promote access to official information and to protect personal information” complete with a dot-gov URL , so you know you can trust that independence), recently said (and one has to admire his foresight): “Two years ago I warned that we were in danger of sleepwalking into a surveillance society.”
It is now so bad that even the obligatory ugly back-formed greasy word has been coined to go with that:
‘Surveil: I surveil; thou surveilest; he, she or it surveils’
of course the only form in common use is probably an ominous ‘They surveil’!

What a paradigm for our times!

Anyway to get back to the reality of Plano: the other day on my commute to work I hit the green light jackpot. Every single light on my route turned green as I approached it! Wow it was fantastic! Oh! Joy!! Whoopie! And possibly Wheeeeee!!! Though, on more mature reflection, my joy was short lived because I soon realised that all I’d won was more time at work.
So maybe those primitive un-monitored lights aren’t such a bad thing after all

Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton







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