WITH HOMELAND SECURITY, I FEEL SAFER ALREADY

Curious about how much safer I'd feel once President Bush got his new
Department of Homeland Security, I called my favorite inside source:
Ananias Ziegler, media relations director for the Committee That Really
Runs America.

After I explained my mission, he was relieved. "I was afraid you were
calling about the corporate accounting scandals and the bear market on Wall
Street," he said, "and we haven't really prepared a statement on that."

Why was it important to make a statement? I wondered. After all, most
people don't have any trouble figuring out what happened - there were
people who could make big money by lying, and so they lied. They touted
stocks that they knew were bad, or they cooked their books so the stock
price would rise.

"Our problem is that we need to restore confidence in the markets," Ziegler
said, "so that Americans will have the faith to continue to invest in
enterprises they know nothing about, thereby ensuring that the supporters
of the Committee have sufficient capital to continue our important work."

Besides, Ziegler continued, if stock prices had continued to rise the way
they had during the "lax moral climate of the Clinton-Gore years," then the
American way of life would have been threatened.

But I had thought a bull market was good for us, judging by what I read now
about people who had planned to retire but now can't, etc.

"If lots of people retired, we'd lose some of our most productive workers,"
Ziegler explained. "And what do people do with their time when they retire?
Some of them might start attending meetings and participating in public
life and paying attention to how their senators and representatives vote,
that sort of thing.

"They might start asking why, if America has the best health-care system in
the world, no other country's politicians ever campaign on providing an
American-style health-care system. The last thing we need is a bunch of
informed people with time on their hands. Better to keep them toiling and
commuting just to pay the bills."

I could see where there might be problems with too much citizen
participation, but before I could respond, Ziegler continued.

"Another problem with the boom was that we had all these emerging
zillionaires with nose rings and tattoos and purple hair. They might run
for office, or support candidates who had sensible views about the
expensive and unwinnable War on Drugs, or otherwise threaten the Committee
and its work. Even if a lot of innocent people suffered in the market
meltdown, we had to act to protect the American way as we know it."

So the Committee engineered the stock-market collapse?

"I wouldn't go that far," Ziegler cautioned. "Let's just say that it was
not an unanticipated development, and leave it that.

"Now, what did you want to know about Homeland Security?"

Will it prevent future terrorist attacks?

"All Americans have already been warned that future attacks are inevitable,
that it's a matter of when, not if," Ziegler intoned.

"So if it won't prevent future attacks, what good is it?" I wondered.

"For one thing, people will get to spend a lot more time standing in line
at airports where their every word is monitored and even their shoes get
inspected," Ziegler explained, "and that should help create a more docile
population that will be easier to govern. And, surely, that represents an
improvement in security, does it not?"

Such logic was hard to argue with, so I moved on. How does this new
Operation TIPS work? I asked. Are there rewards for ratting on your
neighbors if you see them interfering with our infrastructure, say by
bootlegging a cable TV connection?

"It is my understanding that the cable companies offer their own rewards,"
Ziegler said. "And no, there won't be cash rewards. The idea is to have
millions more people out there reporting suspicious activities."

You mean like those FBI agents in Minneapolis and Phoenix who noticed a
pattern in flight-school registrations a year ago? That sure made a
difference, didn't it? "Quit being sarcastic, Quillen. You wouldn't want to
get arrested as an enemy combatant and get held incommunicado, would you?"

Of course not, so I got back to the Department of Homeland Security. The
biggest threat to our sense of security in this homeland has been the
wildfire-starting on federal lands. Certainly the new department would help
there, right?

"But some of those fires were allegedly started by government employees,"
Ziegler pointed out. "So why would adding more of them necessarily help you?"

He had a point. But then something occurred to me. Why is it that the same
Republicans who criticize inefficient government bureaucracies all the time
are now trying to inflict a new one on us?

"It all depends on who controls the bureaucracy," Ziegler laughed, and said
he had to take another call.