Point of View: On Little Cat Feet

While “Birdman” was a wonderful picture, “Citizenfour,” which won the documentary Oscar for Laura Poitras (not to mention Glenn Greenwald’s Pulitzer Prize reporting), is even more of a must-see.

It certainly has a chilling effect — in keeping, I think you’ll agree, with the season.

Though I may not have Edward Snowden’s words quite right, during it — most of “Citizenfour” was filmed in a Hong Kong hotel room — he says that as the result of our government’s massive surveillance of its citizenry, which has effectively stripped privacy bare, we have been transformed from a country of electors and elected to one of the ruling and ruled.

A sea change into something new and strange if one prizes freedom.

It is ironic, moreover, that the whistleblower is charged under the Espionage Act when, in fact, it’s the government that is doing the spying. Dictatorships begin that way, someone in the film says.

Ah, but not to worry, this is the land of the free: Except for the fact that one’s freedom is forfeit to the extent that one’s privacy is invaded, leading to the aforementioned chilling effect.

If he’s got nothing to hide, let him come back and make his case in a court of law, some — even commentators I admire — say. You’ve got to be kidding — Snowden would be clapped into irons as quickly as you could say justice is served. No less a person than Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, has said he should stay away.

Interestingly — at least to me — is that William Blake said that there are two sorts — tyrants and their acquiescent victims. Old-time tyranny may not be practiced in this purported democracy, though it can come creeping in other guises, the above-mentioned universal listening-in to which Snowden has alerted us and the vast structural inequality described by Thomas Piketty being two ways. . . . Tyranny creeps in on little cat feet. . . .

Are we destroying the village to save it?