The National Trust

For the next few days, we at the Blasphemy Blog will be delving into the morass of today's Supreme Court decisions, but today, let us take a trip "across the pond."

Tony Blair, who seems to be in the unfortunate position of a being a good man who has only bad ideas, wants to institute a system of national ID cards for Great Britain. It's an unpopular idea, but mostly because it appears that it's going to cost citizens a lot of money. This is not the same reason why such an idea would be unpopular in the United States.

As our blogfriend Steve Gilliard ably points out, this is the kind of thing that would never fly over here. We Americans, for better or for worse, see our government as very far away from us. This is because it usually is very far away from us; lots of us live in places like Montana and Alaska, which are both well over a thousand miles from the seat of the federal government in Washington, D.C. If you went over a thousand miles from London, you'd be practically at the arctic circle, or in Eastern Europe. But you can be very far from the government and still be in the United States.

What's more, we Americans like it that way. We don't particularly want to be checked up on. Sometimes we're perfectly okay if the government wants to check up on our neighbors, but that's just human nature. We like to be left alone, ourselves.

Is that really possible, though? Are Americans actually any further from their federal government than Britons are from the Queen's parliament? That is the question, after all; just because we perceive ourselves to be far from our government doesn't mean that we actually are. The invention of the computer and the ability to weld it to the satellite sort of ended the age of being able to mind your own business. The vast distance between us and our government still means we're out of sight, but in today's interconnected world, we're never really out of range.

It might no longer be a question of whether you want to be checked up on, or who you want to be able to check up on you. You might just have to trust that you can't be checked up on in any way that's going to hurt you. Which kind of scares us, here at the Blasphemy Blog.