Since
scientists discovered extra sleep results in weight loss, I’ve been going to
bed earlier and staying there longer, pillow over my head, trying to get a bit
more shut-eye. What this really means is that instead of sleeping I’m spending
hours in bed wide awake, thinking.

I
think about how odd it is that sleeping more causes weight loss. I think about
the human body and its funny little biological bits. The hormones and nerves
and whatnot. Soon I’m stricken by the thought that I’m nothing more than a skin
bag full of chemicals and electrical pulses.

Diving
under the covers, I think: we’re all just dust in the wind and — this might
be a good time to mention the possibility that I’m undermedicated — sleep is
a metaphor for death and I remember the thousands of gleaming human bones and
skulls stacked neatly in the Catacombs under Paris and all the other bazillion
dead people everywhere, flesh rotted off bone. Tossing and turning, I wonder:
Do we exist solely to eat and sleep — and in some cases sleep more so we can
eat more — and then die? What’s the meaning of life?

Then,
just as the answer shimmers into view — life is… creating culture…
civilization… striving for ideals… BEEEEP. BEEEEP. The alarm clock jolts me
back to reality.

While I was
piling on
the pillows trying to improve my constitution, the Bush Administration was
destroying the real Constitution by blocking out the world on a larger, more
destructive scale. The Treasury Department sucker-punched the First Amendment,
dragged it into an alley, and left it for dead. Why? National security, of
course.

It
was actually a little department within Treasury, the Office of Fiscal Asset
Control, that committed the crime. About a year ago, OFAC retrofitted a 1917
law designed to prevent trade with enemy countries, broadening its scope to
include information and creative work. This major policy change meant people
living in countries America has sanctions against — Iran, Sudan, Cuba —
couldn’t publish their work here. America isn’t perfect, but it’s a beacon of
hope for the world’s oppressed. When foreign dissidents want to get their
stories out, they turn to us for help.

OFAC
put an end to all that. Publishers could be fined $1 million for producing such
a book; agents also faced punishment, all in the name of national security.
Those brave patriots at Treasury saved us from such dangers as a book on the
birds of Cuba by Cornell University Press and an anthology of contemporary
Iranian literature. And they prevented scientists in international consortiums
from contributing research findings to scholarly journals. Way to go.

If
you’re going to go to all the trouble of shutting up birders wielding high-powered
binoculars and writers brandishing sharpened pencils, might as well silence
those dissidents too, right? Aren’t they the real threat anyway? Oh, wait a
sec. Dissidents in sanctioned countries tend to share the very ideals — democracy, freedom, human rights — the
Bush Administration pretends to support. They’re not only on our side; they’re
endorsing what America represents. I guess the Bushies were so busy silencing
the rest of the world they forgot to listen to their own rhetoric. And the Constitution
took a blow in the process.

America’s not
just blocking out the world — it took Bush four days to offer
condolences to the leaders of the countries hit by the tsunami, for example —
we’re shutting each other out, too. We’ve abandoned civil discourse and each of
us is plugged into separate, narrow bands of partisan media shrieking. Our
leader is the narrowest of them all, hacking away at the freedom of expression,
throwing peaceful protesters out of his political rallies, praising Rummy for
stonewalling a soldier asking questions about armor.

Bush
is, to his credit, the president for our time. In this era of the iPod, sound
isolation technology is at the leading edge of entertainment research.
Consumers are snatching up new speakers and headphones designed to let you
listen to what you want to hear and only what you want to hear. Bose, for one,
offers “acoustic noise canceling” technology which electronically identifies
unwanted noise and blocks out “the tiresome sounds that have so often distracted
you.”

I
know the kind of tiresome sounds the Treasury Department’s OFAC was trying to
block out. Tiresome sounds about political oppression in Iran, Cuba, and Sudan.
Whiny accounts of torture and people disappearing. Stories like the one Shirin
Ebadi, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning Iranian lawyer, hopes to tell in her
memoir. She risked her life fighting for better treatment of women and children
in Iran and was heralded by Bush one year, blocked from publishing here the
next.

The good news
is that
under mounting pressure — and lawsuits brought by Ebadi and others —
Treasury withdrew its restrictions last month claiming the new guidelines had
been misinterpreted. Americans have always been free, it said, to publish
information and creative works by people in sanctioned countries. The bad news
is they’re lying and it could happen again.

I
need to be more vigilant. But how can I monitor this administration’s
shenanigans? Remember, I’m the genius trying to lose weight by sleeping all
day. Speaking of which, isn’t Bush plagued by the Big Questions? The meaning of
life, etc.? Maybe crippling the Constitution is his contribution to future
civilizations. If so, he’s clever to continue raising the specter of 9/11 while
silencing nations and isolating inauguration protesters; we roll over because
everyone wants to help prevent terrorist attacks.

Everyone,
that is, except Bush himself. He continues to ignore many of the 9/11
commission’s recommendations and underfund security initiatives. Bush’s meaning
of life? Empty the First Amendment, fill the coffers. It’s amazing he’s as thin
as he is; I mean, how does he sleep at night?

This article appears in Jan 19-25, 2005.