To start on a bright note: I often remember fondly the sign posted by a local business on Highway 450 (
That is the spirit of
To start with, here is the Encarta Encyclopedia definition of “homeland,” from before the creepy government entity was formed:
- “1. native country: The country where somebody was born or where somebody lives or feels that she or he belongs.
- 2. history self-governing territory for black people: any of the partially self-governing regions of
For an example of the second, here is an explanation excerpted from the Library of Congress Country Studies (
- “Southern Sotho peoples were assigned to the tiny homeland of QwaQwa, which borders
- “Each of the four nominally independent homelands . . . maintained small defence forces that were effectively under SADF control, despite each government’s claim to national sovereignty. (No country except
- “Until 1994 South Africa was divided administratively into four provinces, . . . six ‘self-governing’ homelands, . . . and four independent ‘homelands’ or ‘sovereign independent states’ . . . The government estimated in 1990 that 44 percent of the country’s total population resided in the country’s ten homelands, which formed less than 14 percent of the country’s total land area. A 1992 study by the Urban Foundation, a South African research organization, concluded that this high population density – several hundred persons per square kilometer in some areas – greatly exacerbated socioeconomic and political problems in the homelands.”
Conversely, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 expresses support for a “home” for the Jewish people in
Face it: in this country, “homeland” means a foreign country. “Homeland” is the home country of immigrants who came to this country partly because this is one country that didn’t have departments of homeland security.
Now, presumably, guerrilla terrorists can boast, ‘we forced the
It wasn’t created by Saddam, of course. The entity named “Homeland Security Institute” was created in 1999 by a corporation named Anser, Inc. (Analytic Services, Inc.) which, as luck would have it, happened to be a major one-shop (federal) military and security contractor. On its board of trustees was Stephen Hadley, who became Condoleezza Rice’s Deputy National Security Adviser in the Bush administration.
In another manifestation of Bush’s typically Orwellian approach to “security,” the new department is more top-down, more top-heavy than ever – but called “flexibility,” bowing to the political need released by FBI agent Colleen Rowley’s testimony, etc. It created another level of bureaucracy instead of eliminating and consolidating some of the ones we’ve got, combining basic public-health & public-safety functions with ‘wartime’ security reactions usually of some unspecified sort.
A “Department of Homeland Security” still has a very strange sound for this country. A ‘homeland’ anything has a strange ring in this country. Combine that word with ‘department’ -- as in federal -- and ‘security’ -- as in surveillance, etc. -- and you’ve got a poison cocktail to set the heart racing – and not with inspiration, pride, or tenderness.
If you want to know why this luridly un-American-sounding phrase was so little addressed by newspapers, you probably have to look at their advertisers. An insider in print advertising reminded me recently that most newspapers and magazines, even the biggest, fear the clout of their advertisers, adding that a newspaper’s biggest advertisers are usually the car dealerships and the real estate agents. Here in the DC area, you can add a third category: the “security” industry. And while jumping on the security gravy train, the contractors have taken the press with them. Take a look at the online publications devoted to “homeland security” in the nation’s capital. No wonder we had so few of the self-proclaimed erudite, informed, and aware in the nation’s capital pointing out (in print) how creepy the phrase “homeland security” sounds.
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