It’s easy to be paranoid when you realize that your existence can be reduced to a string of numbers tagged onto your name—numbers that sum up almost every aspect of your life: your work history, police and medical records, shopping habits, reading and video rental habits, phone and travel records, magazine subscriptions, and affiliations and associations right down to which dubious web sites you frequent and whether or not you are a member of the Hair Club for Men. When you break it all down, everything you’ve done and everything about you is attached to a series of numbers on a database at the disposal of the all-powerful Big Brother.

For my own part, I had come to accept this reality, especially being someone who immigrated into the hysteria of a post-Patriot Act America. I have filled out the forms, doled out the cash, and willingly subjected myself to all manner of medical examinations, biometrics, fingerprinting, and background checks. It’s the sort of Welcome Wagon most would prefer to avoid, but I’ve come to see it as a right of passage.

Had my information been marred by prison records, history of psychosis, communicable disease, or an unhealthy pre-occupation with home-style explosives, it is reasonable that I be deemed a threat to security and sent back to Canada to build an igloo and train for hockey season. But, the idea that my opinions could make me a threat, should they prove to be objectionable to those on the current global VIP lists, well that’s just plain scary. If opposing viewpoints are enough to deem a person a liability, then this country has more to worry about than its national insecurity.

I always thought that dissenting voices, though they might be considered radical or uncivilized in the finger-sandwich society, are celebrated and venerated on the campuses of higher education. But, the Bruin Alumni Association has had just about enough of the Liberal opinion-mongering that has, evidently, run rampant on the UCLA campus. The Association, with graduate Andrew Jones at the helm, is declaring its own intellectual war on terror, McCarthy style. Jones has determined to scrub clean his beloved institution and liberate it from its political perversion. Via his site www.bruinalumni.com, Jones targets the students, faculty and administration of UCLA, calling them an “unholy alliance.”

Miffed about the proliferation of liberal-leaning professors warping young, vulnerable minds, Jones is offering students up to $100 per class in exchange for tapes and notes catching professors in the act of engaging in evil left-wing propaganda. Lectures and discussions are then posted and spun to promote Jones’ own right-wing propaganda.

Anti-climactic as this proves to be, Jones exerts every effort to make those peace-loving, Bush-hating, civil liberty-supporting professors appear as bone-chillingly evil as Jones is creepy and delusional. Jones is the only thing radical going on here, and even a couple of his Alumni comrades agreed, jumping ship when they caught wind of his spy-school witch-hunt.

Abandoning any hope of luring the UCLA student body to the dark side, Jones’ solution is to eliminate politics from the campus altogether. It’s ironic that Jones would like to see a campus devoid of politics because the campus’ current political bent opposes his own. Instead he would prefer a community where discussing anything political is politically incorrect. Students would be forced to wander off to secluded corners in order to discuss current events outside of who’ll be the next American Idol.

But there is no such thing as a politics-free zone. Higher education couldn’t be attained in the absence of politics or radical thought. In Jones’ perception, disagreeing with the war in Iraq is akin to setting off a bomb in a playground. So, those who disagree with Jones are radicals. Knowledge, however, cannot be fostered in an environment where political expression is stifled.

For example, Jones’ own ideas did not materialize in a vacuum. He attended the liberally infected UCLA, and look how he turned out. It’s not like campus Republicans are heading for extinction and Jones’ minions have to use spying to supplement their blood-and-sperm-for-beer-money income.

Parents, Jones seems to believe, can be grateful, not only that their children are learning the true meaning of capitalism, but that they can also gain information about those scandalous ex-hippy professors who believe that multi-national corporations are running the world. How preposterous!

Really, Jones shouldn’t take it all so personally. Silly, young people always want to change the world. Eventually, though, parental financial support disappears, rent comes due, and the spell is broken. Sure, a few idealists will persevere come feast or famine. But the bulk will exchange their abstract ideals for the profit motive, embrace the capitalistic dream and vote Republican. Some may even buy into the stock market with money they earned ratting out their peace-loving professors.