Back in the ’80s when, on a couple of occasions, I visited the Soviet Union, I always wondered what was it really like to live in that godforsaken place. But it didn’t much matter. For all the creepy spying that was going on, I realized I’d be out of there in a week or two.

Now I know what it was like. It’s come home.

I live in fear.

I don’t want to admit it, but it’s true. Every phone call I make, every email I send, every text I message, every article I write including this one, I imagine being bugged or recorded.

1984 is here and it’s not pretty.

It infects everything we do.

For example, I want to criticize the IRS with every breath I take, but in the back of my head I worry — what if they come after me? What if I’m audited and have to spend the next few years and untold dollars on accountants and attorneys? Is this fair to my family? Is this how I want to spend my life?

Just today I was going to follow up on some information about the wretched prevarications surrounding Benghazi and hesitated. Should I email the source? Telephone? Send a letter? Snail mail would take too long.

What about buying one of those throwaway phones at Radio Shack? But then I would be compromising the recipients of my calls. I would be implicating them.

A few days ago, MSNBC commentator Martin Bashir, in high dudgeon, accused critics of the IRS scandal of racism toward Barack Obama. I’m not going to rehearse the number of black conservatives — including intellects of the stature of Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele — who would then be racists, or even go into my own personal story as a white civil rights worker in the South in the sixties (I’m older than Bashir) and how insulting it would be to people like me to be lumped in as racists because we object to the president’s policies.

Never mind the massive declines in racism in our (and other Anglo-Saxon) societies documented in a recent Pew Poll and never mind the late Andrew Breitbart’s offer of one hundred thousand dollars for evidence of the use of the n-word by even one of tens of thousands of Tea Party demonstrators for which not a single bid came forward.

What interests me is why people like Bashir maintain this need to brand anyone even vaguely to the right as racist. It’s almost a disorder worthy of classification in the DSM-5 — PRDS: Projective Racist Derangement Syndrome.

Actually, I don’t think it’s quite that sick, although it does have definite pathological aspects. A more obvious motivation is old-fashioned fear. The liberal canon is under heavy intellectual and practical assault at this moment. Keynesian economics hang by a thread as monumental deficits threaten the global financial system. Unemployment numbers coupled with entitlements escalating into the stratosphere spell disaster for all. The welfare state is on the brink of bankruptcy — or over it in many instances.

For the rational person, something must been done about this. But to do so would mean the dismantling of the liberal orthodoxy. For people like Bashir that would also mean undoing or questioning everything (or a great deal of) what they had believed since high school or college or even earlier. Not fun. I know — I had to do it myself. Like it or not, you pay. (If you’re an employee of MSNBC, you lose your job.) Most liberals I know don’t even dare to examine this.

Much better to blame the other and accuse him or her of racism, taking the ideas off the table and dehumanizing your opponent.

Of all the many extraordinary sites and sounds from the Israel trip from which I have just returned, the view from the high point of Kibbutz Misgav Am, in the extreme north, down into Lebanon is the one I am unable to get out of my mind.

You look in the Israel direction and see richly cultivated farmland running across the Hula Valley for miles and miles almost to the horizon. You look into Lebanon and you see sporadic small olive groves, abandoned homes interspersed with inhabited ones and uncultivated hard-scrabble land running on forever.

The difference is almost surreal since the land itself is the same on both sides of the border. Anyone could farm it. You just have to have the will to do it. (Much of that land, I was told, was riddled with underground tunnels through which to attack Israel.)

You notice a similar disparity between Israel and the Palestinian Authority areas on the West Bank.

Of course the soi-disant “progressive” explanation for the dramatic difference is the Israeli occupation. Never mind the Israelis are not occupying Lebanon – they must be doing it in some spiritual manner.

But only the likes of UN rapporteur and UCSB professor Richard Falk could actually believe that nonsense.

When I say “the likes of” I am acknowledging there are many similar (though few as bad as Falk), but I will get back to them in a second.

Imagine for a moment the Arab standing on his land whether in Lebanon or the West Bank and looking down or across into Israel. What must he be thinking? (This would also include, to varying degrees, those living inside Israel.)

Their first reaction would most likely be a form of shame – why can’t we do that? But shame is a difficult emotion to “contain” in the psychoanalytic sense. In order to quiet it, you have to do something about it, improve your situation yourself to gain self-respect.

An easier reaction, a quick amelioration of shame, is a combination of rage and blame – and that is what we have seen all over the Arab Middle East for decades. And, as we know, this unremitting anger is justified and exacerbated — and, to a great degree, caused — by religious fundamentalism.

It didn’t take the IRS scandal, the Benghazi debacle, and the surveillance of the press to make me think Barack Obama was one of the worst, if not the worst, president in American history. I already did.

But I’m not sure the latest scandal — the mass sweep of everyone’s metadata by the NSA — is everything it’s cracked up to be. Certainly, it’s not surprising. I rather yawned at the revelation that the comings and goings of all our emails, phone calls, texts, etc., were being recorded. I always assumed they were. And I always thought we were all leaving an indelible digital trail.

In fact, I had long since ceased putting my most serious private communications online or even making them over the phone, except in moments of haste or laziness, when I held my nose and went ahead with it. I imagine many of us have done that.

And this has little or nothing to do with Bush, Obama, or any politician. It’s the nature of technology. Privacy, as we once knew it, is over. We can put in strong checks and balances to prevent the improper exploitation of this information to bolster the provisions already in place, but we’re fighting the proverbial uphill battle — and not just because of Obama’s quasi-totalitarian behavior (although who would like the crew behind the IRS scandal peering into our email?).

Sad, but true…. but there is another side to it. I spent part of Sunday at Kibbutz Misgav Am in a part of the extreme north of Israel known as “The Finger.” This is because, like a finger, the kibbutz juts up into Lebanon so that parts of it are bordered by the Arab state on three sides. (Earlier in the day, I had driven an ATV right along that border.)

I stood in the lookout booth at the kibbutz high point with a spokesperson looking down at a Shiite village perhaps two hundred meters away. You could see yellow Hezbollah flags flying in front of the houses, one of them just yards from a small UN installation. To our right were some sculptures made from primitive Hezbollah mortars in previous wars. (By the way, later I saw several UN jeeps heading south on the main road. I couldn’t tell if they were Austrian soldiers who were reported leaving the Golan Heights to avoid involvement in the Syrian civil war, but they looked European.)

As some people know, I’m traveling in Israel right now. At this moment, I’m in Safed (alternatively Tsefat and Zefat), the home of the Kaballah and Jewish mysticism. To be ultra simplistic — a very cool place.

Forget that for the moment. I travel and have traveled a lot, ever since I was sixteen and took off for England and France with my friend Ed. That was more years ago than I will admit on a public website, but ever since then I’ve been fortunate enough to bebop around the world on a regular basis. Some like pot, others like whiskey, some like to dance the hully-gully. Travel is my drug of choice.

Being a news junkie, however, in all those travels I stayed close to home by incessant reading of English-language newspapers — the Rome Daily American and, of course, the Paris Herald Tribune (“Just tell your cab driver “sank too denoo”), now the International Herald Tribune. In more romantic days, it was the very symbol of Americans abroad. Remember Jean Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless, the Godard flic with Seberg hawking the Trib on the Left Bank? That was, for years, the hip image of Americans abroad.

Them days are over. Way over.

The wise American abroad now stays tuned to what’s happening with the man himself — Matt Drudge.

Forget Travels with My Aunt or Travels with Charley. I travel with Matt.

By reading Drudge any time I want (virtually) I can stay almost as tuned in as I am in New York or L.A. — and without the absurd NYTimes filter placed on the International Herald Tribune.

I’ve been in Jerusalem the last few days engaging in a combination of traditional tourism and what you might call political tourism (others might call it research, but I’m being honest, or trying to be).

Traditional tourism in Jerusalem has always been fascinating, but it has reached another level in the intervening twenty years since I have been here. The archaeological excavations in and around the Old City have grown exponentially and now are as interesting as the Roman Forum, more so if you’re Jewish. They are also extraordinarily well presented. You can spend a lifetime studying them and obviously people do.

But you can read about this a million places online and I have no special insight to add to what is already there — except to stay out of Hezekiah’s Tunnel if you’re claustrophobic and not to miss eating at the Mahneyuda Restaurant off Jerusalem’s Mehana Yehuda market, world class food in a raucous, fun atmosphere.

Now to the political tourism. Some of this had been arranged in advance. Through the offices of friends in the Israeli diplomatic corps in Los Angeles, a “briefing” was set up for me in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was quite cordial and flattering to be there.

But what did I learn that I didn’t already know? Nothing. If I had, something would have been wrong. Who was I? And besides, I have trouble keeping secrets about the most minor affairs. You would have to be nuts to share something of an important confidential political nature with me.

Well, I’m not dead certain of that. I’ve never actually been told anything of that nature that was any more than gossip. Maybe I’m more trustworthy than that. In any case, I learned at the Ministry that Israel thinks the Arab world is going through a tumultuous period of change with no clear end in sight. (Are you surprised? How could they think otherwise?) Also, they are generally loathe to get involved unless they deem it absolutely necessary. (Again, not surprising.)

Still, it was fascinating being inside an Israeli ministry. The foreign affairs building is attractive and made of translucent stone, a modernized Jerusalem look. The most impressive modernized Jerusalem look, however, is Moshe Safdie’s design for Yad Vashem, the Holocaust history museum, a prism-like triangular structure.

My second foray into political tourism was, let us say, somewhat more exotic. I was taken to the Israeli equivalent of Guantanamo to observe terrorist trials.

Barry Rubin is a first-rate writer, scholar, and person, but no one would ever mistake him for Mario Andretti. He’s the kind of guy you might want with you as a partner on Jeopardy, but maybe not if you’re trying to find your way out of the Istanbul bazaar.

This is all by way of saying we got lost yesterday on our way driving [REDACTED] of Tel Aviv to an appointment at the Meir Amit Intelligence & Terrorism Center (ITC) at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (HCC). Barry took a couple of wrong turns and we ended up at the gate of the new headquarters of the [REDACTED] agency — an organization that has been written about frequently in novels.

Naturally they were surprised to see us. A young man with an M4 stepped out of a car and asked to see our IDs. He stared at our U.S. passports with some amusement as Barry explained at length (possibly more than was necessary) in Hebrew who we were. Then the young man sent us on our way with the proper directions.

A few minutes later we wound up rather miraculously at our destination where we were met by Dr. Yoram Kahati, deputy director & senior analyst of the aforementioned center. It was worth the wait — and the confusion.

The Meir Amit Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center is actually a tiny museum on a military base. consisting of blood-curdling displays of the history and activities of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, etc, a kind of Madame Tussaud’s of terror organizations. (Note to B. Obama: Al Qaeda existed before bin Laden and did not vanish at his death,)

In case you didn’t know it, Tel Aviv can get hot. I was sitting in the courtyard of this place called Sonya’s, having lunch with the Rubin family, when the sun moved around to my side of the table and in a few minutes I felt as if I were Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia in those scenes where he was limping across the desert like a scorched rat. And I’m from L.A., where once in a while — during Santa Ana winds — it can get a bit warm.

So I have learned in a few days here not to be a mad dog or an Englishman and go out in the noonday sun. Many of the locals clearly follow suit, making this a terrific night city, which is fine by me because I don’t know what time it is anyway. I am up at 4:30 a.m. jogging on the beach front. It’s an interesting experience because you get to see the action at various hours.

One commenter on my previous post noted that I should look for a surprising comity between Jews and Arabs. That was evident last night when we walked over to Jaffa, the old largely Arab port, for dinner and saw both groups mingling casually. The Arab women had some pretty exotic and trendy head scarves, but they’re living in the city recently branded number one in the world for “gay travelers.” You get some pretty amusing culture clashes, even some sense of live and let live. (I hope I’m not projecting on that. Perhaps some Israelis reading this will chime in.)

What strikes me most of all is the pursuit of normalcy here. Syria may be disintegrating, Hezbollah may be out for Jewish, Sunni, or whatever blood, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood may be on the loose from Mali to Egypt, even Turkey now has demonstrations, but the people of Tel Aviv want a normal life. Who wouldn’t?

I arrived in Israel Thursday afternoon — I think it was Thursday, hard to tell with a ten hour difference — and almost immediately took a walk along the Tel Aviv beach to clear my brain.

It didn’t. But Sheryl, Madeleine, and I pushed on, anxious to acclimate ourselves to Israeli time. It was their fist trips to Israel and my first since 1993. I had spent most of the fifteen hour flight from L.A. reading Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews, a fantastic book I had promised myself for years, and had images of Jeremiah and the other prophets swimming in my head. Jetlagged, I was already a prime prospect for the Jerusalem Syndrome, that peculiar problem that develops when people visit the Holy Land and start to over-identify. This seems to happen especially to agnostic types like me. If I start to sound or act messianic, just laugh or put me away.

Fortunately, we were met soon by Barry Rubin and his family who walked with us south down the boardwalk to Jaffa, passing along the way the ancient/modern Etzel Museum to the Stern Gang who fought for Israeli independence over a half a century ago, on our way to dinner at Dr. Shakshuka — a (what else?) shakshuka joint in an Ottoman courtyard.

As we walked, I queried Barry about something I had always meant to ask him, why he had made aliyah — “ascended” and moved to Israel — decades ago. I will leave it to Barry to explain his reasons, which were naturally interesting. I was really asking the question about me. Like many American Jews, I have always had a “counter life,” as Phillip Roth called it in his novel of the same name, an imaginary Israeli version of me.

I had thought about moving here in the eighties, though I doubt very seriously. I had almost no Hebrew, for one thing (have even less now), but that was the least of it. I assumed I could learn. But I am American to the core. I believe more than ever in American exceptionalism, how necessary it is for the world. Still, I am confused. Am I here or am I there?

It seems as if Time and Newsweek were right back in the seventies. Global cooling is here. At least for this Memorial Day.

Somewhere Al Gore is gnashing his teeth, while concocting another speech to tell us that cooling actually means warming or some such palaver. Up is down. Good is bad. He’s beginning to sound like a cross between Napoleon in Orwell’s Animal Farm and the Mad Hatter.

Actually, Al has done us a favor by making it clear once again that science is not for amateurs and that when someone says something’s “settled,” that means it more than likely isn’t. They are trying to put one over on us and probably on themselves as well. After all, it’s profitable.

But wait — there’s more.

This strange freezing weather is oddly symbolic on this Memorial Day for the situation of liberalism in general right now, which is being exposed as phony and venal across the board from Benghazi to the IRS to the surveillance of the press — an ideology cracking like thin ice on a winter’s day.

Anthropogenic global warming was a harbinger of all that, a kind of pseudo-scientific, faithed-based belief in something about as proven as the existence of vampires, only you were supposed to alter the world economic system completely for it. Some still want to, of course, but their power seems to be diminishing. It’s up to us finish the job.

Speaking of which, here’s a personal observation for Memorial Day that I pretentiously think is important. With this #scandalabra of scandals, this great country of ours is at a crossroads. Even the monolithic MSM is beginning to shift a little. It’s nowhere near Tectonic as yet, but something’s happening.

But the MSM are highly traditional, conservative types (in the sense that they almost never alter their views about anything). As Peter Wehner pointed out in the Weekly Standard, they are likely to revert to to type at the first opportunity.