This threat to freedom comes bundled not in a scarf but in telecom treachery

Not quite a month ago, American freedoms faced a terrifying new threat posted by the tattered white scarf Rachael Ray wore in a Dunkin’ Donuts ad. In a testament to the ingenuity and vigor of post-9/11 American paranoia, a photo stylist’s passing fancy became a symbol of Islamo-fascism, coiled around Ray’s neck like a cobra preparing to strike. Dunkin’ Donuts’ pulled the ad, however, and the Rachel Ray kaffiyeh kerfuffle somehow passed without enduring damage to American freedom and security.

Hijacking Rachael Ray would have been a brilliant stroke by those who hate our freedoms. She’s everywhere, smiling out at us from snack food boxes, magazine covers and television screens. She’s almost as ubiquitous—and potentially as menacing—as Big Brother, the totalitarian leader whose glowering visage loomed from signs posted inside and out in George Orwell’s 1984.

Indeed there’s hardly anything so ubiquitous in American culture as Rachael Ray’s promotional face, unless it’s the proliferating products of the telecommunications industry. Now the threat to American freedom is not a matter of dress, but of redress. Will Congress grant immunity to telecom corporations that put obedience to the administration’s secret domestic surveillance program before their duty to the Constitution—Sen. Barack Obama’s planned protestations notwithstanding (by design)? It’s a proposition that has made cries of “Fascism!” less overbroad epithet and more on-the-mark analysis—what with corporate oligarchies in service to a repressive regime that tramples on civil liberties in a fearful climate of war without end, and all that.

Hijacking the Constitution by immunizing the telecoms brings us closer to fascism—a word with its root in the Latin word fasces, meaning bundle (of sticks, making a group). Is it more ominous when Rachel Ray bundles up in a scarf, or when a telecom tells you it’s a better deal if you bundle your services?