Iron Mountain

[Spoken verse 1:]

It was so strange, the way it happened.

Almost overnight, there were soldiers everywhere in the city.

Where there used to be just, maybe, one policeman –

now there were groups of soldiers with machine guns, and riot gear.

Almost immediately, it became normal.

They began to blend in.

Nobody talked to them but they were everywhere,

Like ghosts.

And I thought, "when did that start to happen?"

[Voiceover:]

We're trying to prevent it from happening,

instead of having to deal with it afterwards

[Spoken verse 2:]

So homeland security began to breed dogs.

When the puppies were 13 weeks old they were sent to prisons to be trained by prisoners.

The smartest dogs were drafted to work with police on patrols.

And on bomb sniffing squads.

The homeland security slogan

"If you see something, say something."

sounds like something the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein might say.

And his books are full of cryptic sentences about logic.

And about how language has the power to actually create the world.

"If you can't talk about it," he says, "it just doesn't exist."

[Instrumental]

[Spoken verse 3:]

After the "see something, say something" slogan had been around for a while,

someone from Homeland Security must have had second thoughts

about asking people to report on each other all the time.

I would've loved to have been at that Homeland Security PR brainstorming session

when they decided to add this phrase to their slogan.

[murmur.]

There's so many trucks in my neighbourhood now,

carrying information and data on their way to secure storage areas.

Iron Mountain started as a network of caves for growing mushrooms.

And gradually turned into a bomb resistant storage facility for corporate documents.

After World War II,

the company began inventing new identities for Jewish immigrants,

who arrived with nothing.

No papers – or at most their old library cards.

So Iron Mountain created all sorts of new documents for them.

And they became instant Americans.