As the witchhunt for the now-infamous fugitive NSA whistleblower intensifies and the cries of his despisers grow only more shrill, a single line comes to mind beneath the din, nearly too faint now to hear.

“Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?”

Those who have read Joseph Heller’s classic novel Catch-22 may have recalled the vaguely familiar ring of the name upon first hearing of Snowden and recognized it from the wistful query uttered by the book’s beleaguered anti-hero Yossarian, who poses the “question with no answer” as he pines for the lost airman who spilled his guts for his country while on his first doomed mission. Desperate to avoid the same fate, Yossarian attempts to avoid any further missions of his own by professing insanity. However, by wittingly claiming to be insane he establishes himself as sane enough by law to perform his duties, and so he must fly. There is no way out of the bind. He is hopelessly screwed.

Edward Snowden is screwed, too. Maybe we all will be if we don’t fight to protect him. Much like Yossarian’s predicament, the national situation at hand is most certainly crazy, as a democracy seemingly in its death throes finds itself in a dire catch-22 of its own, with its own cast of farcical characters and government officals who further entangle the ever-growing knot of bureaucracy, blurred legality, irrational security, and national hypocrisy in a no-man’s-land of Justice where principled men apparently go to die.

Ever since news of the NSA scandal broke and the name of our bearer of bad tidings became known, that line of lament from Heller’s novel resurfaces and beckons with an inscrutable significance from the pages of an older America, one that seems to be receding only further into history as something altogether different and more monstrous takes its place.

Yet the government is sticking to its guns, and it has plenty of them­­––along with a death-flock of killer robots licensed to kill whomever our sagacious higher-ups deem threatening, whether American or not, so you better keep one eye cocked to the sky for freedom bots, Snowden. A new era is being ushered in, and Snowden has become one of its great harbingers of doom. As a contractor of the state, he was bound by the dictates of his office and the bureaucracy he served to remain hush-hush about the particulars of what went on in the dusky liaison with the National Security Agency. Yet in being privy to the secret data-gathering program and its most undemocratic of machinations, he found himself in conflict with a greater, more transcendent allegiance: his loyalty to the Constitution of the United States, that old bygone piece of parchment encased in museum glass that is rumored to enshrine the inviolable rights that our forebears fought and died for to vouchsafe to us.

“Posterity!” John Adams wrote long ago in the midst of the Revolution. “You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope that you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.”

There must be tears falling in heaven to see our country today, as the world’s self-proclaimed bastion of freedom and its leading lip-server of hope & change cry out in sanctimonious indignation against Snowden, the so-called traitor to liberty who blew the lid on the administration’s unprecedentedly far-sweeping spy program with the potential to make Big Brother look like ‘Lil Sister. But who in this scenario is the true traitor? To uphold the Constitution by protecting his country from all enemies foreign and domestic was the oath Barack Obama swore when he took office, and it is always the responsibility of the public and its representatives to ensure it not be broken without great consequence, à la Richard Nixon. But nowadays our leaders have Watergate for breakfast and a cup of Teapot Dome at two. The president who promised us an unprecedented level of transparency also railed against the invasions of privacy set in motion by the Bush presidency, giving fiery speeches about the audacity of a federal government that would dare snoop into the library records of private citizens or tap their phone calls in a breach of their constitutional rights; and of whistleblowers he proclaimed that they “should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration.” The country elected him in a bold disavowal of what had come before, not as an amplification of those same policies. Who is the real traitor?

Now here we are, and here’s Snowden facing the fire for his disclosures in the name of democracy and transparency and accountability for the American people. What is his true crime? If elements of the government he served had gone rogue, if his leaders had fallen into a fugue and forgotten the sacrosanctity of their oaths, if fear and paranoia had usurped the decisionmaking faculties of those in command and driven them to lawlessness, what was he to do as a man of conscience? After all, the great lesson we were supposed to have learned from Nuremberg was that simply following orders would not save your hide when the inexorable hammer of Justice finally did come down on the crimes of government. Even now the Justice Department fights to keep secret a 2011 opinion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court which found its program to be unconstitutional and in breach of the Fourth Amendment, thus criminal. This is the very information that Edward Snowden has risked his life to bring to us. Who is the real traitor?

Perhaps the real problem is the general malaise of We the People and our inability to call criminals for what they are any longer. No matter how bad things get, no matter how far amok our leaders stray from the law of the land and then shirk all cries for redress, We the People have not held them properly to account for their transgressions. It’s possible we’ve forgotten our Sacred Honor. Still, maybe somewhere within this new Empire there lives the spirit of the old Republic, and it isn’t too late to salvage our right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. It may be that we have only to heed the voice from America past that once told the world, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Edward Snowden must go free. We’ve got to stand with him now against our government and be heard. He is one of us: We the People. The others––McCain, Feinstein, Kerry, Clinton, all the criers of treason––vote them all out of office and bring in a new vanguard. It’s time to make a stand, so that one day, when all dissent is stifled, when the control grid is complete and we have no heroes left to speak for us, we won’t have to ask that hopeless question with no answer.

Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?