The Totalitarianism of Modern Airports by Edward Cline
http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-totalitarianism-of-modern-airports.html
I hate flying, and have hated it for years ever since 9/11, and have sworn never to fly again. It’s for my blood pressure. I hate it not only because of the airlines’ treatment of passengers or customers as faceless widgets to be squeezed together as much as possible in an airport, but also on the planes, forcing one to come in physical contact with other passengers, many of whom one would not otherwise wish to touch. I hate it also because of the role of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
The typical large airport is a microcosm of a regulated, controlled society, an experiment in Progressivism. The miasma of the environment is repellent if not dulling to the senses. Modern, post-9/11 airports are intended to be soul-destroying because the only way to exercise the government’s power is to hold one’s business and purposes hostage and extort soul-destroying submission to the state’s will. “You have to go there?” says the TSA. “Well, you have to get past me first. Drop your drawers.”
All American airports have been turned into microcosms of totalitarianism. It’s not a hard concept to grasp, once one has passed through – or rather endured – being molested, fondled, spindled, stamped, x-rayed, bar-coded, ordered from here to there, stripped bare to reveal one’s secrets or shames, approved or disapproved, and made to conform to the government’s measure of good and acceptable behavior. The milieu demands total submission to the state’s will and ends. There is certainly no ambience left to an airport, except one of nonstop dread and mental numbness.
Everything seems to be designed and planned to distract one from observing that once one is in the clutches of the government, and also of the airlines, one has been reduced to the status of of an assembly line cog to be processed and dispatched as speedily as possible – speedily in terms of bureaucracy.
I remember the time when flying was somewhat romantic, something to look forward to with some excitement. I remember being greeted by a throng of friends when I stepped off a plane. Today, anyone not flying isn’t even allowed in most of the spaces and byways of an airport. One’s friends, family, and well-wishers have been banned from having any business inside an airport. One’s greeters are confined to an area outside of the processing center.
I also remember a time when there were smoking sections, when actual meals were served to passengers instead of dispensing to hapless passengers what look like dog biscuits or packets of pretzels, when the stewardesses were pretty and bustling, when the seats were wider and roomier. Today, one is ensconced into as little square footage as possible without fitting one into a tagged straightjacket.
I refuse to subject myself anymore to it.
The airlines are complicit in reducing Americans to sardines who pay for the privilege of being stuffed like baggage into its planes.
American airports are proving grounds to test the willingness of Americans to tolerate abuse by the government.
In terms of employment, jobs at airports seem to be the exclusive realm of “minorities.” The TSA is an “equal opportunity,” “affirmative action” employer. It will hire certified dullards, perverts, thieves, and sadists, of any gender or race or religion. Even Muslims and individuals whose command of the English language is shaky or nonexistent.
The thoroughfares of terminals are replete with eateries and shops of every kind. These are called concessions, that is, businesses that are the mere stewards of whatever has been allowed by the government for sale. Naturally, everything for sale is taxed. They exist by government fiat. The government’s policy is to keep the passengers fat and happy before sending the cattle to the stockyards of “security.”
The TSA costs the country billions, yet it has neither detected nor foiled a single jihadist plot in its entire existence. It has failed repeatedly when supposedly dangerous materials or potential weapons have been sent through its screening system by agents testing the system’s effectiveness in security, which is nil. It is a police bureaucracy staffed, from top to bottom, by approximately 65,000 of the otherwise unemployable dross of the earth who take delight in putting their moral betters through the search and fondle wringer. It practices extortion on a scale that would make the Mafia green with envy. It exists, in one sense, to gauge the degree to which Americans are willing to submit to its own brand of Islam.
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| The Police State, American and Nazi Styles |
As a tool to “fight” jihad, it is absolutely useless. There are dozens of articles that have exposed its ineptness in “protecting” Americans against bombers and suicide vest-clad Muslims. Indeed, it employs Muslims, lots of them.
Congress has promised over and over again that it will reform the TSA and correct or eliminate its criminal activities. But Congress has never been in much of a hurry. After all, most members of Congress are exempt from being treated like warp and woof in travel, as the electorate is. They’re special. They’re the “elite.”
The TSA has a pigsty’s record of the theft of passenger property. Again, there are dozens of investigative articles that chronicle the ubiquitous larceny committed by TSA agents. Those blue surgical gloves worn by the agents are supposedly worn to protect passengers from whatever nasty things the agents or their victims have, and also they help to prevent any fingerprints from being left behind. Computers, watches, jewelry, cartons of cigarettes, valuable apparel – it’s all on a TSA employee’s felonious “shopping list.”
The modern airport is a model of the kind of society Progressives and other drooling totalitarians hanker to see America “transformed” into. It is a regulated society in which you are accountable to the state, but the state and its anonymous minions are not accountable to you. The modern airport is a precursor of things to come. Frankly, it’s already here.
One event in my life prepared me, in a manner of speaking, for my last visit to an American airport (I imagine most European airports are just as intolerable), and that was being thrown under the bus by a landlord who, having learned that I had been visited by an FBI/NCIS agent to warn me that this blog spot was on the radar of ISIS and perhaps that of other terrorist organizations, decided to evict me from my apartment. Arguing with the landlord was about as fruitless as arguing with a TSA agent. In fact, it was counter-protective. The more reason I employed with the landlord, the more hostility was generated against.
So, get this: Even though the threat to me, according to the FBI agent, ranged from minimal to nil, and that a jihadist was likely to attack anyone or everyone in the apartment complex where I lived, I somehow posed a “risk” to my fellow tenants. The landlord was concerned with the “safety” of her tenants. A knowledge of Islamic and Muslim “culture” and ways was a verboten subject, not to be discussed with the landlord. She did not wish to know anything about them. Bringing up the subject of the Orlando massacre was futile. The landlord was proof against reason. I had been writing about Islam for decades, and not once had ever been threatened by a jihadist, nor even sent a nasty comment or had my Facebook page invaded by pro-Islam or pro-immigrants in search of signs of “Islamophobia,” it mattered not.
You, who have been nominally risking his life while defending the right of Americans to speak freely about Islam and the federally subsidized and encouraged invasion of the country by the ciphers of an alien and hostile ideology, must be shown the gate and risk being killed. You must be sacrificed for the health and welfare of your fellow tenants and neighbors, who may or may not have anything to say about Islam. Your jeopardy and safety are of no concern.
The experience has left me wondering: Is the landlord a secret agent of ISIS? Is she a Taliban tart? An al-Qaeda airhead? Or is she one of those Progressives who refuse to think in terms of fundamentals, unable and unwilling to venture into the broader scheme of things?
So, here I am, uprooting my life at the behest of a callow paragon of mental thickness.
I think she has missed her calling. She could investigate, instead of being a private property manager, becoming a TSA administrator. She certainly has the temperament and personality.
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