bump the origional article for later my Liege...
Posted on 05/20/2005 12:41:18 PM PDT by HairOfTheDog
bump the origional article for later my Liege...
Not long ago, I was standing in line at LAX undoing my shoelaces, emptying my pockets of coins, cell phones, iPods, keys, assorted aviation-grade bolts, nuts and washers, auxiliary fuel pumps, Buick transmissions and anything else that would cause the metal detector to explode in a shower of sparks. Directly in front of me was a greasy man with a gray ponytail wearing a sweatshirt that seemed to be covered in yellow fluff, as if he had spent the day removing insulation. I paid him no attention whatsoever.
The TSA guy said “remove your shoes and any metal objects, have your boarding pass and ID visible, and step through the metal detector in an orderly fashion.”
And just as I am about to push the grey plastic stuffholder over the rollers, I, and the 200 people directly behind me, realize that the man in front of me is not proceeding through the metal detector in an orderly fashion. He is, in point of fact, not moving at all.
“Step forward, sir”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not until you say please.”
Ah, here we go. I take a closer look at this guy. He’s got a carry-on “suitcase” that consists of a cardboard box wrapped in plastic tape, but he’s not poor. He’s just rumpled – and not merely disheveled, either – point of pride rumpled. He’s wearing the kind of expression that allows you to see what he’s watching in that private screening room inside his head. It’s the same expression he’d wear if he were that Chinese Tiananmen Square guy holding up that line of tanks. The Standing Up To The Death Machine expression. (Of course, Ponytail knows in advance that the tanks will stop, which is a lot more, and an awful lot less, than that brave Chinese student had to work with.)
“Sir, I need you to step through the screening device.”
“I demand you say please. It doesn’t take any extra effort to say please.” And while that’s true enough, now we’re dealing with the issue of who is in control here: security personnel, or The Delicate Sensibilities of the Perennially Offended.
A supervisor materializes and motions me through. He pulls Ponytail over to the side as well. I hear them going at it not two feet away as I regain the thirty pounds of ferrous compounds I had placed on the conveyor belt. I’m trying to ignore them and get to the gate because this guy is starting to get on my nerves.
“Your job is to provide good customer service,” smirks Ponytail, checking the audience for approval.
“No sir. Our job is to provide a safe travel environment. We try to provide good customer service while doing so, but our main goal is to move people through here as quickly as we can while maintaining safety standards.”
And so on. And so on. The Man asks Ponytail for some identification. And just as I am turning to leave, just as I have my carry-on in hand and am walking away, I hear ponytail say, for the benefit of the oppressed masses behind him:
“You people are just like the Nazis!”
And then something happened that I cannot remember ever happening to me before. I’d had that cork in my mouth – you know, the cork you put in your mouth when you see children being dragged nonchalantly down a supermarket aisle, collapsed in a tantrum because they didn’t get the candy bar they wanted; or the cork you put in your mouth when a couple is having a knock-down, drag-out yelling match in a quiet restaurant, or the one you stuff in your mouth to avoid screaming at the guy talking on his cell phone in the movie theater. The it’s not worth it cork.
Well, the millisecond the “Z” sound from “Nazis!” entered my ear, it built up an overpressure wave so intense that it blew the cork out of my mouth, sent it flying through the plate glass windows, through a large avocado green American Tourister hard-sided suitcase and embedded it three feet deep in the reinforced concrete tarmac.
“NAZIS!! Are you out of your goddam mind?! How dare you!” said I.
Now one thing I have learned about the North American Greybacked Strutting Trumpeter is that it is, in fact, a rather easily startled bird.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve, man! A lot of nerve! This man is potentially risking his life for your personal safety, and you have the gall to call him a Nazi?!”
Ponytail is looking around, confused now. He was the one who was supposed to get murmurs of agreement and nods of support, not the right-wing warmongering reactionary who he had the misfortune to be standing next to when he made The Stand.
“Just like the Nazis!” he screams, and then, to my utter astonishment, he does a bad Major Hochstetter German accent and says “Show me your papers!”
Then, moral trump card: “I had family taken away by the Nazis!” Well, that ought to shut me up!
“If that’s true they must be pretty goddamned ashamed of you, you goddam idiot! If you can actually compare someone not saying please to having family members murdered in front of your eyes then you have some serious reading to do! My GOD, you’re disgusting!”
There was a lot of nodding and murmuring, and a half-corked “Yeah!” or two.
“Idiot!”
Actually, I think I placed an additional adjective prior to that last “idiot,” but this is a family website.
Now I know some of you are having a hard time believing I came up with all this right off the cuff. And you’d be right. Unfortunately for Ponytail, I’d been practicing this speech in my head for years now; every time I see one of these people with their American flags with swastikas in place of stars, or their BUSH=HITLER signs. Looking back on it, I have a tinge of guilt, quickly dispelled when I realize that he’d been rehearsing his speech pretty much all his life. If he’d kept his cork in I was certainly happy to bite down on mine. But nooooooooooooo.
Then the Supervisor steps up, and now I think I might be in a little trouble. He turns to Ponytail and says, “Sir, now we have a problem. Now you are disrupting security procedures. Am I going to have to ask you to step into my office for an interview?”
“No.”
“Have a safe trip.”
The man disappeared, no doubt ducking through the terminal to find the nearest internet access so he could post his heroic exploits on Democratic Underground.
Just as I’m walking away, I feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s the Supervisor.
Oh well. I’ll catch the next flight, I guess. It was worth it. I guess it’s time for my interview now. For disrupting security procedures. Which I did.
“I just wanted to thank you for sticking up for us like that,” he said. “We get that all the time.”
I never really thought about it before. I guess they do. The original screener, the Nazi Latino in his mid fifties, thanks me for defending him. So does a young black woman Nazi in her mid twenties. “We really appreciate it when people get what we’re trying to do. We get stuff like this all the time.”
And I stand there, looking around at the multi-racial, multi-cultural menagerie swirling around me, and I think to myself – yet again – that this whole thing works. Not perfectly, but it works, by God. And I think that this greasy, grey little one-man phalanx of narcissism and protest should in fact bow his head and take a knee to simply be allowed to walk through this gate of miracles and fly six miles high at nearly the speed of sound and nurse his grievances against the people who are in fact protecting him, while he fetishizes and romanticizes those that would kill him in a heartbeat.
I know what I did. I thanked those men and women for what they have done and are doing and continue to do to make my life the safe, pleasant and prosperous affair I am so accustomed to. Sitting there, drinking my $2.00 aviation-grade bottled water, I wondered how someone could seriously make such a comparison: remove your shoes versus forcibly removing your gold fillings.
Well, these are the consequences of not knowing about what life is really like, outside of the Sanctuary.
It deserves to have every word read aloud.
bttt
Thanks for the ping. It was well worth the read.
why do otherwise intelligent and educated people so despise and detest American society, which has achieved more in the way of individual rights, science, arts, medicine, diversity, cooperation and prosperity than any other in history? Why would they oppose such a society when it is trying to bring these blessings to people who have spent thirty years cowering in dark places, fearful of letting the slightest word slip, or betraying their entire family with an askew glance or unguarded moment? Why would someone so viciously oppose freeing a People who have lived for a generation in total, abject fear?
It’s because they have never lived it. That is what I mean when I say reality has left their building. How many people would be opposing the war in Iraq if they had to watch, actually witness, three or four hundred thousand people being shot in the head in front of their families? At the rate of one life taken every single second, with one unique and irreplaceable person being extinguished every tick of the 60 Minutes stopwatch, going without sleep or rest, you would be at it for three and a half days. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Every face unique, every one someone’s son or mother or precious grandchild. Bang. Bang. Bang. All night and all day, every second for three and a half days. How long to wipe out your entire family? Four seconds? Eight? Thirteen? We have found that many in Iraq, more will follow, believe me.
How many children – four or five year old boys and girls – do you need to see raped in front of you before you change your mind about Iraq? Fifty? Fifty thousand? Will that make a dent in your stainless steel belief system? How many cries for mercy in the muffled corridors of prison basements? Ten thousand? Ten times ten thousand? They were there. They happened.
They just didn’t happen to you. Not in Berkeley. Not in Manhattan. Not in Santa Monica, or at Columbia University. Not in your Sanctuary. If they did we wouldn’t be having this discussion, would we? You’d be dead, and it would be your relatives begging for good and powerful people to come to their rescue to stop this horror.
There’s nothing “progressive” about what these people believe. It is refined selfishness and moral cowardice. I can understand not wanting to go overseas and lose blood and treasure to solve other people’s problems. I can at least understand that. But these “progressives” should be thanking whatever they take to be sacred – which is nothing – and hit their knees in gratitude that better, braver people have built them the kind of Sanctuary where torture and state-sponsored murder are so far from their closed eyes that even the act of imagining such horrors is beyond them.
How far from the reality of human nature do you have to be to see our culture as a curse on the Earth, rather than being the only ones willing to roll up our sleeves, shoot the wolves that are eating our kids, go out into the blizzard to collect some firewood and then paint the goddam house?
Wow, that covers so much but worth the time to read it all.
Best Essay I've read in quite a while.
Tet gives it ***** !
Joanie I sent you this in an E but will ping you
to the thread all the same.
Hope you are doing great.
Stay in touch.
t.
Thanks all for bumping the thread. I had a feeling that there'd be unanimous applause for this essay.. I am going to pass it on to everyone I know and I hope you all will do the same.
Wow! Great find! Thanks for posting that, especially with the captions that made me check it. Really a breath of fresh air. I read all the way down to the bottom of his page. I intend to read every one of his archived posts if they are as good as these two. I especially enjoyed his 7/11 analogy to the pyramids.
Interesting how all these Freepers recongized quality so readily.
This is how it ended:
But there is hope for us. We can change. I can change, and I am as stubborn a cuss as they come. And there is hope here, on these pages. Not my pages -- I’m but a speck of flotsam in an electronic ocean. But these pages, these ghostly pages pulled from the ether down highways of colored light. These pages may be able to save us.
Because now, for the first time in human history, a small person can talk to millions. The defeatism and cynicism of our betters is no longer the only voice we hear. Now, for the first time, we common people, we citizens, can speak directly to each other about life within the Sanctuary, and those unseen people, those builders and maintainers of decency and civilization have at their command a tool with which to make their voices heard. We can patrol and repair these crumbling walls from within and man the gates ourselves.
There are millions of us. Millions. And we do not have to go gently into that good night.
btw, those who enjoy this might enjoy this essay, by a liberal in favor of the Iraq war.
'A friendly drink in a time of war' by Paul Berman
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/wi04/berman.htm
I send this to liberals opposing the war frequently.
I intend to read back articles also, when I've got another few hours to kill ;~D
I haven't read any before this one either.
Bill writes very well and precisely and eloquently describes just what is wrong with liberals. Basically, they have never actually had to suffer REAL hardships and are so disconnected from reality that they equate the USMC with the SS.
Anne
I have one quibble; Mr. Whittle writes:
No, today the loudest criticisms of the West come not from the bottom, but from the top: millionaire filmmakers and Harvard University professors and columnists who live in luxury skyscrapers.
The loudest criticisms of everything that makes the West great have always come, as he puts it, from the top.
this guy really is a great one.
Bump for later in the morning reading.
I don't normally ping you to this sort of thread, but I thought this essay may be something you would find worth reading through.
Bump - one damn fine article.
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