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Life in the Airline Terminal
American Mind ^ | 09.30.2021 | Spencer Klavan

Posted on 10/01/2021 8:51:23 AM PDT by Heartlander

Life in the Airline Terminal

What the ruling class wants.

Walking through an airport these days is like digging through sedimentary layers of useless government regulation. The TSA security line is where every hare-braned bureaucratic policy goes to die. Except they don’t die: they sit, fossilized in horrible suspended animation, crust upon crust of outdated protection against misunderstood crises. 

Here is what happens now when you board a plane. You have to put on your COVID-19 mask as you approach the first security checkpoint, where you will be asked to take off your mask to verify your identity. Then you put on your mask but take off your belt and shoes, preparing to irradiate your body and your possessions in x-ray scanners. If anything seems amiss you will be apologetically groped by some poor functionary. Both of you will be too embarrassed by the indecency of it all to look one another in the eye, and the agent will be so eager to get the whole thing over with that if you really were hiding anything, he certainly wouldn’t find it. 

But you’re not hiding anything. All the same, if you forgot a bottle of water or a toiletry kit in your bag it will be emptied and thrown away, because officials apprehended a man named Abdulla Ahmed Ali 15 years ago. Ali intended to make an explosive inside an empty soft drink bottle. You are not Abdulla Ahmed Ali, and anyway if you were you wouldn’t be stupid enough to try the same thing twice. It doesn’t matter. Down the drain goes your expensive cologne.  

Maybe you buy a ten-dollar cardboard sandwich to eat on the plane, where you will be accosted if you do not put your mask back on between bites. Mercifully at long last you will land. Then the flight attendants will remind you to exit the plane slowly, leaving spaces between rows. This is because you need to maintain six feet of distance from the people with whom, for the past few hours, you have sustained a level and duration of physical proximity you otherwise reserve for your spouse. Safety first, you see.

The cumulative effect of this elaborate kabuki show is humiliation. It is shameful and emasculating to lurch through a series of stylized gestures that obviously make no sense. Everyone involved can see there is no coherent logic behind the several procedures which now govern airline travel. When tested, they do not appear particularly effective. Many of them obviously contradict and frustrate one another. Being forced to do irrational things, like being forced to say things you don’t believe, is a form of insult.

These nonsensical parlor tricks, dreamed up by inept politicians to assuage their own creeping sense of inadequacy, induce a superstitious kind of comfort in irrational neurotics and a crushing sense of demoralization in normal people. For decades our leaders have been too cowardly or sly to say what they were really after, too out-of-touch to see or care how their ineptitude would affect us, and too distant from the consequences of their actions to feel any accountability to real, demonstrable results. 

Since the federal government has exclusive sovereignty over U.S. airspace, I think of plane travel as a little portrait in miniature of the life our ruling class wants for all Americans. Whenever they take control of a place or an institution, the people in it come to look like the people in an airline terminal: exhausted, downhearted, groping in dejection for whatever overpriced comfort they can find to soothe their wounded souls. Our American oligarchs want us spiritually gelded, shuffling complacently through small daily rituals of servitude.

It doesn’t really matter in the end if they think they want this for good reasons. They want it all the same, because they believe in control and efficiency but not in God. At a philosophical level they are opposed to us, to the American idea and the tradition of self-government. What they are owed may be expressed in its totality by three little words: do not comply.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Government
KEYWORDS:

1 posted on 10/01/2021 8:51:23 AM PDT by Heartlander
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To: Heartlander

Traveling? ID please. Fishing license? ID please. Renew your Driver License? ID/birth cert please. Purchase a firearm? ID please. Voting? Just mark whatever you like. No ID required.........


2 posted on 10/01/2021 8:59:31 AM PDT by rktman (Destroy America from within? Check! WTH? Enlisted USN 1967 to end up with this? 😕)
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To: rktman

It always has been and will always be about POWER...POWER and more POWER over the masses.


3 posted on 10/01/2021 9:13:02 AM PDT by Don Corleone (leave the gun, take the canolis)
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To: Heartlander
TSA, like most government and military organizations, is designed to prevent the past from reoccurring.

It does nothing to forestall the future.

And the current state of the TSA and our government is as stated in the article.

4 posted on 10/01/2021 9:15:12 AM PDT by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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To: Heartlander

A couple generations ago, in another America, airline travel was a pleasure. Tell your grandkids about it.


5 posted on 10/01/2021 9:16:44 AM PDT by Jacquerie (ArticleVBlog.com)
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To: Heartlander

Sometimes I think they just enjoy rubbing constitutionalist noses in it.


6 posted on 10/01/2021 9:49:33 AM PDT by hardspunned (former GOP globalist stooge)
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To: Heartlander

Thank the ROP.


7 posted on 10/01/2021 9:57:16 AM PDT by Ben Dover
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To: texas booster

.....TSA....Thousands Standing Around......


8 posted on 10/01/2021 10:01:27 AM PDT by TokarevM57
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To: Jacquerie

Yup—I flew for business back in the good old days.

No TSA.

The stewardesses were beautiful and friendly.

The meals were excellent.

The seats had plenty of leg room.

Everybody was in a good mood.

Now I am retired and so far have avoided going anywhere near any airport—no way I am going through concentration camp beta testing.


9 posted on 10/01/2021 10:01:37 AM PDT by cgbg (A kleptocracy--if they can keep it. Think of it as the Cantillon Effect in action.)
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To: Heartlander

Haven’t been on a plane in 2 years. I suspect it will be 3 or so before I have to get on one. The experience is getting worse, not better.


10 posted on 10/01/2021 10:06:51 AM PDT by 1Old Pro (Let's make crime illegal again!)
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To: cgbg

...I remember those days, also...airline travel was relatively expensive; if you look at videos taken of airline travel back in the late 1940s and 1950s, the men all wore suits or at least sports jackets with ties; the women didn’t look like cheap, half-dressed sluts as they do today; and it all fell apart when the great un-washed could buy cheap airline tickets to travel...ahhhh; the sounds of a four-engined TWA Lockheed “Constellation” flying overhead......


11 posted on 10/01/2021 10:07:16 AM PDT by TokarevM57
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To: Don Corleone
Tyrants of any stripe never, ever, ever give up their power, however they obtained it. In today's America, most all of the tyrants, be they politicians or, even more sadistic, unelected bureaucrats, obtained their vast new powers by self-anointing themselves. No one voted them their powers, they just assumed them and I guaran-damn-tee you they have no intention of giving any up.

With few exceptions, tyrants can be removed only by force ... by forceably taking away their power. Up to now, we had a peaceful way of doing this through free elections. The Democrat/Communist/Left Party is moving at warp speed to eliminate the effectiveness of this peaceful method lest they be forced to relinquish their power by it next year. They will do everything and, more importantly, anything and at any cost to stop that from happening, just as they did to stop Trump's re-election. Mark these words.

12 posted on 10/01/2021 10:08:35 AM PDT by glennaro (Dennis Prager: "Until it's safe" means "Never")
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To: 1Old Pro

Was just on one a week and a half ago.

Mask theater.


13 posted on 10/01/2021 10:09:05 AM PDT by sauropod (Bidet was no prize before he put the “d” in “dementia.” - Schlichter)
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To: Heartlander

We are the neo-refuseniks.

Ain’t gonna do it.


14 posted on 10/01/2021 10:16:45 AM PDT by Walrus (I do not consent)
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To: Heartlander

Remember Michael Chertoff? He was the dual citizen Israeli-American, 2nd Dir of Homeland Security under Bush II 2005-2009, co-author of the heinous Patriot Act. TSA was founded Nov 2001. After leaving govt service, Chertoff’s company marketed those untested terahertz backscatter xray machines to the US govt DHS/TSA grossly enriching Chertoff (oh stupid sheeple, that conflict of interest thing is none of your business...).

Just yesterday I was thinking about those terahertz scanners at airports, and I wondered if there is a connection to the graphene oxide in the vaxxines and the global scamdemic. For example, can those TSA scanners “see” the vaccine remnants in the body?

5G operates in 24-40 GHz with 24.25-29.5 GHz most used worldwide

TSA scanners operate in .3 - 3 THz where
1 THz = 1000 GHz

I will leave this for greater minds than mine, but I do wonder. And Life did not arise on this planet in a background soup of microwave radiation, just saying, and one would think the global warming brigade would be concerned but they are silent. Part of Agenda21 has always been to cram all of the surviving sheeple into urban centers, apparently in intense crisscrossing radiation bands.


15 posted on 10/01/2021 10:40:47 AM PDT by guthunde47
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To: Heartlander

I have not flown commercial since 2003 because of the TSA security theater I had to go through. I had my boarding pass and ID checked about 7-8 times going through security by 7-8 different people just to get into the waiting area before boarding. I probably traveled less than 50 feet during all of this.


16 posted on 10/01/2021 10:53:09 AM PDT by rllngrk33 (It seems the soap box and ballot box have failed, it might be time for the bullet box.)
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To: Jacquerie

“A couple generations ago, in another America, airline travel was a pleasure. Tell your grandkids about it.”

It also cost about 5 times as much in real terms back in the Golden Past of air travel, so relatively few could afford it, and so it was mostly for business travel.

It’s still possible to travel that way today (mostly), excluding this virus-related crap. You do the following:

1) Get approved for TSA Pre-Check. When you go through, it’s almost the same as the Golden Past, although you do have the limitations on liquids.
2) Travel Business Class, which cost about the same as coach in the Golden Past. No lines to check-in or to board the planes, and first off the planes.
3) And if you want to also avoid Pre-Check lines, which can be 15 minutes sometimes, you can cut to the front with Clear.
4) For international flights, you can also get Global Entry, which is actually something that was NEVER available in the past, and bypasses most of the huge lines into the US.

You still have the masses in the airports, but not the lines and they won’t bother you on the flights. Also, today’s Business Class is significantly better than Coach was in the Golden Past, and again, pretty much the same price as Coach was back then (inflation adjusted).

The difference between then and now are the ENGINES. Planes can carry far more weight than in the past, and so they load them up with people and cargo, while downgrading coach quality to maximize loading.


17 posted on 10/01/2021 3:19:25 PM PDT by BobL (I shop at Walmart and eat at McDonald's, I just don't tell anyone, like most here.)
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To: cgbg

<>concentration camp beta testing<>

That’s a keeper quotable term.


18 posted on 10/01/2021 3:29:40 PM PDT by Jacquerie (ArticleVBlog.com)
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To: 1Old Pro

I haven’t flown since July 1996, since TWA 800 was shot down. If I can’t drive there, I don’t need to go there.


19 posted on 10/01/2021 7:21:08 PM PDT by Carriage Hill (A society grows great when old men plant trees, in whose shade they know they will never sit.)
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