I've was reading "A Geranium in the Window" and other excerpts today on the plane ... once they'd sent my freakin' shoes through the scanner and I was free to board upon a third requested showing of ID. (The stewardess behind me was reading "A Time to Die", my tome was entitled "Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia")
I find it extremely hard to believe that a culture so comfortable with killing for no Particular Good or Merciful Reasons (as had Germany's eminent, if not "Nazi", physicians) will not find it expedient to use Whatever Means Necessary to fight the War on Terrorism.
Even if it means giving humans beings a more "humane" hoof & mouth treatment and piling up carcasses for the crematoriums with Clean Hands and suitably removed from photogs whose images we might find disturbing.
Sort of like the 1.5 million Americans we churn through the abortuaries each year in the name of Compassion and Choice.
We've not chosen a path ... we've locked onto the Rails.
German asylums and psych hospitals managed to liquidate with all due efficiency about 3/4's of their patients on the average. The esteemed H______ hospital celebrated their 10,000th gassing death with a bottle of beer for all employees -- right down to the secretaries -- involved.
Piece of cake. Bring on Death's Percentages of which I spoke. We only pick up speed from here on out and -- look around -- there's no one left save the ragtag sons of Brutus to put up a fight. How long do you think it will be until we stick out like sore thumbs? I, for one, need to work on my bent neck and downcast eyes for the Security Scanners. I don't wish to be wanded and touched and taking off my shoes every time I fly, do I?
It's Uncle Sam's face -- not Hitler's, not Stalin's, not Mao's -- what's going to be slapped on the unprecedented evil unleashed from here on out.
God save us from Compassion, Inc.
The thing about buying top quality shoes is that they last so long you have to choose carefully. My Alden tassel loafers must have a steel shank or something, because they've been tripping airport alarms for 12 years and counting. I padded through those magnetometers in stocking feet more than once, Miss. And that was before 9/11. Now that (as Peggy sez) we're all soldiers, I fully expect to be strip-searched for having entertained discriminating taste in footwear. Imparts a whole new meaning to "fashion crime."