More on Flying

I am going to rant on aviation security for a little while. I could discuss the snow, but a lot has melted, its black, its brown, its slush, its disgusting.

There was a time when flying was magical, or so I'm told, I was born in a world where Hijackings and metal detectors were already a fact of life. But there was a time when my dad could kick his friend in the shin at the customs line up and say don't forget to declare your marijuana. The customs agent laughed and waved dad's friend through.

But sometime in the period between Orville and Wilbur's first four trips on December 17, 1903, and the present time we as a society lost our collective minds when it comes to airline security.

Honestly I understand there is a need stop the terrorists, but does anyone really believe they are gonna try shoe bombing again? It didn't work the first time! And hijacking with box cutters, come on, after September 11 if the guy in the seat next to me pulls out a box cutter I'm gonna beat the shit out of him before he unlocks the blade! You can bet your knickers that everyone on the food chain from Bin Never Gonna Find Him Laden on down to the lowliest henchman knows that. They are gonna keep trying until we present the Muslim World with better options than the crap we've been feeding them since the 1920s!

Sorry but between our thirst for oil and the growth of an Imperial American army that has fortifications almost everywhere, from Okinawa to Seoul Fallujah did we honestly expect the citizens of the World to sit back and just take it? Of course they resorted to the best weapons they have, remarkable has been the passivity of those (like the Chileans) that have not.

Even more remarkable has been the lunacy of our own society for putting up with this crap. I thought we lived under a representative system of government. You know, a government where the leaders do what they think the people want. Well evidently I'm completely out to lunch, as Chalmers Johnson points out there are over 700 US military bases abroad, in around 130 countries around the World, the United States is the only country in the World to have a full sized Aircraft Carrier, there were 13 in 2004, another is due to be commissioned sometime very soon (possibly already was).

Yet apparently American's as a people don't want to be the World's cop? Don't want to be an imperial power? Perhaps someone can explain to me then how Congress can in full consciousness spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined!

This rant was supposed to be on the idiocy of airport security, about how turning on and off laptops and taking off shoes, belts, and pocket change were not going to stop the next September 11. This rant was supposed to explore how a couple boys in England who never even got close to their final objective were able to put an end to bottled water and the iPod as a reasonable piece of carry on luggage. (Speaking of which, it seems to me that if a couple boys in England can get us so petrified that we'll submit not only to loosing the water and the iPod but to Orange -whatever the hell that means - alerts, and the degradation of granny being busted by the airport police for too many breath mints, then perhaps we ought to face the obvious truth, the terrorists won. We as a people are terrorized!)

But I guess I should have realized, you can't rant about airport security for long without coming back to the same damned issue every time. The solution is not better airport security, the solution is something that we all have to take a part in. We have to recognize the self evident truth, that standing armies are something to be protected against (Thomas Jefferson to James Madison 1787) not protected by. As long as we allow our petty desires for lousy fuel economy and insane defense expenditures to rule be they Conservative, Liberal, Republican, Democrat, Labour or Tory, we might as well toss aside our fundamental rights and responsibilities and call it what it is an Empire of Oppression.