01 May 2008

Remember when it was fun to fly?

"...reminisce about the days when it was fun to fly from place to place -- remember? When you walked through the airport and out the door onto the tarmac and up the stairs to the plane, just like Ingrid Bergman in "Casablanca"?...

... when I went through airport security in Minneapolis on Monday, it was an object lesson in something -- a line of a hundred people twisted around in the cattle chute, 16 men and women in the white TSA shirts with the epaulets, an obese young woman shouting at us to take our laptop computers out of our cases in a voice she learned from a prison camp movie; one metal detector in operation, two closed, and the guardian of this narrow gate was a man who carefully read each boarding pass as if proofreading it for misspellings, though it had already been checked by his colleague at the head of the line. And then a poor old guy rolled up in a wheelchair who had to be made to walk through the metal detector, though he could not walk. But he could sort of shuffle, an inch at a time, so we got to watch him do that...

I wanted to tell the shirts not to treat us with such extravagant contempt, but you should be careful about mouthing off to people who have the power to detain you and order a body search..."

(Text excerpts and image from Salon - where you can read the whole rant HERE. Full credit to the inimitable Garrison Keeler)

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