Beck: Flashes of Sparks

I don't know where I saw it first, but Balko has what was easily the Spark of The Day* yesterday: you have to hear the recording of TSA goons detaining a man at Lambert (St. Louis) and demanding to know why he has forty-seven hundred dollars in cash.

Now, you're either going to get it, because you understand private property, or you won't, because you don't. If you're not sure, then you need to understand that there is no principle beyond which they cannot operate on your life, too. Again: imagine it as political algebra, in which the person is a variable, and it could easily be you, compelled to explain your private affairs -- like a European or something.

*Not necessarily to be a daily feature, even though they happen every single day: it's time to conceive these sorts of outrages as sparks flashing-off in the compressing endarkenment. They will acquire increasing political import under rising bureaucracy (consider it an implicit and unconscious "intensification of struggle"), and though the day must almost inevitably come when one or more of them will set-off an explosion of civil order (remember Rodney King), that will be almost impossible to predict and difficult to even expect.

It's time to begin to consider them in such a political context.