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.
It's news to you that having more than a couple of hundred in cash is grounds for detention, harrasement and confiscation? It's been that way since the Reagan administration. The only thing that changed is now clean cut white folks traveling through the airports are exposed to the same harrasement as the rest of us "undesirable" looking people.
ReplyDeleteI have a friend who is an artist. He had $5,000+ in receipts stolen from him by police after an art show in Madison WI for the crime of being in a public parking garage while long haired. He never got the money back. Suspicion of a drug deal was the handy excuse. He sells small pieces mostly, you think he gets a sales receipt for every $10 print in a busy show???
You guys didn't want to know or care about these tactics untill they were applied to "people like you"... Now perhaps you will do something?
Recognize it or not, like it or not, power to change it or not,
ReplyDeleteWelcome to Weimar Amerika...
It may not be too distant in the future to expect these kinds of searches in other locales... Manpower and equipment will not be a problem at the rate govcorp is stealing/printing FRN's....
Either you see the train coming or you don't. If you miss the headlamp, don't complain to the rest of us on your way to the camps/ovens, as we'll be loooonnngg gone, one way or 'tother...
Bobcat
"It's news to you that having more than a couple of hundred in cash is grounds for detention, harrasement and confiscation?"
ReplyDeleteNo. It's not "news". That's your presumption. You can sit down and be quiet now.