The Return to the Commonwealth and Civilization

Greetings, gentle readers.
U.S. Customs officials are generally amenable folk.  In my case, whether it be through accident or intent, I had rather pleasant and expeditious dealings with them.  That being the case, I was also in a position to observe the inefficiencies of a system imposed upon these rather innocuous people and the impact that Homeland Security has on travellers into, out of, and through the United States.  I've not yet had the experience of entering the United States by sea, highway, or subterranean James-Bond-Übervillain express train, so I'm restricted to describing my observations of dealings with airborne travellers.
American citizens were generally treated with a tad more class, but my father can attest that as we entered the John Foster Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., and we were herded through door number four into our special shuttle container, and taken to a large, white, and sterile room without a clock and with plenty of queue barriers, We went into the right queue.  American citizens and holders of green cards went into the left queue.
In a strange twist of fate, those of us in the right queue weren't forced to wear yellow stars on our clothing, but we did notice, in the 45 minutes that we spent in the queue, that there were 10 out of the 14 available counters open to the queue on the left.  The queue on the right had 16 counters, but only one had an offical attending it.  In addition to watching the other queue clear out while we stood waiting and calculating how long we had to catch our connecting flights, we also noticed that people with ethnic garb, long hair, and other distinguishing factors spent an awfully long time at the one open counter.  They had to remove hats, glasses, etc. and stare into a video camera, have their thumb- and fingerprints taken, shed their footwear, and their fingers were swabbed and chemically analyzed for ions.
Hopefully, I shall have smuggled these words through my final experience with customs in Vancouver before some over-zealous protector of America's verdant pastures of democracy happens upon the concept that a male terrorist might smuggle sticks of C-4 up his urethra to the second knuckle, and thereby rewrite the entire system of searching passengers in transit to include violations of civil liberties that men like Alexis de Tocqueville would never have considered.  
I reckon that the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium is a viable one.  I don't think the American populace are easily likened to the frog in the pan of water that does not react to changes in temperature, only in changes that exceed a certain rate, and therefore a slow and gradual increase in temperature will cook the frog without any reaction, while a swift increase in temperature will allow the frog to perceive the danger and leap to safety.  To describe people, or even the American people as being so myopic as to not realize that a situation is becoming untenable until it is too late is unfair.  That being said, I reckon that people settle into an equilibrium, or political rut, until there is a break in the equilibrium.  It need not be so startling as introducing a frog to boiling water, but a sea-change or a swing in zeitgeist can spread like a wildfire, and people, political systems, and institutions can shift dramatically befopre settling into the next comfortable plateau of development.
The troubles at the recent G12 summit-do-dah in Toronto give evidence that our current political plateau is comfortable enough that a few squeezes of human rights and freedoms are not enough of an impetus to spur a wholesale re-evalution of the system.  The question I pose is... how many knuckles up the urethra will the average voter take before one civil liberty lost is one too many?  This is no revolution-or-die frog scenario, but one that requires us to simply consider Aristotle's advice about the unexamined life.  Americans have already begun to respond.  Democrats hold both houses of Congress, the first non-white man is President and Commander-in-Chief, and confidence in the federal government is crumbling in the approval polls after only a year in office because the military interventions around the world are neither concluded, nor reasonably justified in their continuance.
Lesson to be learned from this particular aspect of my travels - next time, I'm going British Airways, and I'm going through Heathrow, Terminal 4.   Intercourse cheapskate North American airlines and their "credit-card-transactions only" food and drink policy.  To perdition also with the cattle-car mentality, and the riff-raff; the uneducated and uncouth masses that Donavan will no doubt affirm to be the soul-eroding company of trans-continental flights.
Actually, I'm becoming of the opinion that we went wrong giving up on the Zeppelin.  I don't want to sit in a rabbit-hutch next to that fat guy with the bladder-infection and Tourette's syndrome.  I want a deck.  I want an agora of discourse and exchange.  I want to talk to my fellow passengers without making reference to begging their pardon whilst jamming luggage into ridiculously small overhead bins.
I reckon that there are only two options.  
The best would be only to travel by sea and rail.  Those who haven't read my diatribes on post-traumatic stress disorder should know that I consider the decline of those modes of transport as popular choices for mass conveyance to be a primary cause.  Cause for some serious consideration when comparing Second World War veterans to Vietnam and Gulf War vets.  
The other is to become fantastically rich and travel first-class Virgin Airlines tout les temps.   But then you only meet other fantastically rich nutbars, and not real humans.
In any event, our society has become pigeon-holed, impersonal, and categorized enough without our current air transport system encouraging and perpetuating those sorts of socialization.
I know Richard Klinger would join me in rhapsodizing about the romance of the rail, and I've got many stories of the cool things I've done and the people I've met on trains in Portugal.  Actually, just getting places with my awful Portuguese was somewhat of a minor miracle.  Aircraft are all about maximizing profit per fuel expenditure in North America, and the passengers are just consumers to be filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, and debriefed in order to make up the numbers that push the operational budget indicator into the black.
In any event, I'm just about to set off for my final leg of the marathon journey home.  Time to recharge some batteries and set up for the last push.
Cheerio and good night, England and the Colonies.


—mARKUS