Making Eric Blair Proud

Speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act (1)

The reason to go to war is to save lives(2)

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.(3)

I don’t give a goddamn, I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way. Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!(4)

I'll be the first to say that I think the Nineteen-Eight-Four analogy is one of the most over-used, but maybe there is reason. Not living in the US, I've become slightly out-of-the-loop on a lot of the happenings. Sure, the main stuff still filters through. I read mostly US-based news anyway, so I get an idea. But a lot of the day-to-day stuff that this government is putting its citizens through does seem to escape me. They may be monitoring my emails and my telephone conversations that go to the states, and as disconcerting that that may be, I urge them to waste more of [other] tax payers dollars for this Quixote pursuit. I've got nothing to hide when I talk to my parents about my mom's fall down the stairs or with my suppliers about the square-yard cost of different types of vinyls.

However, this week CNN (it's at the top of My Yahoo! RSS links) had a story about Homeland Security tracking travelers meal preferences, among other things. It doesn't seem to be a huge story in the states, like wire-tapping or other blatant Constitution-rights violations have been. I'm not sure why this strikes me so hard, while others haven't. Probably because since I live over here in Europe, and have traveled to the US at least a half-dozen times in the last 3 years or so, I'm sure that they have a folder on me.

I'll save you DOH idiots some time. I prefer not to eat on the plane, but in a pinch I usually take the beef. I usually prefer the window seats if I'm traveling with someone, but have began requesting aisles (I hope I'm not going to be classed as suspicious because of my change of heart). I prefer to fly on Air France, KLM or Delta because of frequent flyer miles, but will fly on the cheapest flight (that explains Air India in 2004) if there's a big difference. I pay by credit card or French banking card. I have bought a few one-way tickets in my life, usually to or from my current place of residence. I have a real US passport that I use for all international travel, for what that's worth, and the best of my knowledge have never committed fraud regarding international travel.

But really, who the hell do they think they're tricking here? After they clamped down on one-way flights after Sept. 11, every talking head with half a brain stated the obvious: A terrorist is just going to buy a round-trip ticket, knowing that the government is flagging one-ways. All it did is piss off a lot of travelers, such as myself, who go stuck in Cincinnati and needed to buy one-way, by forcing them to submit to a lot of time consuming and meaningless security searches. If the four x-ray devices don't find anything in my bags, why do you think some minimum-wage earner with latex gloves is going to?
Do they even have halal meals on most flights? (I've never seen them), so that manner of "screening" seems to be lost right there. Maybe the people eating kosher are actually Arab terrorists? What do they look for? The people who want aisle seats, near the toilets and kosher meals? Either Arab terrorists or incontinent Jews, but we'd better put them on the watch list, just in case.

One of the reasons that this bothers me the most is that a lot of the mainstream press seems to be ignoring it, or at least not making it a big story. CNN has reported on it, but beyond that not a lot of agencies have picked up on it: Although interestingly enough the BBC had basically the exact same report two months before CNN "broke it." Why do I think there was a conversation in the CNN news room that went something like this:
Editor: Can we do any stories that aren't about Christmas?
Writer: Well, it's only 3 weeks before Christmas, everyone is basically looking at Walmart's data from black-friday.
E: Find me something

The writer did some Googling and found this story from 1 October 2006 on BBC's website and just re-wrote it.

In any case, whether it was news in October or in December, this is one more slip down the slope towards increasing control over the every day lives of people in the US. This isn't about foreign nationals being refused habeas corpus or a guy that was misprofiled and got watched by the FBI, DOH, et al, for months because they thought he was involved in the Madrid train-bombings. This is about everyone that has ever flown being databased by the federal government. I'm sure that they develop profiles and what happens, if on one of these trips, I change a habit (holy shit Colonel, Kristian John Salo just ordered a center seat with a vegetarian meal and he paid in cash, plus he's flying to Florida!)? do I get refused boarding? increased screening? a 12-volt battery, probes, a bucket of water and wooden chair in the back room? I won't talk!

You can have freedom or you can not have freedom, but you can't have freedom if the government is refusing to recognize constitutional rights. I do not wish anyone die from terrorist attacks, but is it better we stop one terrorist act that may kill 100 people or we oppress 300 million for life?

Here's to King George's lame-duck two years. May they be as crappy as his first 6. At least there's some opposition now, although I don't think the spineless Democrats have the balls to stop the erosion of our civil rights for fear of looking "weak" to the populace before the next elections.

1.Eric Blair (G. Orwell) [george-orwell.org]
2.Fleischer [Mindprod]
3.Goering at Nuremberg [multiple sources]
4. Bush [Mindprod; Capital Hill Blue]