Is the airport the country or is the country the airport?
With the news that Trump is going to send his ICE goons to "help" at airports during the government shutdown I thought we'd take a look at this piece from last summer again.
The house is as big as the world or rather it is the world
I was worried I was going to shit my pants before too long. Both meanings. It had been about thirty minutes of trudging through an improvised security line antechamber at the Atlanta airport on a Sunday morning before we finally made it to the area where the security line as one commonly understands such a concept actually began in earnest.
You can never tell how long these lines are going to be until you are in one and then you can tell even less.
It all becomes an abstraction anyway. The disorientation is part of the deal. There are so many exit signs everywhere but no actual exit.
Someone should write a play about that.
Monde de l'enfer c'est d'autres personnes you might say.
No matter though isn’t the line where I’ve always lived come to think of it?
Do I not belong at long last to the maze?
Quizá yo he creado las estrellas y el Sol y la enorme casa, pero ya no me acuerdo.
They’re remaking the entire country into the security line as it happens. The putrid umbrella hungover atmosphere of simultaneous infantilization and militarized threat that the air travel experience has pummeled us with for…
...well I guess almost twenty five years now wouldn’t you know it.
I should say it’s a hungover atmosphere even if you aren’t actually hungover. Which I nevertheless obviously was literally speaking.
Those fellas well and truly got our ass with setting all this into motion didn’t they? And did our own worst guys a favor in the effort.
We have so many of them.
Retribution almost never gets the main guys’ in the ass it’s just the regular fuckers who suffer. You know that. I don’t know why I’m telling you that.
You cannot and probably will not ever again go on vacation without having to receive permission both tacit and explicit from roughly fifty feds every step you take along the way including many of them that you cannot even see and may or may not even exist.
You cannot for example go to visit your beloved in-laws and celebrate your nephews’ graduation in Cobb County – the famous place from the news on election nights I kept thinking of every time I saw a sign – without being made to understand how powerless you are at every turn.
Everything in the airport and everywhere is:
The Implication.
Anything out of line – no pun intended – you might do can be hit here with the punishment multiplier. Never mind on the actual plane itself.
It’s been good practice for all of us I suppose. All of this. To inhabit a place where the law isn’t real for any other purpose but the potential for punishment.
Have you ever been held hostage on a plane that you desperately did not want to be on anymore? Not for one single fucking second longer?
They can do that to all of us so easily. It’s not even considered that big of a rights violation. It wouldn’t even make the news.
You can be sitting there at the gate on the way in or on the way out for hours and hours and say you would like to get off and they will say to you:
No.
For safety reasons.
I guess the country isn’t just the security line now it’s more accurately the entire airport itself because they still need to gouge us for everything. They still want our money.
Is the airport the country or is the country the airport?
I have bought so many packs of gum in airports without even knowing how much they cost. The little push out sleeve joints that make you feel like you’re taking meds. What do those cost?
I’m not being rhetorical here I’m literally asking.
Nine dollars?
By the way I will never as long as I live buy a bad bottle of water or a thing of gum as per above from one of those proliferating self-service things at airports now. I don’t care if it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I do not care if anything I do doesn’t matter I am still not going to volunteer to debase myself a single degree more than necessary.
Not until later in this piece.
As I walked Charlie Brown head down round yet another corner of the line there emerged before me a bright blue rotating hologram of a gun. Some kind of spinning LED fan type of fucking thing that can display different images according to what I just briefly read up on. They must have paid some creative firm so much money to design these.
I thought of the cramped little bullshit mazes they make the livestock walk through before they blow their fucking brains out.
For the farmers’ protection I gather.
My brother-in-law grilled so much steak on Saturday night. I think he has it shipped in from New Hampshire he said. It was very good. I ate more of it than I’d like to admit.
When you first see the LED contraption you might not be sure if it’s an advertisement for the concept of guns themselves or not. I also saw a lot of those on my trip to Georgia of course. I went for a walk along a brutal tree-less stroad in Marietta to the cigarette store and saw more than a few. A pawn shop too whose sign read We will accept anything of value.
They had junkies playing slots in the Quick Stop.
I can call them that.
The LED wasn’t an ad for guns but the opposite in fact. It just makes you wait a few moments for the reveal. For the strike-through to appear over the platonic depiction of:
Gun.
The airport is one of the few remaining places where they still don’t want us to have guns. All of the literal airports. That’s weird right? They do not care if we are massacred by guns almost anywhere else in the country but the airplane violence thing really stuck with them. I guess killing people on an airplane is supposed to be Muslim-coded and we can’t have that becoming too popular.
We can’t even have apparently kind and decent Muslim politicians becoming too popular. Not even if all they seem to want to do is give people a better life.
Especially if that’s what they want.
These LEDs displays or whatever are a few years old by the way. Nothing about any of this is new besides the vantage we’re looking at it all from.
Next to the display there was a separate old fashioned video screen showing Kristi Noem talking about something or other. God these people love to be on TV of any kind. I didn’t listen to what she was saying. She and all of them are setting up something they’re calling ____ ____ down in Florida. It’s a phrase I will not be using. I’m not going to call Trump’s budget by the cutesy fucking name either so I’m sure as hell not going to do it for a concentration camp. I was just going to say I don’t know why the media has all agreed to help advertise their branding for them for free but then I remembered one second later that it’s because they all want the same thing:
The violence to happen where it’s supposed to.
Occasionally there would appear a fork in the line and we would have to think about which path would get us to where we wanted to be quicker and I thought of the most obvious metaphor of all time. They were both leading to the same place of course. One just slightly quicker than the other. I thought maybe they just installed a few of those along the way to provide us with the illusion of choice.
Goddamnit I wanted a cigarette so badly.
That’s one of the other things they don’t let you have in an airport anymore besides guns. And empathy for the genocide of Palestinians.
So three things you cannot do in this new but not really new Airport of a country.
My brother in law was raised in Western Mass but he’s southern now after being down there so long maybe. He and my sister in law who I love raised four great kids and now some of them are young men that I love and they are very generous hosts and a fun hang and I enjoy getting fucked up with them. He knows I was really into spirits from around the world for a while there and probably still am. He told me his friend had brought back a bottle of single malt “scotch” from Israel. I wasn’t sure what to do with that news for a while and so I just turned into a writer in the moment. What is funnier for the bit?
To try it or boycott it?
Can I wring anything out of this?
How does this benefit me?
It’s called Apex and it is 115 proof and it was extraordinarily aggressive. I spent just a little time with it and learned all I needed to know about Israeli whisky.
They have a magnificent airport over there don’t they though? I’ve never been but you hear about it all the time. Both kinds of airports. The one kind.