Airplanes and Cameras

“Modern armed forces continue to be structured for large-scale war, but advanced societies whose small families lack expendable children have a very low tolerance for casualties.” - from an article called ‘Dead End’ by Edward N. Luttwak, in Harper’s Magazine, Feb 2007.

I figure that speaks for a lot of us, doesn’t it? “Low tolerance for casualties,” indeed. There oughtta be a way to get those desk-bellied bureaucrats to do their own fighting. Like they say, maybe if they had to fight we wouldn’t have these wars. But that’s turning the world right side up and that takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. It’ll get done but not right away. Give it time.

I just got back from the UK. I think the travel took about 30 hours. It was a long one! First of all, I was staying on the opposite side of London from the airport and it was an 8:30 flight. That meant that I had to take the first subway train which was at 5:30. And, because the house where I was staying was a good twenty minute walk from the station – without any luggage – I wanted to leave at a quarter to 5 at the latest just to be sure. And that meant that I had to be up at 4. But of course I couldn’t sleep so I was up at 3. For some stupid reason I thought the subway ride would take about 40 minutes. Uh-uh, it was almost an hour and a half. I was sweating buckets. And then I was told that I couldn’t carry my guitar on board. What?! I would have to check it! Okay, I said, I’ll check the guitar to Amsterdam – my first leg – and the suitcase all the way to Seattle. Can’t do that, they said, the system won’t allow it. There’s that system thing again – more tenacious than the cockroach. Okay, so I checked them both to Amsterdam. Which meant that I had to go through passport check and customs in the Netherlands, only to turn around and go through passport and customs again to board a flight for Washington, DC. And here’s the fun part. Everybody getting on that plane to DC was interviewed. I thought it was because I had made a snide comment about the “no outside water bottles” ruling, but no – everybody was singled out and questioned by anal security officers before being allowed into the loading area. There were three podiums and three questioners. Mine was seriously over pronouncing her words and I over pronounced right back. I though maybe that was her language. I stood on one side of the podium while she stood on the other. The questions were all the usual that you’ve heard for years – did you pack your bags yourself, and so on. After a few of these I just answered them all at once. I don’t know what she thought of me but she let me go through.

Landing in DC - “Our Nation’s Capitol” as we laughingly refer to it – was actually pretty painless. The passport guy made a joke about my name – “anybody ever mistake you for Jimmy Page?” Which allowed me to say, “I wish his banker would.” Which allowed him to think I was okay and I just sailed on through. Then I had three hours to wait before the final airless dose to Seattle. Like Ramblin’ Jack says, “Why do they call them airplanes? There’s no air in them.” True enough. Or food. Maybe a few peantuts or a rigid bag a pretzels. The good thing was that the cold I had picked up and attributed to the London breeding ward of the Underground had pretty much disappeared. Probably passed it onto into the stream of that greater disease factory, the winged aviation ward. The ward giveth and the ward taketh away. After 5 hours of semi sentient submergence and claustrophobial fidget we landed safe but dehydrated in Seattle. My friend Janet met me at the baggage thing – I refuse to call it a carousel, carousels are fun and filled with children, these things lose your luggage. Jim was outside in the car but hade to circle around because of our national paranoiadal security fetish. People who constantly move are good. People who stop moving are up to something. Then they very kindly brought me to my little house in the trees where we did a quick check to see if the lights were still on and then I was left to my own befuddling devices.

That was last night. A long time ago. I am in a cotton layered tunnel and I will stay here until I catch up with myself. I will happily bump into things and will feel no real need to make sense. There will be plenty of time for that.

Oh, one more. England is famous for camera surveillance. There are cameras all over the place, four or five of them at a time on the same stand. They say that the average Brit gets photographed 400 times in the course of a day. What do they do with all that? Anyway, they’ve been using cameras at the intersections to catch bad drivers – speeding, running red lights, that sort of thing. We’re starting to do that here too. Really annoying. Well, some people have been vandalizing the cameras, spraying paint over the lenses and so on. So what are they doing about it? They are installing new cameras to catch the vandals who wreck the other cameras. And the news casters reported it all with a straight face. Good for them!