Prison Furlough

My country is a jail cell.

This painful truth hit home when I crossed back into the US after an international flight. Weary, jet-lagged, but dressed professionally (this was a business trip -- yep, I'm moving up in the world, finally had an actual business trip).

Things were fine until I got to the final checkpoint. Showed my papers, everything in order. Then the questioning began. Where had I been. What was I doing. How long did I stay. Etc. Delivered in a blankly menacing undertone, similar to the one I had heard before in a junior Illinois cop. The cop was jacked up on the Drug War, had me sit down in his squad car for no reason, and worked me over with some of the most ludicrous leading questions ever devised while the police dog in the back of the car barked its head off in my ear. "You from Oregon? What do you think of marijuana legalization?" (Seriously. The cop actually asked me that. Couldn't make this up if I tried.)

But in retrospect, the cop was just a wanna-be centurion. The immigration official was the real deal, the beating heart of the Terror War. Just that faint menace which announced that I could be stripped of any rights and deported to a torture-cell in some overseas barracks at the press of a button.

It was exactly the sensation of being an inmate returning from a prison furlough.

In fairness to the immigration officials, most of them were decent, especially the staffers of color, who were noticeably humane. But the ideology of empire has clearly led some of the others over the deep end.

These days, I can't even be angry at this shambles of a former empire,  its elites neck-deep in systemic self-delusion. To paraphrase Patrick McGoohan, I do not approve of the proceedings, I note them -- in hopes that whatever I write down will be passed down, like a message in a bottle, to more fortunate galaxies.