It’s not bad enough that airport security procedures have turned
commercial flying from a merely miserable experience into a
nightmare.
It’s not bad enough that airport security procedures have turned commercial flying from a merely miserable experience into a nightmare.
It’s not bad enough that they keep announcing changes in the threat color chart at random times to keep us vaguely uneasy about the possibility that Al Qaeda will choose to vaporize the very Starbucks we’re about to patronize (Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge said today that chatter on the international airwaves leads him to believe that the upcoming anniversary of the invention of the sewing machine may cause Al Qaeda to launch attacks on establishments serving overpriced brown liquids. He was unable to be more specific, but he did raise the threat level from aquamarine (“slightly jittery”) to burnt sienna (“you may now panic”).
No, these things are as child’s play to the shadowy and inscrutable forces that control the government of, by, and for we the, you know, people. Now they’re messing with an institution so sacred that the Founding Fathers devoted an entire section of the Constitution to it, a section which was tragically lost when Ben Franklin hired a space-cadet high school student to clean up his print shop one Saturday. I am of course speaking of the Sunday newspaper, every guy’s shield against commencing the household chores until he has taken a leisurely stroll through the portions that make this country worth fighting anybody and everybody for, namely the sports section and the comics.
Now my comics section, which is what the Second Amendment should have been about instead of that lame thing about guns, comes mummy-wrapped in ads, ads which must be slowly and carefully removed before one can enjoy Opus and Kathy and Rhymes With Orange in the pristine way God intended when He gave us colored ink. One such offense against a free press wraps cloyingly around the back and left side, allowing for easy extrication, but the other is insidiously welded to the right side of the front page, requiring patient and thoughtful tearing in order not to risk damage to the strips, and all this lithographic surgery must be performed while the morning coffee is still kicking in. It is not a proper activity for a free and sovereign people who have important things to do like conquering Iraq and replacing the dead bulb in the porch light.
My personal form of protest against this insult to freedom and goodness is to never even glance at the offending ads, thus rendering them useless as an enticement to buy whatever they’re selling. So there, advertisers; take that. Power to the people.
This is of course just one more example of the erosion of our civil liberties caused by the Patriot Act. The requirement that all comics be festooned with unwanted ads is in there, trust me, along with lots of other things yet to be discovered since no one, not even Uberwienie Ashcroft himself, has fully plumbed its depths. In fact, a recipe for low-carb chicken enchiladas was recently found by a Congressional staffer buried in a section defining “enemy combatant”, the result of accidentally copying the menu of a Georgetown Mexican restaurant into the Act late one night. Consequently, it is now federal law that anyone preparing chicken enchiladas for sale containing more than 12 carbs per serving may be held incommunicado at a Motel 6 in Joliet, Illinois indefinitely without formal charges or the right to counsel.
Aren’cha glad America is safer now?
