Mack
Hall, HSG
By The Smart
Phone’s Early Light
Any
nation is perceived both by its own people and by others through its symbols:
the Star of David for Israel, the monarchy for the more-or-less-maybe-kinda-sorta
United Kingdom, the maple leaf for Canada, the eagle and serpent for Mexico, the
Byzantine eagle for Russia, and expensive little bottles of water for the
United States.
A
more accurate symbol of the modern USA might be bottled water in the hands of
Americans being probed, patted, and frisked by other Americans. No, not in a hootchie movie; it’s just the
way we live now.
An
old Viet-Cong veteran watching television news images of Americans with their
hands up and being flushed out their own places of work in their own country by
squads of uniformed men wielding M-16s must surely gloat as he yips “Back at
ya, Yanks!”
But,
by golly, we Americans surrender like nobody else. We might give up our dignity and even our
trousers so we can be fondled in public by some otherwise unemployable Homeland
Security doofuss in a polyester uniform, but we never surrender our water
bottles and our MePhones. There are limits.
How
might the symbols of history be different if bottled water and little Orwellian
telescreens had been available long ago?
George
Washington crosses the Delaware while looking for a geo-satellite signal on his
MePhone while the lads in the boats search each other for contraband. “Sorry, Private Winthrop, but we have to
place you in a holding cell because of this one-inch Swiss Army Knife. You are forbidden to board the boat, make the
hazardous river crossing amid ice floes in the middle of the night, march miles
through the snow to Trenton, and then risk being shot by German mercenaries.” Or perhaps suffer a little traffic problem
ordered by someone in the governor’s office.
Lady
Liberty, faux pagan goddess, holds aloft over New York Harbor a plastic bottle
of designer water enriched with Tahitian vitamins. While being patted down.
The
Texas Army never receives the order to advance on San Jacinto because General
Houston can’t get enough bars on his MePhone for texting. While being strip-searched.
Abraham
Lincoln with earbuds. While being
wanded.
Henry
Ford, while texting, is run over in the street by the first Model T. No one goes near the body because they’re too
busy taking pictures with their little Orwellian telescreens and captioning the
images with our new national anthem: “OMG! OMG! OMG!”
At
the Battle of Bunker Hill Colonel Prescott commands his men “Don’t fire until they
can see your underwear with their electronic glasses!”
Davy
Crockett, age three, shoots an electronic image of a bear with his game
console. He then has to write an apology
to PETA.
Indians
give Sir Walter Raleigh an electronic cigarette. And a cavity search.
Sculptor
Gutzon Borglun receives a federal
arts grant to render the images of presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln,
and Teddy Roosevelt as a photoshop image and so never gets around to carving up
Mount Rushmore. However, a TSA agent
goes through all his stuff anyway.
Could we Americans sink any lower in
subjecting ourselves to the humiliation of being interrogated, searched,
frisked, prodded, patted, poked, wanded, and ordered about by menacing bullies
in scary uniforms? Well, yes, we could
fly Air Canada.
-30-
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