Some Observations on the Habits of the American Cardinal

Lawrence Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Some Observations on the Habits

 of the American Cardinal

 

The Cardinal knows that he is a pretty bird

Splendidly attired in feathers bright and gay

He publishes loudly; he will be heard

Among the squawks of mockingbird and jay

 

He gobbles and scatters husks, rusks, and seeds

In self-indulgent abandonment

He ignores all others in his wants and needs

They’re secular birds; they can take a hint

 

The Cardinal certainly loves to be seen

At the public feeder in all his pride

Attentive to fashions, and always keen

For the Best Birds to be seen at his side

 

And then one day

 

A few remnant feathers, a ripped cardinal’s hat -

He seems to have forgotten the watchful cat.

 

The Plains of San Agustin

Lawrence Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
From The Road to Magdalena, 2012

The Plains of San Agustin

“And lean upon a peasant’s staff”

-Wordsworth

But rather lean upon a pilgrim’s staff,

And trudge the road to Magdalena, yes,
With Rosary in hand, wearing old boots
From some lost war, some long-lost time ago;
A canvas vade mecum for his gear,
A worn-out boonie hat against the sun,
The high-plains sun against the stars, upon
The track to Magdalena in the fall,
To listen to the spirits converse with clouds
Upon the Plains of San Agustin where
A Very Large Array of idols listens for
A voice from space, from far beyond the skies;
For there, if anywhere, He can be heard,
But not from painted idols, no, but from
The haunted earth, and from the stars and back
Again.  And then – and then shuffle away,
Stick tapping on the rocks, boots treading dust;
For if some stranger finds that stick, those boots
Abandoned in the brush some desert noon
And bones upon the sands like scattered words,
He’ll know a pilgrim made a happy end.

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Major Pettigrew's Last Duck Hunt

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Major Pettigrew’s Last Duck Hunt

 

The annual shoot at the local estate is by itself worth the price of a copy of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson. 

 

Lord Dagenham, a worthy variation on P. G. Wodehouse’s eh-wot-oh-rather-don’cha-know Lord Emsworth, is a somewhat down-at-the-Rolls Royce noble who rents out much of his ancestral home to a private school and who is selling some of his lands to an American real estate developer.

 

The last annual duck hunt in the doomed countryside ends as a menace to the humans more than to the ducks.  The hunters, mostly English and American bankers playing at being squires for a day, are on the firing line when suddenly the field of fire is occupied by: (1) ducks, lots of ducks, (2) the schoolchildren, who raised the ducks as a science project and who rush in to defend them, (3) the gamekeeper and the farm hands, trying to round up both the children and the ducks, (4) environmentalists, and (5) the local Save Our Village protestors.  And, yes, someone gets bashed with a sign proclaiming “Peace.”  The reader sees that coming, and is delighted when it does.

 

A safe modern writer would have fitted all this into a scripted screed against guns and hunting, all kitted out with global-warming environmentalism and cuddly Disney children and animals.  Miss Simonson will have none of that; she makes fun of everyone involved, sparing not even the children: “’They killed our duckies,’ came a wail from a child holding up a bloody carcass.” 

 

As Lord Dagenham says, “I had no idea that fee-paying pupils would smell bad.”

 

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is framed as boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back, only geriatric, but is saved from Famous Greeting Card Company sugar-free syrup by Miss Simonson’s lemony (seldom acidic) observations on socialists, yuppies, environmentalists, the upper classes, the lower classes, country clubs, the sort of people who resent country clubs, the Church of England, Moslems, Americans, Englishmen, artificial Christmas trees, hunters, anti-hunters, parties with themes, “the glass-squashed faces of small, angry children” on school busses, and flavored teas.

 

Through all this Miss Simonson develops a delightful love story.  The protagonist is Major Pettigrew, retired from the British Army, and his friend, Mrs. Ali, owner of the local shop.  Both are widowed, and they “meet cute,” as the film cliché goes, but their relationship must voyage from acquaintance through friendship and finally to love through 355 delightful pages of misunderstandings, cultural differences, disapproving relatives, disapproving neighbors, a retired banker “with an almost medical allergy to children,” organic turkeys, neighbor Alice’s organic vegetarian lasagna that smells like plankton, neighbor Marjory, whose sole topic of conversation is her gifted and talented grandson, a dotty vicar, the vicar’s even dottier wife, the aforementioned hunt, an annual club dance that deteriorates into a food-throwing, stage-collapsing, drink-sloshing brawl, a continuing sub-theme about a matched pair of Churchill shotguns, and a knightly rescue of an imprisoned lady.  And ducks.

 

The setting is a Wodehouse England that never really existed, flavored by Jane Austen, Kipling, Agatha Christie, the Romantic poets, Alexander McCall Smith, declasse’ climbers, and the occasional cup of real tea (no rose hips or other debris for our hero). 

 

Some of the social assumptions are a bit naïf, and in this the novel sails dangerously close to being approved of by famous television ladies, but this is a love story, after all, and one with a happy ending. 

 

Even so, with lines such as “The major wished young men wouldn’t think so much,” “a group of faded hippies, with ripped jeans and balding heads,” “Old Mr. Percy became so drunk that he threw away his cane and subsequently fell through a glass door while chasing a shrieking woman across the terrace,” and mention of an assistant imam named Rodney, this is a book that even manly men can read without fear of their boots magically dissolving into designer cross-trainers.

 

And there are ducks.

 

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson, is published by Random House.

 

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Send Not to Ask for Whom the Clock Ticks

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Send Not to Ask for Whom the Clock Ticks

 

“Time is but the stream I go afishing in.”

 

•  Thoreau
   
  Several decades ago I bought a clock at Jerry’s Family Pharmacy on Main Street in Kirbyville.  When I bought the clock the mere fact of buying a clock would not have been worthy of mention.  Now it is, because clocks are uncommon.
   
  People seldom determine the time from clocks or watches.  In the mornings tiny little made-in-China Orwellian telescreens wake up their obedient humans, who then pass the rest of the day, heads humbly bowed, perusing, viewing, reading, or hearing their masters.  When a modern wishes to know the time, he (the pronoun is gender-neutral because calling one person “they” is barbaric) pulls from the recesses of his garmenting his Orwellian telescreen.  Then he reads his twits, twoots, and Me-mails, slides the news to see what some embalmed personality has done further to degrade himself, and goes back to the Me-mail as a validation of his existence.
   
  In 1914 no man would have worn a wristwatch because they were “sissy.”  That changed with trench warfare, and the suddenly manly wristwatch enjoyed a century of service and adornment.  In 2014, though, a modern young man would no more wear a wristwatch than he would stand up when his mother enters the room.
   
  As with watches, buying a clock is worthy of note as a curious activity from a bygone day, rather like not wearing camouflage at a funeral.
   
  This clock was made in the USA by a company that still exists as an office somewhere but which has long since farmed out the construction of clocks, for the few eccentrics who want one, to China.  The mechanism for ringing the alarm gave out years ago, but the clock continued its dependable tick-tick-tick (being a superior sort of clock, it refused ever to tock) until a sad day not long ago when its winding mechanism would not wind.  After its final day as an intact ticking clock its spring wound down for the last time.  It ticked no more.
   
  As would any good American, I took the clock apart to explore its innards.  The key had stripped its threads (dang, after only twenty or thirty years…).  I wound the clock with pliers, and once again it tick-tick-ticked nicely. 
   
  The clock machinery now resides on my desk, wound each day with a pair of pliers (made-in-China) kept handy for the purpose.  It is wonderfully inaccurate, gaining or losing about five minutes each day, but it is aesthetically pleasing as an objet d’art.  Three metal stampings bound together with slender bolts form a matrix for the springs, gears, and escapement wheel, all of which can now be seen in action.  The hour hand and minute hand, painted with some luminescent material that would probably give the EPA the Aunt Pittypat vapors, still glow briefly in the dark after lights out.
   
  The ticking is curiously comforting, reminding the tick-hearer of Jerry’s Family Pharmacy, a happy heartbeat for Main Street, now just another dark and empty storefront and an empty place in the hearts of those who remember good ol’ Jerry Nobles and his wheezy jokes.  The castoff 1950s chairs and table where old men made merry and told stories over coffee are all gone, as are most of the old men, as are the stories.
   
  But only for us, and only for a time, for in God’s omnipresence no happiness ever really goes away, not from Him. 
   
  Tick, tick, tick…
   
  -30-

Henry Kissinger's ON CHINA

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Henry Kissinger’s On China

 

“Blood will have blood”

- Macbeth 

On China was a Christmas gift by a couple of folks who really do qualify as Old China Hands.  Well, okay, early-middle-age China hands who spent several years in China, and whose curiosity about what was happening in Tibet, in the western provinces, in small towns, and in the cities and factories annoyed the Chinese government on a number of occasions.  One hopes someday they will write their narrative on China, for it will be far more reliable than Henry Kissinger’s self-serving door-stop.

 

Kissinger’s own story is fascinating.  He was born in Germany to Jewish parents, and as a young man escaped with his family to New York via England.  He was drafted late in World War II, and his service to his adopted country is remarkable indeed.  His Bronze Star was well-earned.

 

Unfortunately, Kissinger’s will to power led him in subsequent decades to dispose of nations and thousands of lives through his arrogance and his reptilian insensitivity to human suffering.  His Nobel Peace Prize reeks of blood and death and decay, as does his career.

 

On China is over 500 pages of turbid Henrican self-indulgence though on occasion some sense can be filtered from the cascading fall of words, words, words, big words, small words, all striving for hegemony, which is possibly the author’s favorite word.  The preface and the first few chapters are very useful; the beginning brilliantly and succinctly defines, compares, and contrasts American and Chinese concepts of exceptionalism (p. xvi), and the early chapters are a good overview of Chinese history.

 

After that, the adventure becomes a plod.

 

And in all of this plodding, Kissinger never employs even one of his warehouse of words in sympathy for the millions of Chinese murdered by the Communist Party in the revolution and afterward in purge after purge, in managed starvation, in mass executions, and in the genocidal horror of the Great Leap Forward.  And there is no surprise in this, for Kissinger never grieved for the thousands of deaths for which he is responsible in Viet-Nam (almost 60,000 American dead alone), Cambodia, Laos, Cyprus, Bengal, Chile, East Timor, and Kurdistan.  In his book he never mentions the Chinese government’s murders of protestors in Tiananmen Square and in numerous cities in China in 1989, nor the thousands of Chinese citizens who “disappeared” in the weeks following.  His consulting business and his relationships with the power structure in China might be compromised were he to do so.  In Kissinger’s narrative of Tiananmen (pp. 408-439) he does not mention the deaths (“This is not the place to examine the events…” [p. 411]), and suggests that using tanks and machine guns against the protestors was really the protestors’ fault.

 

In her 11,000-year history, China has not yet acted imperially, and there are no Chinese military bases outside of China.  China’s influence on the world has been generally positive through its culture and its mercantilism.  Dr. Kissinger assures us that China will continue to be an inward-looking nation.

 

However, China’s rapid development of her army, air force, and a blue-water navy suggests otherwise.  China invaded its former ally North Viet-Nam in 1979 (and lost), threatens Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, and is messin’ and stirrin’ all over the Western Pacific.  The United States Navy, through its fleets and air arm, can, in concert with other nations, defeat Chinese aggression at present.  However, no situation is ever static.  The United States is a declining power while China is a rising one.  China probably does not want to dominate the United States militarily, but China does own this nation financially and soon we may well be a supplicant hoping our new masters will be kind to us.  This is not Kissinger’s script; this is reality.

 

China quite rightly resents her humiliation by Western powers in the 19^th century and Japan in the 20^th.  China insanely murdered millions of her own people after World War II and into the 1970s.  A nation with a catalogue of resentments and a recent history of violence, a nation that in the 21^st century arranges the executions of her healthy young people so that their organs can be harvested for transplants for sale to the wealthy, is not ruled by flower children, and is not a peaceful nation of vegans meditating on ancient Confucian wisdom.  China is not this nation’s friend, and neither is Henry Kissinger.

 

Another reality, a bizarre one, is that Dr. Kissinger, author of deaths and books, has dedicated On China, a serious if deeply flawed examination of China and its influence on the world now, to a dress designer.

 

Anyone wishing to give this mildly interesting recycling of vegetable matter a look can check it out of the public library; this would minimize the profits to an evil man.

 

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"O Canada, We Obey the IOC"

Mack Hall

P.O. Box 856

1286 County Road 400

Kirbyville, Texas 75956

409 423 2751

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

“O Canada, We Obey the IOC”

 

Last week Penguin Books pulled Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: an Alternative History from circulation in India, and destroyed copies still in its supply chain.

 

Professor Doniger’s book is almost surely boring – any book with a colon in its title is going to be a yawner.  After all, from our high school lessons in anatomy and physiology we remember what a colon is full of.

 

But Penguin didn’t destroy its own book because it is a doorstop; Penguin meekly surrendered to a religious group which didn’t like the book. 

 

One might expect self-censorship by a company in India, but surely not in Canada, the nation based on that whole thing about The True North Strong and Free.

 

USA-ians wanting a frozen-moose report from Newfoundland or another exploding-train-in-Quebec news item from north of The World’s Friendliest Border will not be hearing anything on CBC Radio via livestream.  To call up CBC radio on the ‘net (rather like Macbeth calling up those witches in Act IV?) is to be greeted with Hamlet’s “The rest is silence.”  The electronic page is there, all right, but nothing happens except a sign reading “From Feb. [sic] 6-23, CBC Radio One live streams will only be available to Canadian listeners due to Olympic rights restrictions. However, you can visit cbc.ca/radio/ to listen on-demand or download podcasts.”

 

Whatever amount of money was exchanged between the International Olympics Committee and the CBC apparently wasn’t sufficient to buy enough letters to spell out “February.”

 

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which Canadian taxpayers must fund through taxes, chose to silence its own livestream outside Canadian borders.  The bit about listening to on-demand to podcasts is not technically a lie, but until the IOC gives Canada permission, no new podcasts are being generated.

 

If this self-censorship by the CBC applied only to live Olympics broadcasting, well, fair enough.  Bribes…um…money has been exchanged from oily hand to oily hand for the games.  However, the CBC has silenced all its livestreaming outside Canada’s borders – weather, news, recipes for roadkill moose, and the latest rumor about the whereabouts of the elusive Lyuba Orlova.

 

The last news USA-ians heard of the abandoned Russian ship Lyuba Orlova was that it was infested with giant cannibal rats and drifting toward Ireland.  Until the IOC gives its colonial minions in Ottawa permission to broadcast again, no one will know if the giant cannibal rats on the Lyuba Orlova are reading up Irish stew recipes in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Rod Serling’s To Serve Man, or innocently rehearsing choral routines from The Flying Dutchman.

                                                                                        

Canada is this nation’s biggest trading partner and a solid ally.  Every day thousands of Americans cross the border to work and shop in Canada, and thousands of Canadians cross the border to work and shop in the USA.  All along that 3,000-mile border people cross this way and that for lunch with the in-laws.  Tons of food, manufactured goods, raw materials, and the occasional moose are daily traded via rail, roads, and air between our two great nations.  That Canada can be bribed or bullied into silence, compromising friendly relations, suggests not incompetence by a few functionaries but malicious intent by a third party.  Who?  And why?

 

Emails to several CBC address were not answered.  Well, maybe all the headquarters gnomes were too busy listening to the games.  Certain the CBC leadership listens to the IOC.  The emails were not impertinent; they did not ask if some CBC vice-president’s daughter or son recently received a full scholarship to an exclusive private school in Switzerland or France, or if another CBC executive suddenly sported a shiny new SUV in his driveway.  To ask such questions would not only impertinent but wrong.  No rude questions were asked, and the respectful questions were not answered.

 

Perhaps CBC Radio shares the same ‘tude toward listeners that Air Canada displays toward passengers: “We’re Not Happy Until You’re Not Happy.” 

 

-30-

The Banana-Gat Song

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Banana-Gat Song

 

A man wearing a banana suit and carrying a Kalashnikov while walking along a street was stopped and questioned by the police in Beaumont, Texas last week.  And in these troubled times, one understands – some people are made nervous by the open display of a banana.

 

Beaumont usually votes Democrat, so perhaps the police thought the man was a banana Republican.

 

Maybe the perp was singing “Yes, we have no ammo; we have no ammo today…” without a music license.

 

Not sure if the police handcuffed him, but he was a slippery customer.

 

What do law enforcement officers have against fruits?  Haven’t we progressed?

 

Maybe this was an advertisement for a new Orwellian telescreen program, Banana Dynasty, oriented for a specialty viewer market, rustic vegans.

 

When bananas are outlawed, only outlaws will have bananas.

 

Curiously enough, banana-boy’s Kalashnikov was fitted with a drum magazine instead of a (wait for it…now use that drum magazine for a drum roll…) banana clip!

 

For manly men, bananas have always had a peel – um – appeal.  John Wayne is said to have worn a banana suit in one or two of his early movies, and certainly the banana sub-text is continued in Bananigan, The Green Bananas, Rio Banana, The Banana and the Geisha, and Angel and the Bananaman.

 

As John Wayne would say, partner, the West wasn’t won with a registered banana.

 

When filming cowboy movies in the United States became too expensive, some movie companies produced a series of Banana westerns in Central America.

 

Bananas are slippery; Sergeant Preston of the Yukon kept his on a lanyard so it wouldn’t get away from him.

 

The Mae West gag naturally follows: “Is that a banana…?”

 

Traditional hunters don’t understand the need to import all those foreign semi-auto bananas with the fancy rails and scopes and stuff.  Once upon a time a real man got his deer with a good old J. C. Higgins banana from Sears.  And no matter what the National Banana Association says, we just don’t need armor-piercing bananas.

 

But Freud keeps us grounded by reminding us that sometimes a banana is just a Kalashnikov…um…banana.  Or cigar.  Or something.

 

Finally, let us all remember the first rule of banana safety as taught by responsible fathers and in effective banana-safety courses: there is no such thing as an unloaded banana.

 

-30-

Tejas y Libertad Para Siempre!

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Tejas y Libertad Para Siempre!

 

This Sunday is the 178^th anniversary of Texas’ declaration of independence from Mexico.  An assembly of dubious legality in Washington-on-the-Brazos put together a most noble document, signed it, and then fled for their lives.  Within a few years the short-lived Republic of Texas was absorbed by the United States.  When, in 1861, Texas voted herself out of the Union, the Union welcomed her errant child back into her arms by force of arms.  Joining the United States is not unlike joining the Mafia – you can’t unjoin.

 

Our Texas Declaration of Independence might seem like a pretty dead letter, but it is still worth reading for its elegant language, the rightness of its cause, and its occasional wild and inexplicable failures.

 

The first four paragraphs are long, complex, dependent clauses beginning with “When” but never concluded.  This is the sort of thing that gives delicate English teachers the vapors.

 

The dependent clauses are brilliant, though, because, without a resolution, they sort of propel the reader forward, looking for a verb and the recipient of action.

 

The following paragraphs then make a series of excellent complaints – freedom of speech, trial by jury, public education, ownership of firearms (“the rightful property of freemen”) – and does so excellently.  The flaw here is that the complaints are made against Mexico, not against the usurper, Santa Anna

 

To fault Mexico in 1836 for being in a mess is rather like blaming the Polish government for poor domestic policies in 1942.  In 1942 there was no Polish government, only occupiers, just as in 1836 there was no Mexican government, only a tyrant who had replaced a previous tyrant who had crushed Mexican democracy.

 

A real irony is that almost all of the rebels were Mexican citizens, some by pledge of allegiance, others by birth who risked their lives, their families, their friends, and their hard-earned property to join in the fight against the tyrant.  Tragically, after the Revolution those truly native to the soil were betrayed by the young nation they had helped build.  Colonel Juan Seguin, a hero of the Revolution, was to the later immigrants a non-citizen, a non-person, and he withdrew into exile.  The citizens of Goliad, who rescued as many of Fannin’s men as they could without being shot by their own soldiers, were thanked by the new government by being burnt out and forced to flee.

 

The declaration of independence dismisses all Mexicans – including those who fought for Texas – as “unfit to be free, and incapable of self government.”  This dismissal should have been addressed only to one man, the wicked Santa Anna.

 

The declaration of independence dismisses the Spanish language, the language of Texas for over three hundred years to that point, as “an unknown tongue.” 

 

The declaration of independence dismisses Indians, who lived on this land long before the Spanish, French, Mexicans, and Americans got off the boat or rowed across the Rio Sabina, as “merciless savages.”  And, yes, they were rough, especially the Comanches.  No one, not even the Apaches, ever thought of the Comanches as especially nice neighbors.

 

That’s a whole lot of long-time residents to annoy when starting up a new nation – what were the boys in Washington-on-the-Brazos thinking?

 

And then, after the fight for freedom was won, new immigrants introduced slavery into Texas, an evil forbidden by the constitution Santa Anna had discarded.  History is heavy with bitter ironies.

 

Every nation has its myths – King Arthur for Britain, Roland for France, El Cid for Spain, Davy Crockett for Texas, Brian Boru for Ireland, ice hockey medals for Canada, Mel Gibson for welfare-state Scotland – and myths are good for encouraging unity.   But no one should substitute myths for hard facts, or employ them to cover up injustice. 

 

Anyway, I say it’s a hard fact that in Texas we’re far better, freer, and more just than those 49 provinces who think they’re something, so may God bless Texas, and may He confound all our enemies, on our Independence Day and always.

 

Tejas y libertad para siempre!

 

-30-

By the Smart Phone's Early Light

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

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.

 

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