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Chart, Please: by Joseph R. Stromberg
Red Alerts I have not flown since September 11, and I am not in much of a rush to do so. I take along a lot of reading matter when I fly, and I can imagine some security operative drawn from the non-reading classes interrogating me thusly: "Why you readin’ Der Spiegel, boy? Ain’t People Magazine good enough for you? What kinda ’Murrican are you, anyway? You better wait here." Well, maybe not. They can’t be too careful. There’s terraces about, or however they pronounce it. So we seem doomed for the foreseeable future to put up with long lines, arbitrary searches, seizures of our pointed sticks, pet tigers, and 16-tonne weights. I wonder if pens and pencils come under the new safety rules? I want to say in passing that it is very wicked to make detainees listen to Barry Manilow tapes. Rank Strangers To Me A number of writers have mentioned, on lewrockwell.com and elsewhere, the sheer absurdity of searching a cross-section of everyone, regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, bad hair, resemblance to actual terrorists, etc., so that the authorities can show that even as they fight terraces they have not given up their deep commitment to multicultural diversity. The latter, you must know by now, is implicit in our Founding Documents, as understood by the interpreting classes when they smoke their hermeneutic weed. On the other hand, the proper authorities expect the public to support their efforts – by land, sea, and air – and they really don’t need to go irritating the public unnecessarily. I suggest a compromise. Rather than a random quota system for searching passengers, I propose a genealogical rule. Over lunch in some anthrax-free part of the World’s Great Deliberative Body, the usual pork handlers can work out the details. My suggestion is that any American who can show proof that a direct ancestor on either side of his or her family arrived on these shores before, say, 1840 should go to the head of the line. If they’re not "loyal" by now, who is? Some may find the date given above a bit restrictive. Okay, how about 1880? I grant that cash may have to change hands while an exact year is worked out, but that’s the political process. Those political science textbooks I studied in the late sixties were very explicit about that. They referred to such things as articulating and aggregating interests. The advantages of the Old Dan Tucker Rule, as we might call it, are manifold. First, it obviates the need for any phony-baloney national ID. Under this rule, one need only wave a genealogical chart at sundry airport clerks, security personnel, and machine-gun wielders. Many Americans would go right through to their gate, and flying could return to something like its pre-September 11 level of annoyance. A Threat To Our Dearest Values? I know that high-minded egalitarians might blanch at this plan. I grant that the rule might inadvertently "privilege" certain portions of the population. Southerners and Mormons, who generally know their genealogy, would zip through airports with the speed of a neo-conservative calling for additional wars. But on a happier note, African-Americans would certainly be grandfathered in, so to speak, along with Native Americans (formerly dba as Indians). That’s egalitarian enough for me. Old Americans – English, Dutch, French, German, Irish, African-American, Native Natives, and there may be others – would unite, as never before, on the ground of their longevity on these shores. It would be a 19th-century rainbow coalition. We would overcome. For those who might be lagging behind on their genealogical research, I suggest a visit to the Brigham Young University Bookstore on line to find software. There are six or more major websites devoted to genealogy. You can’t trust everything you find on these – we are probably not all descended from Charles Martel – but with a little work, one can arrive at relative genealogical certainty. It’s good enough for government work. As for those unlucky enough to have no ancestor in these parts before 1840, 1860, or 1880, a Common Sense Rule could be followed in airports and other Homeland Weak Points. Now you know this is not a serious proposal. Common sense in government-controlled airports. Not bloody likely. But if it were a perfect world, the post-1880 folks could be scanned for such outward traits as Being Chinese, Being Norwegian, or Being Greek. Since the government, for various reasons of victimology, already likes to classify us by race, it shouldn’t be a great intellectual feat for it to share such data with airport personnel, federalized or not. The number of people searched and seized for possible terrorist intentions would plummet as fast as the famous mouton Anglo-Français, or flying sheep. Kinfolk Traced All The Way Back To MacAdam, The First Scotsman There really was an Old Dan Tucker, by the way. He seems to have been a farmer in Georgia. He’d get through the check-in line real fast. So let a thousand genealogies bloom. Shintoists of the Western World, unite! Just don’t complain to me, if your family lines criss-cross about ten times before 1860. It was smaller population then. Those mountain Williams married their third and fourth cousins all the time. And then they ran off to Oregon. Go figure. It is not true, however, despite Phil Harris, that you can be your own grandpa. There is a downside. Sometimes you find out you are related to someone who came over with William the Bastard in 1066. Came over to England, I mean. It’s hard to live that down. Go to the front of the line, anyway. [Warning: Nothing in the above essay, a mere attempt at humor, should be taken as reflecting on anyone living or dead, unless of course it does. Of course, I’m mostly kidding.] November 14, 2001 Joseph R. Stromberg [send him mail] is the JoAnn B. Rothbard Historian in Residence at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for Antiwar.com. Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com The
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