Tales from Barbados

ESCAPE FROM AMERICA

Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
Thursday, 18 November 2010


Folks - get ready for your brain to go on a roller coaster ride. Buckle up...

The best rum punch in the Caribbean is made by Captain George Clarke, who owns the Sweetfield Manor B&B in the Barbados. Late last month (October), I was enjoying his libation while watching a truly glorious ocean sunset when we were joined by a couple who had just arrived from New York. They looked like they needed a drink.

George poured them each a glass from his ever-full pitcher, sprinkled a little grated nutmeg on top, and said, "Welcome to the Barbados. What would you folks like to do on the island?"

They cast a glance at each other. After a long sip and a long sigh, the lady answered, "Escape from America."

In response to my, shall we say quizzical glance, she held up her glass and said, "After two or three of these, maybe I can explain." We enjoyed the sunset quietly. I took a picture of it that was so good George offered to exchange his secret rum punch recipe for it.

There was a rustling in the trees above. "That's a troop of green monkeys," George explained. "They usually come through about now. Green monkeys escaped from Africa on a boat some three hundred years ago..."

George let this comment hang in the twilight air, so I followed it up with, "For centuries, people have been escaping to America. You folks want to escape from it?"

George poured them another rum punch. The lady wiped a tear from her eye. "Yes, from," she answered, "... we can't stand it anymore, we have to get out. What happened to me at the Newark airport coming here was the final straw."

Her husband continued. "We don't want to escape from America. We're Americans - how can we be anything else? We want to escape from America's government, what it's become. We feel like we're Jews getting out of Nazi Germany in the ‘30s."

"What happened at Newark?" George inquired.

The lady grimaced. "We had gone through security, our flight was called, the airline fellow scanned our boarding passes, and we started down the jetway to board the plane. There - in the jetway - were four guards wearing a police-type uniform waiting to pounce on us. One of them barked at me, ‘You, step over here!', and made me come in to this vestibule of the boarding ramp. My husband followed, the guard stopped him, he said, ‘But she's my wife,' the guard ordered him away.

"This goon proceeded to grill me for several minutes Why was I going to the Caribbean? When was I coming back? What was I going to do there? Where was I from? What's my home address? What high school did I go to? What did I do for a living? On and on and on. He wrote my answers down on a clipboard. Finally I asked him what was going on. He said it was just a random security check. So I asked him the purpose for all these intrusive personal questions.

"Believe it or not, he said - with all this truculence in his voice - ‘We want to know who's leaving this country, not just entering! We want to know where our citizens are going, what they're doing, when they're coming back - and we have a right to know!' He made this last point with added forcefulness. Then he dismissed me with a wave of his hand.

"We went to our seats, and I held my husband's hand and cried. It was a beautiful day and you could see Manhattan so clearly out the window as we flew past it on takeoff. I never felt so sad. ‘Goodbye, America,' I thought. ‘I'll come back when it's free again'."

After a few moments of silence, her husband said, "I saw these guards with these big gold badges on their uniforms do the same to several other passengers. We were worried before but this clinched it. We were coming here and a couple of other islands for a vacation but we may not go back now. You see, we are convinced the federal government will before too long require an exit visa - government permission to leave the country - so we're getting out while we still can."

I asked if they had any hope the upcoming November 2nd elections would change anything.

"Hope, yes - sure, we've got plenty of hope, but we're not betting our freedom and life savings on it," came the reply. "We've got enough to retire on. We know this Obama government will try to dig itself out of the hole it's dug by confiscating our and everyone else's savings. Of course we hope a new Republican Congress will prevent it. But it's too risky a bet."

I could not help recalling this sobering conversation in the light of the burgeoning "TSA Revolt," sparked by John "don't touch my junk" Tyner's now-legendary TSA confrontation in San Diego last Saturday (11/13).

After traveling around the world - and through airport security in 18 countries - over the past few months, then returning to the US, I can confirm that no country I know of on earth has airport security as stupid, obnoxious, and intrusive as the US. And yes, that includes North Korea.

Yet who should be surprised that government-conducted airport security now trashes the 4th Amendment and requires sexual assault by bullying perverts? It's the inevitable consequence of combining political correctness and creeping fascism.

Remember that roller coaster ride I promised at the start of this discussion? Hope you're cinched in, ‘cause here we go. We're going to talk about something called historical physics, about what snow avalanches on a mountain, forest fires, earthquakes, economic collapses and political revolutions have in common.

What all of these events have in common is that their historical conditions have reached what is called a critical state. Let's say you make a pile of rice grains. As the pile gets higher and higher, the "angle of repose" gets steeper until it reaches a critical state where any additional grain of rice can cause the pile to collapse.

You can't predict which particular grain when added will precipitate the collapse, because that depends on the unique history of how each previous grain lies on the pile. But you can tell the approach of a critical state and see the odds for collapse getting higher and higher.

The key to understanding where American history is right now, politically and economically, is to grasp that we are in such a critical state of instability.

Politically, there is incredible instability between the producers and the parasites, the makers and the moochers. Just look at how many electoral races on November 2nd were (or are being still) decided by less than 1% of the votes.

Economically, there is incredible market instability - there really aren't any markets anymore - because market signals have been replaced by government signals. Whether it's long term or short term interest rates, food prices, housing prices, gasoline prices - everywhere you look government interference is ubiquitous and calamitously distorting.

When a system, physical or political, reaches a critical state of instability, something out of the blue and unexpected often sets it off. We may have such a "trigger" in the TSA Revolt.

Besides the disgustingly objectionable aspect of their exposing people's genitalia, the backscatter x-rays used in the naked scanners are not safe. The radiation does not penetrate through the skin thus can contribute to skin cancer. Pilots or frequent fliers scanned often will receive radiation levels at the nuclear power plant worker level.

There are quite rational reasons, in other words, for objecting to an airport security naked scan - and equally so, obviously, for being sexually abused by some pervert groper with a badge.

I have to insert a side-bar here, regarding the support for TSA pervert fascism by the biggest jerk on the right, Emmett Tyrrell. How big a jerk? He once told me - no smile, he was serious - in response to the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer, that "anyone who doesn't smoke is chicken s**t."

Evidently, Tyrrell prefers pervert fascism to Moslem profiling, or dealing with terrorists the KGB way (no details here but trust me, it's persuasive).

Will this incipient TSA Revolt widen into a conflagration of opposition to government intrusion into our personal and business lives? Maybe.

The revolt started with the Tyner incident in San Diego on Saturday the 14th. On Monday the 16th, Congressman John Mica (R-FL), who helped write the original TSA bill in 2001 and will soon chair the House Transportation Committee, publicly reminded airports they can opt out of TSA. On Wednesday the 17th, the Orlando Sanford International Airport decided to opt out. Today, Thursday the 18th, airports throughout the South are considering opting out.

A guy in San Diego may have triggered a political avalanche, earthquake, and forest fire. Maybe it will fizzle out. But we can be sure another trigger will be pulled, somewhere, out of the blue, in left field. The last grain of rice will fall on the pile and our current system will be swept away.

What will be swept away, who will be buried, and who will remain standing? That's what can't be predicted. That's in the nature of a critical state collapse. Its unique history in creation means a unique end that cannot be repeated, thus not predictable. All you can do is play the odds.

I personally think the history of America favors the odds for freedom. I respect the way the Barbados couple chose to value their freedom. The lady cried when she left. There are more and more good people leaving America every day - in tears and regret, but leaving nonetheless.

Still, I'm glad for this critical state America is in now, for it's not just "where there is danger there is opportunity" like the Chinese proverb - it's that there must be danger for there to be opportunity.

Only danger can create the possibility for real opportunity. The greater the danger, the greater the opportunity.

Escape from America? It's rational to get out of harm's way. We have to squarely face the truth that our government has become a force for evil. If someone doesn't want to depend on this new "I've seen the light" Republican Party to defend them from this evil, we cannot blame them.

Yet there is too much history of freedom for America's critical state to avalanche in the direction of freedom's destruction. I am confident that the couple I met in the Barbados and all those now escaping from America will before long be returning to an America in which freedom has been reborn - and they will kiss the ground when they arrive.

Ps: The book to read on historical physics and the critical state is Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen, by Mark Buchanan.

Pss: You want the secret rum punch recipe?

Three oz. white rum, three oz. dark rum, three oz. simple syrup, half-cup fresh-squeezed orange juice, half-cup key lime juice (real key limes!), two dashes Angostura bitters. Mix well, serve chilled over ice, grate fresh nutmeg on top.