How Home Became Homeland

[fencesitter]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/opinion/04Cohen.html?ref=opinion

By ROGER COHEN
Published: September 3, 2008

The threat level has been raised (or was that lowered?) to orange. I wonder idly what this means — an image of medium-intensity jihadist chatter menacing Armonk, N.Y., comes to mind — but I have no time to get that vision in focus before another cheery message rolls out across the airport.

“Do not make jokes about security. You could be arrested.”

O.K., I won’t ask the Transport Security Administration guys with “TSA” on their shirts if the letters stand for “Team Standing Around,” and I won’t say, “Hey, remember how the U.S.A. used to be a land without fences and nobody ever called it a homeland,” and I won’t say, “Arrested? Ha! And then what?”

Nor will I mention the other America before “threat levels” and two wars and renditions and bumper stickers saying “Freedom is not free” — the land where jokes were not yet grounds for arrest and nobody got wrestled to the floor for “looking” suspicious and fear was not yet a coin of the realm.

Oh, but it’s good to be home, even if it’s a homeland now.

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To think this airport is named after J.F.K. — all that promise, and my Dad weeping at his loss in faraway London. Kennedy who asked us to ask ourselves what we could do for our country. Whatever happened to Lincoln’s “last, best hope?”

It got frayed. Let’s stop talking about an infrastructure bottleneck, sounds too like something in a Soviet 10-year Plan, and start talking about collapsing bridges, crawling trains, dilapidated airports, potholed roads, subway blues — the great national failure to build a network of public transport worthy of a modern state in the age of $110 oil.

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much more.....