My colleague Simon Phipps writes:

[www.webmink.net]

The Reg relays an AP report on how Senator Ted Kennedy was prevented from flying by the unaccountable and uncorrectable No Fly List that’s operated over in the US. I can’t decide what the worst aspect of this is: that a famous US senator should be banned, that it should prove impossible for him to fix it using any public process, that he was obstructed in the democratic process of the US or that he was able to get it fixed through personal clout in a way a citizen could not.

The whole thing is intolerable and I can’t work out why there’s not hell being raised on the subject in the USA where commuter flying is on a par with the subway as regards ubiquity. Surely preventing citizens from travelling is something that should have perished with totalitarianism?

I responded with a comment:

Yes, and therein lies an interesting question; being a 36yo Brit brought up in a British household, but for the first 10 years of my life in Pittsburgh PA, I look back in horror at some of the stuff I was exposed to in elementary (primary) school, up to age 10.

Books extolling West Point, history of different battles, big, red, hardcover easy-to-read books, probably hanging-over from the 1950s, teaching me about the history of tank warfare, and different sorts of grenades. These were the “interesting to geeks” books that were available, as opposed to the see-spot-run and/or stuartlittle-charlottesweb kind.

I thought nothing about it when I was immersed in it, but looking back I wonder quite how totalitarian America became in response to the “Red Threat” (and the economic interests thereof) – and what the knock-on, resonance effect is of a generation growing up under that influence.

thought number 1: “Bring back the good old days, substitute Terrorist for Communist and go recycle the same old horror stories”

thought number 2: Russia had to go to the brink of collapse for someone to begin to disassemble the totalitarian regime. Will that happen in the USA?

Sometimes I do really worry about that. Will the USA end up running itself into poverty? Who will/would it take with it?