Georgia on my mind

 

Once again to the shores of the New World.

We’ve now flow considerable times back to America from our French hidey holes, and so we have an expectation that the whole routine, the packing, the transport to and fro, the security, the waiting, the queuing, the stowing of carryon, will all unfold a bit like Hobbes’ description of uncivilized life, short and brutal, although hopefully not bloody.

This time, of course, the New World, from the image in the papers, was sunk in a fascist morass, so I was a bit worried. For twenty five years, ever since I skipped from zines to the web page, I have let my opinions roam largely across the big, beautiful Net, like millions of others, and in my experience they have not exactly intruded into the zone of celebrated opinionmakers, but have been far back in the pack, along with the livejournal rants disgruntled adolescents, the geocities musings on family history by last name obsessives, the fanzines and porno stories and paranoia of the hoi polloi. So my reality check superego knew that I had nothing to worry about. But my paranoid Id has never believed my dull and reasonable superego – fuck that! – and, according to my beloved, I have never seen a cop drive by, when I am driving, without saying: oh oh!

In truth, in my twenties and thirties, when I had a Lew Harvey Oswald smirk on my face half the time, the polizei did not like me. In the town of Pecos, New Mexico, where I lived for a while, the police chief (who commanded a force of one) had so little to do that he stopped me quite frequently. I think it was simply that he wanted me and my roommates to find some other town to live in – Pecos not being friendly to strangers back then. We eventually obliged.

In any case, as the trip loomed larger, I decided not  to read the paper’s stories about hostile interactions at airports, since they seemed too bizarre. Why would the border patrol or whatever put two nice German tourists in the pokey and then expel them? Did they really care about some French dud carrying a polemical book about American politics? It was like my motherland, or homeland, or simply the peapot I was born and bred in had gone crazy.

My superego, that unbearably smug bureaucrat, proved correct. It was actually the simplest airport interaction we ever had. We answered the perfunctory questions (are you or have you ever been Canadian? Are you carrying fentanyl or any French cheeses? Like that) and we were delivered into the wonderful colossus of the Atlanta international airport.