October 8, 2008
purple farts of freedom
10/8/08
Man, I frickin' KNEW it was a matter of time before this happened. Crochety old-school longtime blog readers may remember the time I got detained and held overnight in jail at the Homeland Security checkpoint in Houlton, Maine. Don't remember it? Go here and read it, it's pretty goddamn good.
Anyway, since you're not going to read it, in 2003 I got stopped when trying to re-enter the United States because, well, I don't know. My hair is silly, and let's face it: when I go on a road trip, I don't keep an immaculate car. They ransacked my stuff, found a vial of baby powder that I use for my hoop shoes, and we were off to the races. Suffice to say I was there for another 16 hours and had to write an essay to a group of these numbskulls in order to prove I wasn't a terrorist.
Fast forward to now, where the exact same Homeland Security dudes at the exact same checkpoint in Houlton, Maine detained a woman in her Prius because she had this sketch in her notebook:
She's a professor at Fordham University, and was removed from her vehicle because the Homeland Security personnel thought she was "an industrial spy and copyright infringer." However, as you might have guessed from even a casual glance at the sketch, it was an artistic rendering of a crochet art project. CROCHET!
The goons only found the picture because the professor's passport had foreign country stamps on it, which apparently merited a full car search. You know, because people who don't stay put in America are dangerous.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the merits of "playing the game" in this country, whether that game was "your job" or "the Starbucks line" or "the airport X-ray machine". I'm here to tell you that the game is meaningless to these Homeland Security cops; they are your arbitrary plaything, and short of abject supplication, there's nothing you can do to help yourself out. "I am both judge and jury to you right now," one of the buzzcut-pated sargeants told me, and they all seemed delighted in their exclusionary club of We Can Do Anything We Want.
I can understand why they stopped me – you know, I'm a guy, I had pharmaceuticals for kidney stones, and until I was about 32, cops just fucking pissed me off. But I saw then how dimwitted they were becoming with their exclusionary power, and it was only a matter of time before they stopped someone for having dangerously suspect crochet.
Posted by Ian Williams at October 8, 2008 11:00 PM
mirrors = earsshe is either crocheting or she is a terrorist trying to plant an IED inside of Herbie the Love Bug.
Perhaps they were just punishing her for a bad art project, we've all dreamed of doing it...
Although Koons or some such would have been a better story over someone so earnest.
Off subject, but I watched a short film online yesterday (again from the NYT comments) that i thought you and yr readership might like to check out called Money as Debt. Pretty interesting (and scary.)
That story you wrote about being detained at the border in Maine is one of my favourite stories ever. I go back and reread it whenever I am in need of a good dose of good storytelling.
I wonder if Homeland Security ever googles their detainees. What if next time they discovered xtcian?!
Not only could the goons read it, they could post pithy comments. They might even invite Ian to live-blog his "confession" and to upload photos of he and the whole Houlton crew yucking it up over fair trade coffees?
Good times, good times...
"they could post pithy comments."
You think we don't?
Absolutely!
Here's exactly what I was talking about in the previous comments. Maybe the federal government's power to create The Department of Homeland Security exists in the same penumbra where the right of privacy exists.
Did they let you keep your essay?
"...the professor's passport had foreign country stamps on it, which apparently merited a full car search. You know, because people who don't stay put in America are dangerous."
This is a little off-topic here, but along the "foreignish=dangerous" lines, you know what I would love? For a conservative Arab-American (especially one named Hussein, but not would be OK, too) -- there must be some out there, yes? -- to step forward and say, "Stop using Barack Obama's middle name as a scare tactic! The name Hussein itself doesn't signal terrorism or anything bad. Throwing my name around like this insults me and the ordinary people whose parents gave this name to them."
Otherwise, wouldn't it be great if the Obama campaign started referring to McSame as "John Sidney McCain III"?
Was anyone else freaked out by McCain saying "my fellow prisoners" by accident instead of "citizens"? He was in the midst of talking about the economy, not his prisoner of war days!
What a great piece of writing on 10/28/03.
My favorite part:
I looked at (W) and thought, "you have done more blow than I will ever see in my lifetime, yet I am going to jail because I have kidney stones."