The Paramilitarized Bureaucracies who joined the Order of the Death's Head

Uniformly mean and stupid. Put a uniform on seemingly normal people. Give them the power of control over other people and the power to inflict pain or kill, and the will inflict pain and, at least hypothetically, will kill.

The Paramilitarized Bureaucracies :: SteynOnline

I flew in to Montreal from an overseas trip the other day and was met by a lady from my office, who had kindly agreed to drive me back home to New Hampshire. At the airport she seemed a little rattled, and it emerged that on her journey from the Granite State she had encountered a "security check" on the Vermont–Quebec border. U.S. officials had decided to impose temporary exit controls on I-91 and had backed up northbound traffic so that agents could ascertain from each driver whether he or she was carrying "monetary instruments" in excess of $10,000. My assistant was quizzed by an agent dressed in the full Robocop and carrying an automatic weapon, while another with a sniffer dog examined the vehicle. Which seems an unlikely method of finding travelers' checks for $12,000.

Being a legal immigrant, I am inured to the indignities imposed by the U.S. government. (You can't ask an illegal immigrant for ID, even at the voting booth or after commission of a crime, but a legal immigrant has to have his green card on him even when he's strolling in the woods behind his house.) And indeed, for anyone familiar with the curious priorities of officialdom, there is a certain logic in an agency that has failed to prevent millions of illegal aliens from entering the country evolving smoothly into an agency that obstructs law-abiding persons from exiting the country.

But my assistant felt differently. A couple of days later, I was zipping through a DVD of The Great Escape, trying to locate a moment from that terrific wartime caper that I wished to refer to in a movie essay. While zapping back and forth, I chanced on a scene after the eponymous escape in which Richard Attenborough and Gordon Jackson are trying to board a small-town bus while Gestapo agents demand "Your papers, mein herr." My assistant walked in in the middle, and we exchanged some mordant cracks about life under the Nazis. "It's almost as bad as driving from Lyndonville to Lac Brome for lunch." Etc. Her family have lived blameless and respectable lives in my North Country town for a quarter-millennium, and she didn't like the idea of having to clear an armed checkpoint on a U.S. highway in order to leave the country.

But, if you don't care for the Third Reich comparisons, consider more recent European ones: The capital flight from Greece, Spain, Italy, and elsewhere as the euro zone approaches breaking point.

- go to link-