Mary rarely cries, and certainly not in public. When I asked her what was the matter, she tried to quell her tears and sobbed, "I�m sorry...it�s...they touched my breasts...and..." That�s all I heard. I marched up to the woman who�d been examining her and shouted, "What did you do to her?" Later I found out that in addition to touching her swollen breasts � to protect the American citizenry � the employee had asked that she lift up her shirt. Not behind a screen, not off to the side � no, right there, directly in front of the hundred or so passengers standing in line. And for you women who�ve been pregnant and worn maternity pants, you know how ridiculous those things look. "I felt like a clown," my wife told me later. "On display for all these people, with the cotton panel on my pants and my stomach sticking out. When I sat down I just lost my composure and began to cry. That�s when you walked up."
Of course when I say she "told me later," it�s because she wasn�t able to tell me at the time, because as soon as I demanded to know what the federal employee had done to make her cry, I was swarmed by Portland police officers. Instantly. Three of them, cinching my arms, locking me in handcuffs, and telling me I was under arrest. Now my wife really began to cry. As they led me away and she ran alongside, I implored her to calm down, to think of the baby, promising her that everything would turn out all right. She faded into the distance and I was shoved into an elevator, a cop holding each arm. After making me face the corner, the head honcho told that I was under arrest and that I wouldn�t be flying that day � that I was in fact a "menace."
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Eventually we heard back from a different person, the guy in charge of the TSA airport screeners. One of his employees had made the damning statement about me exploding over her scissor discovery, and the officer had deftly incorporated that statement into his report. We asked the guy if he could find out why she�d said this � couldn�t she possibly be mistaken? "Oh, can�t do that, my hands are tied. It�s kind of like leading a witness � I could get in trouble, heh heh." Then what about the videotape? Why not watch that? That would exonerate me. "Oh, we destroy all video after three days."
Sure you do.
A few days later we heard from him again. He just wanted to inform us that he�d received corroboration of the officer�s report from the officer�s superior, a name we didn�t recognize. "But...he wasn�t even there," my wife said.
"Yeah, well, uh, he�s corroborated it though."
That�s how it works.
"Oh, and we did look at the videotape. Inconclusive."
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The week before we�d gone to the airport my wife had had her regular pre-natal checkup. The child had settled into the proper head down position for birth, continuing the remarkable pregnancy she�d been having. We returned to Portland on Sunday. On Mary�s Monday appointment she was suddenly told, "Looks like your baby�s gone breech." When she later spoke with her midwives in Los Angeles, they wanted to know if she�d experienced any type of trauma recently, as this often makes a child flip. "As a matter of fact..." she began, recounting the story, explaining how the child inside of her was going absolutely crazy when she was crying as the police were leading me away through the crowd.
My wife had been planning a natural childbirth.
{it's something you believe because you want to believe it. it sounds believable, it sounds real, it fits the picture that already exists. scummy little half-humans finally having a connection to some way through the coming cull. that's what it is you know. a cull. a selecting out. no more renegades, no rogues, no wildness. domestic animals defending their places at the trough. they don't need us. they need us not to be there. the illusion was that we're all sort of the same, all more or less necessary to the continuing of this, but we aren't. that's the scariest change you have to make. the absolute fragility of even being. there is no inevitability to our existence. whether it's chance or something closer to intentionality isn't as important as that one ugly truth. they don't need us. and the worse conditions get the more competition there is, the more we're a threat to what they will increasingly HAVE to have, not want. need. imagine the barnyard on strict rations, and the various barnyard creatures being aware of that, the looks they'll give the 'others'. go along with the program or go live 'outside' only outside is gone now, there isn't one. imagine a 25 year old pregnant woman in Cracow, a 'Jew', in 1939, dragged through the streets by the hair. does that make this image easier to take? there's worse things that are just as real. does that make it easier to explain away? bits and pieces of human lives scattered throughout the world. we flicker between the broadest perspective, the god-like wide-angle, and the trembling subjective, a human being staring at unimaginable horror. you can use the technology to dull the impact of it. but here is this. and it's truly obscene and it has all the earmarks of the real. it's histrionic, a little, and it comes from a somewhat frenzied site, but it sounds true, and in the absence of clear rebuttal, I believe him.}
