Thomas L. Knapp is a director and senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism, where this was first published. He lives in north central Florida.
On Aug. 3, NORAD scrambled fighter jets to intercept a civilian aircraft that entered a “temporary flight restriction” zone in New Jersey. What was this very special, very sensitive zone? A golf club.
Why was it so special and so sensitive? President Donald Trump was enjoying a round of golf there.
The day before that, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers increased the outflow of Little Caesar Lake into Ohio’s Miami River at the request of the Secret Service. Why? Vice President JD Vance went kayaking on the river and a higher water level was required to “support safe navigation of U.S. Secret Service personnel.”
Or maybe not. An anonymous source, The Guardian reports, says the real purpose was to create “ideal kayaking conditions” for the Very Special Important Politician.
At this point, I should mention that I’m only picking on Trump and Vance because they happen to be in office. This kind of thing is far from new, but it got old a long time ago.
In 1992, a woman I didn’t know then but have now been married to for 25 years, was eating with friends at a hotel restaurant when the Secret Service barged in and demanded that everyone leave.
Then-President George H.W. Bush was on his way to that hotel, and The Little People needed to get out of his way.
Over the 12 years I lived in St. Louis, I lost count of the times that air and ground traffic were disrupted for hours at a time because, apparently, it’s unthinkable for the hoi polloi to use runways, roads or sidewalks when (or for hours before) a big-name politician wants to fly in on a special plane and proceed by motorcade (without regard to the publicly posted speed limits, of course) to wherever he or she happens to want to go.
America treats its politicians like the kid in that old “Seinfeld” episode, “The Bubble Boy” — isolated and coddled lest contact with regular human beings harm them.
The rest of us apparently exist only to provide these power-mongers with votes and, occasionally, with audiences carefully curated for high levels of adoration and applause. Outside those contexts, we’re to be neither seen nor heard.
OK, that’s not completely true. We also fork over $3 billion per year for the Secret Service, $800 million for the Capitol Police Department and heaven-only-knows how much for military air cover, etc., to ensure that Very Special Important People never experience discomfort due to unintentional contact with us mere mortals. They definitely want to hear from us or at least our employers’ payroll departments.
To which I retort: “Moops!” (If you know, you know.)
Don’t fall for the fiction that these pampered pols “work for you.”
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
