I have returned

Dear Friends, I told you I would be back this week, but it is only by the skin of my teeth. When I returned my rental car at the Atlanta airport on Sunday, December 17, I inquired about the location of the train that takes you to the terminal. The response was that the train was not working, but busses would take you to the terminal.

I went to the alleged buses only to find masses of people waiting in a growing line several hundred yards in length in the outside cold without any information except the complete power faiure of the entire airport. There were no busses.

As you know, I sometimes refer to “dumbshit Americans,” and now I must confess that I was one for about an hour before I realized that a complete power failure at the Atlanta Airport, due to the inability of the airport authorities to keep an eye on the power system, meant that an airport that over-sized would not recover until long after the power did, which never happened on Sunday.

Disturbed by my absence of instantaneous wits, I quickly abandoned my place in a line that never achieved its purpose and rented a car which I drove to my home destination.

Free market economists are opposed to planning, and that is why airports get so large that they are dysfunctional. The shutdown of Atlanta affected far more than the airlines.

How is it that an airport the size of Atlanta doesn’t have backup grids serving it?

There are reports that there were people kept onboard airliners for 6 hours that never were able to take off.

What happened to the endless line of people waiting on busses to take them to an airport that was closed? They never understood that they were waiting for Godot. There was no transportation out of that place except car rentals. If you were the last to realize, you were trapped.

This is America today. Nothing works. When I was born America was a superpower. Today it is a Third World Country Yet the politicians in Washington think that America is still a major power when in fact America can’t even provide jobs for its work force. After 16 years and a trillion dollars, America has failed to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban in Afghanistan. It was up to the Russians to destroy ISIS.

As soon as I left the Atlanta airport car rental onto the Interstate highway I noticed that in place of my speed the reading said no passenger side rear brake light. This was a premium car rental. I had been rented a car that no one of many employees had bothered to check. The car also had damage to the rear bumper that was not marked on my rental agreement. Luckily for me, despite all the confusion I had the presence of mind to walk around the car before I drove off and secured an acknowledgement of the existing damage. Otherwise, I would have faced a $2,000 or $ 3,000 damage charge.

So, go be a Proud American, like Trump wants you to be.

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